Trump says may invoke Insurrection Act to deploy more troops in US

“FEAR AND CONFUSION”

Trump’s comments about the centuries-old Insurrection Act came just minutes after Pritzker warned that Trump was creating a pre-meditated “escalation of violence” as a pretext to invoke the emergency powers.

“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” Pritzker told a press conference.

“Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”

Trump over the weekend authorised the deployment of 700 National Guard members to Chicago despite the opposition of elected Democratic leaders including Pritzker and the city’s mayor.

In their lawsuit, the state Attorney General Kwame Raoul and counsel for Chicago accused Trump of using US troops “to punish his political enemies”.

“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favour,” they said.

In the press conference with Pritzker, Raoul described such planned deployments to Illinois as “unlawful and unconstitutional, no matter where these forces come from”.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has defended the plan to send troops to Chicago, claiming that the third-largest US city is “a war zone”.

Trump has similarly called Portland “war-ravaged”, but District Judge Karin Immergut issued a temporary block on the Oregon troop deployment, saying “the president’s determination was simply untethered to the facts”.

“This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” wrote Immergut, a Trump appointee.

The Trump administration is appealing the ruling, the White House said.

A CBS poll released Sunday found that 58 per cent of Americans oppose deploying the National Guard to US cities.

Illinois and Oregon are not the first states to file legal challenges against the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard.

California filed suit after Trump sent troops to Los Angeles earlier this year to quell protests sparked by a crackdown on undocumented migrants, with the case still working its way through courts.