As Illinois awaits the deployment of National Guard members on Chicago area streets, President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning took aim at Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker, writing on social media that both should be jailed for “failing to protect” ICE officers.
Trump wrote, “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!” on Truth Social.
Pritzker responded Wednesday morning, writing on X, “I will not back down. Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”
And speaking WBEZ’s In the Loop show with Sasha-Ann Simons, Johnson called Trump, “unstable.”
“We know that. He’s a double-minded man, and he is also very simple minded. And it’s totally not the first time that Trump has called for a black man to be arrested. That’s not the first time,” Johnson said. “Look I have a responsibility to defend Chicago and that’s what I’m going to do.”
The president’s post came as federal prosecutors in Chicago Wednesday morning dismissed criminal charges against a Chicago couple found lawfully carrying loaded pistols last month outside the Broadview ICE facility.
Federal prosecutors have also charged two people — including a woman who was shot by federal agents — with allegedly ramming a car driven by a border patrol officer in Brighton Park on Saturday morning in a heated clash. Body camera video of the agent involved in the shooting shows an officer saying, “Do something, b----,” before pulling over and shooting the woman five times, the woman’s attorney said in federal court Monday.
After Illinois and Chicago filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s move to deploy the National Guard, Pritzker and Johnson blasted Trump’s ICE operations in Chicago Monday, with the governor calling operations a “military style invasion.” Pritzker showed reporters polished Department of Homeland Security videos of controversial raids, including one last week in South Shore in which a U.S. citizen was dragged out in zip ties and children were put in U-Haul vans without clothes on.
During a Minnesota event with Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday, Pritzker was asked, “do you both sincerely believe you’ll be arrested?”
As the audience laughed, Pritzker responded, “I’m asking any of you to come visit me in the gulag in El Salvador.”
