Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledged Sunday a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Chicago in the coming days but stopped short of saying it will be accompanied by a National Guard deployment.
Any military presence ultimately would be President Donald Trump’s call, Noem said, but Gov. JB Pritzker reiterated that such a move would be against federal law and warned it would be met in court “pretty quickly” by the state.
“I’m saying we don’t want troops on the streets of American cities,” Pritzker said. “That’s un-American and, frankly, the president of the United States ought to know better. This one doesn’t seem to. He doesn’t seem to understand the Constitution or the laws.”
Noem and Pritzker each appeared on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, though in separate interviews. Their appearance came as Chicago prepared for more intensive ICE enforcement, which could begin as soon as Friday, with agents based at Naval Station Great Lakes in North 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, but we do intend to add more resources to those operations,” Noem said.
Asked if a surge in ICE operations was planned for other cities, she said she would not discuss specifics but said the efforts were not aimed at Democrat-led urban areas and could include cities in Republican states.
“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. We’ve been making sure that we have the resources and the equipment to go in,” Noem said.
“I’d encourage every single big city, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, whatever they are, if they want to help make their cities safer … they should call us,” she said, citing declines in violent crime after Trump federalized law enforcement in Washington, D.C., and deployed National Guard troops.
“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,” she said.
Noem, a former South Dakota governor, belittled Pritzker for not personally calling Trump and seeking federal intervention to address Chicago crime.
“This seems like it’s more about Gov. Pritzker’s ego now, rather than actually protecting his people. If he had one murder in Chicago, he should be calling President Trump and saying, ‘What’s your ideas? What can we do?’” she said.
“So he can talk about what a great job he’s doing as governor but he’s failing those families who will no longer have their child with them, their mother or their father or their cousin, aunt and uncle that are gone forever because of the violence that’s happening in Chicago,” she said.
Pritzker, in an unaired portion of his Friday interview with CBS White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe, said he has not called the Trump administration to tell them not to come to Chicago because “I think I’ve been pretty clear publicly” and that if the president wants to send in the Guard, “he should call.”
“Honestly, we’d be happy to receive a call,” the two-term Democratic governor said. “When we have an emergency and we need the federal government to send troops in, believe me, I will pick up the phone and call. That is not something going on in Chicago today.”
But Pritzker said the ICE surge is “inflaming passions and causing disruption that doesn’t need to be caused.”
“We have people that have lived in the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago for decades, working here, paying taxes. They’re law-abiding members of our communities, friends, neighbors, and why are we arresting them? Why are we making them disappear?” Pritzker asked, saying he would tell Noem “to maybe check herself for, what does she really believe.”
Discussing the issue of mid-decade redistricting, which Trump has pushed in Texas and other GOP-led states, Pritzker said “it is possible to have more Democratic districts in the state of Illinois and we could do it.”
Texas Republicans have signed into law redrawn congressional boundaries aimed at flipping five Democratic seats in the U.S. House for the 2026 midterm elections, as part of Trump’s effort to maintain a GOP House majority through the end of the decade. Democratic-led California recently responded to Texas’ move as Gov. Gavin Newsom is asking voters to approve a map aimed at giving his party five more U.S. House seats, but late last week, Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe said he is calling lawmakers into a special session to redraw that state’s House districts.
When asked whether Illinois would join in the redistricting fight, Pritzker said, “That’s not something that I want to do. It’s not something any of us want to do,” he said of Democratic-led states. “If he’s going to do that all over the country, I think all of us have to think about what it is that we can do to counter that.”
Illinois’ Democratic-led redistricting map approved after the 2020 federal census was politically gerrymandered to create a 14-3 Democratic majority in the 17-member House delegation. The Illinois map earned a grade of “F” from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
Pritzker, who is seeking a third term next year, did little to dispel his interest in a potential 2028 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, saying, “I don’t know what the future holds.”
“You know, I look around, we’ve got a bench among the Democratic Party that is really terrific. I could point to governors. I could point to senators. I think there are a lot of good choices,” he said, according to a transcript of an unaired portion of the interview. “We’ve got a terrific group of people who could be president of the United States on the Democratic side and I’m happy to stand with them as we stand against Donald Trump.”