In a blistering opinion, a federal judge accused the Trump administration of misrepresenting the facts on the ground in Chicago in an attempt to legally justify the deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s third-largest city. The 51-page opinion, issued late on Friday by Judge April M Perry, explained the basis for her decision on Thursday to temporarily bar the administration from deploying the National Guard anywhere in Illinois. She found that the legal threshold for such deployments is “very high” and that the “perceptions” held by Trump administration officials about potential threats to Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices from Chicago protesters “are not reliable.”
Citing a “potential lack of candor” from government officials, the opinion notes that grand juries did not indict at least three protesters who officials had claimed were violent, which the government omitted from its filings. That, she wrote, “calls into question their ability to accurately assess the facts.” “Law enforcement officers who go into an event expecting ‘a shitshow’ are much more likely to experience one than those who go into the event prepared to de-escalate it,” wrote Perry, a former prosecutor who was nominated by President Joe Biden to the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement by email that President Donald Trump was acting lawfully. “President Trump will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities and we expect to be vindicated by a higher court,” she wrote.
Perry’s written opinion was released hours after a second judge in Chicago ordered ICE to remove a fence that agents had erected around a facility in suburban Chicago, saying the acting director of ICE indicated the agency’s “Operation Midway Blitz” would go on indefinitely, not the 45 days the administration first indicated. The Perry ruling is now the second finding from a district court judge that protests over Trump’s immigration policies are unlikely to provide a legal basis for National Guard troop deployments, in contrast to assertions by the administration that Chicago and other cities are “hell holes” plagued by “antifa militants” and are “burning to the ground.” The other ruling came last weekend from Judge Karin J Immergut of the District of Oregon.
The judges appear to be rejecting an argument repeatedly made in court by the administration, that the judiciary needs to step aside and accept the White House’s factual claims about potential threats. “Case law is pretty clear that, by and large, courts should automatically defer to the president’s judgment on what constitutes an emergency,” said Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown Law and an expert on the relationship between the military and civilian government. “The district court judges in both cases, in Chicago and Portland, are saying that there has to be some reality-based limit to that.” The government has appealed both rulings. A three-judge panel from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments regarding Immergut’s ruling on Thursday, and a decision about whether her order will stay in place could come at any time.
In her opinion on Friday, Perry explained her view of the statutory limits on the president’s authority, the role of the courts in enforcing it and the broader risks that come with sending soldiers into US streets. “The significance of the public’s interest in having only well-trained law enforcement officers deployed in their communities and avoiding unnecessary shows of military force in their neighborhoods cannot be overstated,” she wrote. Her ruling is the fourth over the past week against the Trump administration in Chicago. On Wednesday, a federal judge imposed new limits on ICE agents, restricting their ability to make arrests without warrants.
On Thursday, another federal judge granted a temporary restraining order against the Department of Homeland Security, barring it from arresting and using force against journalists unless it believes someone has committed a crime. And on Friday, a judge ordered ICE to tear down a fence at its Broadview, Illinois, facility, after residents argued that it was illegally constructed and limited their access to fire department services. In all of the rulings, the judges said ICE’s tactics were informing their decisions.
On Friday morning, a few hundred protesters gathered at the facility in Broadview. Many carried signs, sang songs and prayed with religious groups. Some arrived during a curfew that the mayor had established and were given citations, and a handful were arrested because they refused to get off the street. Whenever ICE vehicles arrived, the crowd chanted “shame, shame.” By 10 am, many began to leave, and the crowd decreased to about 100 people.
In the meantime, immigration operations continued to make waves in the city. On Friday morning, a creative services department employee at WGN-TV, one of Chicago’s largest television news outlets, was detained by two Border Patrol agents in the morning rush hour. The employee was released from federal custody and no charges were filed against her, according to a statement.
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