By Jacob Burg
Contributing Writer
The Trump administration is sending additional immigration enforcement resources to Chicago as part of the president’s plan to deploy federal agents to the nation’s third-largest city, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Sunday.
On Aug. 27, DHS asked the Naval Station Great Lakes military base for “limited support in the form of facilities, infrastructure and other logistical needs to support DHS operations.” The base, which is roughly 35 miles north of Chicago, had not yet decided on the request, a base spokesperson said on Aug. 27.
Noem told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that her agency plans to send Immigration, Customs and Enforcement resources to Chicago.
“We’ve already had ongoing operations with ICE in Chicago and throughout Illinois and other states, making sure that we’re upholding our laws,” Noem said. “But we do intend to add more resources to those operations.”
The DHS secretary declined to offer further details about the agency’s plan for deploying federal agents to Illinois.
The plan comes weeks after the Trump administration first sent National Guard troops to Washington to target crime, illegal immigration and homelessness. President Donald Trump had previously deployed National Guardsmen to Los Angeles for immigration enforcement operations.
Noem was asked whether Trump’s plans for Chicago would mirror those for Los Angeles, where National Guard troops were essentially supporting the ICE agents conducting immigration and related operations.
“That always is a prerogative of President Trump and his decision,” Noem said. “I won’t speak to the specifics of the operations that are planned in other cities.”
Noem was asked whether DHS was planning similar operations in other cities beyond Chicago, including Boston.
“I think there’s a lot of cities that are dealing with crime and violence right now, and so we haven’t taken anything off the table,” she said.
On Saturday, Trump criticized Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, in a Truth Social post, warning the governor that he might soon be sending troops to Chicago to combat crime.
“JB Pritzker … just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME,” Trump wrote. “He better straighten it out, FAST, or we’re coming!”
Trump has also been critical of Brandon Johnson, the Democratic mayor of Chicago.
Pritzker told CBS in an interview that aired on Sunday that if the Trump administration sends troops along with ICE agents to Chicago, “they’ll be in court pretty quickly, because that is illegal.”
“Posse Comitatus does not allow U.S. troops into U.S. cities to do, you know, to fight crime, to be involved in law enforcement — that’s not their job,” the governor said, referring to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the federal government’s ability to use federal military personnel to engage in civilian law enforcement within the United States.
“National Guard troops, any kind of troops, on the streets of an American city, don’t belong unless there is an insurrection, unless there is truly an emergency,” Pritzker said, adding that in this case, “there is not.”
The governor claimed that no one in the Trump administration, including the president or any officials, has called him, “the city of Chicago, or anyone else” to coordinate immigration enforcement.
“They ought to be coordinating with local law enforcement. They ought to let us know when they’re coming, where they’re coming, if it’s ICE or if it’s [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] or whoever it is, but they don’t want to do that either,” Pritzker said. “It tends to inflame passions on the ground when they don’t let us know what their plans are, and when we can’t coordinate with them.”
Noem was asked whether she would consider sending ICE agents or National Guard troops to Republican cities with high crime rates or federal law enforcement operations.
“Absolutely,” Noem said. “Every single city is evaluated for what we need to do there to make it safer.”
“So we’ve got operations that, again, I won’t talk about details on, but we absolutely are not looking through the viewpoint at anything we’re doing with a political lens.”
Jackson Richman contributed to this report.
