In a brief hearing Monday afternoon, U.S. District Judge April Perry said she was “very troubled” by the Justice Department’s attorneys’ inability to answer her questions about where the guardsmen would be deploying and what exactly they’d be doing.
“If I were the federal government, I’d strongly urge holding off until Thursday,” she said of the plan to activate troops. But she added, it’s “up to them.” During the hearing, the DOJ confirmed that members of the Texas National Guard were scheduled to board a plane for Chicago at 4 p.m. But, attorney Jean Lin said, those out-of-state guardsmen would not be “in position to perform their federal protective mission” until Tuesday at the earliest. Members of the Illinois National Guard would similarly not be mobilized until later this week, pending pre-mission trainings, Lin said.
Christopher Wells of the Illinois attorney general’s office pleaded with Perry to grant “some form of interim relief” before Thursday’s hearing. He pointed to the “level of disregard the administration has shown” to a federal judge in Oregon who over the weekend ruled Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland exceeded his authority. Despite two rulings from the Trump-appointed judge, the feds have mobilized guardsmen anyway from California and Texas to the west coast city.
“This is all part of a concerted effort to target disfavored jurisdictions that the president doesn’t like,” Wells said, urging a temporary restraining order before the federal government “hostilely deploys troops from another state to a sister and equally sovereign state.”
Though she denied his request, Perry sided with Wells’ contention that the Trump administration’s request for an entire week to respond to the lawsuit was “ridiculous” given “they have been planning this for months.”
But since neither Perry nor the DOJ lawyers had been able to read all 500 pages of the state and city’s legal filings, the judge said she would delay her ruling.
“It’s unclear to me, frankly, whether they’re even going to be deployed between now and Thursday — and I mean deployed in the nonmilitary sense,” Perry said. “Whether they will be out on the street and engaging in activity … I simply don’t know that and neither do you.”
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Not even a little.