Judge dismisses National Guard mobilization suit after Trump’s loss at
Supreme Court
[April 21, 2026]
By Hannah Meisel
CHICAGO — A federal judge on Monday officially closed the book on a
lawsuit filed against the Trump administration last fall when the White
House ordered 500 National Guard troops to Chicago as the “Operation
Midway Blitz” mass deportation campaign was escalating.
U.S. District Judge April Perry, whose Oct. 9 temporary restraining
order restricted any true deployment of the guardsmen to the streets of
Chicago, declined to grant the state of Illinois’ and city of Chicago’s
joint motion to keep the case alive in order to protect against any
future National Guard mobilization orders from the administration.
“The court can no longer provide ongoing protection against hypothetical
unlawful acts committed by the federal government,” the judge said
Monday, delivering her opinion from the bench after hearing lawyers’
brief oral arguments.
Shortly before Christmas, a 6-3 majority on the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld Perry’s order, writing in its decision that the Trump
administration had “failed to identify a source of authority that would
allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.” By that point,
Operation Midway Blitz had wound down — with the exception of a short
mid-December return to Chicago — and the last of the National Guard
troops left the area by mid-January.
The 300 or so members of the Illinois National Guard that the Trump
administration federalized via a pair of orders on Oct. 4 remained under
the Trump administration’s control until then. The roughly 200 members
of the Texas National Guard, mobilized via an Oct. 5 order from Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth, were sent back to their state at the same time
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents left the Chicago area in November.
Perry on Monday said she found all three of those orders had expired,
even taking into account Hegseth’s Dec. 22 extension of the Illinois
National Guard takeover until April 15.
Lawyers from Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office and those
representing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Law Department worried that
without those orders being officially rescinded, the Trump
administration might try to reuse them after the case was dismissed.
Christopher Wells, a top lawyer in the attorney general’s office,
pointed Perry to a Dec. 31 post from Trump on his Truth Social account
that promised Chicago “we will come back, perhaps in a much different
and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again — only a matter of
time!”
But Stephen Tagert, an attorney with the Department of Justice, told
Perry the orders “are no longer operative” and that the case had to be
dismissed as moot after the Supreme Court’s Dec. 23 decision. Perry
agreed, telling Wells that “issuing an injunction against future
unlawful federalization in Illinois … would be inappropriate.”
“I honestly don’t know what to make of those particular social media
messages,” the judge said of Trump’s posts, noting that the Dec. 31
message was “about crime control, which was not at all what this
deployment was supposed to be about.”
‘Things in Chicago are calm’
When leaving Chicago in November, then-Border Patrol Commander Gregory
Bovino also threatened to return to Chicago in March with many more
agents than the 200 on the ground in the fall. But Bovino and his boss,
former U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, were
both removed from their posts earlier this year following a chaotic
deployment in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two U.S.
citizens.
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A group of people in military fatigues walks into an Immigration and
Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview on Thursday, Oct. 9.
National Guard troops were deployed to the facility earlier in the
day. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Andrew Adams)
“Things in Chicago are calm,” Perry said Monday. “They have been calm
for many, many months. While that could change at any time, there’s no
imminent thread of it happening soon.”
Of the 500 National Guard troops deployed to the Chicago area in early
October, only a small portion of guardsmen were active for a single day
before Perry issued her temporary restraining order. The troops were
briefly stationed at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
processing facility in Broadview, a near-west suburb of Chicago that had
become the epicenter of protests against the Trump administration in the
weeks since Operation Midway Blitz began in September.
Both the Illinois and Texas guardsmen spent their extended stays at the
National Guard training site in Marseilles and the U.S. Army Reserve
Center near Joliet — 81 and 53 miles southwest of Chicago, respectively
— performing training exercises, according to federal officials at the
time.
Beyond the “federal protective mission” the National Guard troops were
supposed to perform for immigration agents and properties like the
Broadview ICE facility, Democratic leaders have warned that deploying
guardsmen in American cities was a test or ramp-up to an attempted
federal takeover of elections in 2026.
In a statement Monday, Raoul nodded to a potential broader use of the
National Guard.
“The American people, regardless of the city or state in which they
reside, should not live under threat of military occupation simply
because they live in a jurisdiction that has fallen out of a president’s
political favor,” he said. “I am pleased that today, the court has
declared the Trump administration’s unlawful orders defunct and said it
is absolutely clear that the administration cannot use the Illinois
orders to federalize or deploy National Guard troops in Illinois.”
Gov. JB Pritzker echoed Raoul in his own statement, saying the case
confirmed “Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to occupy our
streets was a reckless and illegal abuse of power.”
“I’m grateful to the court for siding with our communities and slowing
the erosion of our democratic norms,” he said. “Communities should not
have to live in fear of masked federal troops occupying their
neighborhoods, and our brave National Guard members should not be used
as political props. These are foundational principles of any healthy
democracy, and the result in this case validates that belief.
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