(The Center Square) – The war of words continues between President Donald Trump and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker over public safety in the streets of Chicago and beyond.
Monday evening returning from the Middle East peace summit on Air Force One, Trump said Pritzker should ask for help with public safety.
“I think he should beg for help because he’s running a bad operation,” Trump told reporters. “He’s letting people be killed in his city because he doesn’t want it,” referring to a callus of the National Guard.
Clashes between law enforcement and protesters continued into Tuesday with chemical agents being deployed to scatter a growing crowd in Chicago surrounding federal immigration enforcement.
After an unrelated event Tuesday afternoon in Hampshire, Pritzker reacted.
“We don’t want troops on the ground and we don’t want [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officials or [Customs and Border Patrol] abusing people on the streets of Chicago or any of our suburbs, or, frankly, anywhere in Illinois or the country,” Pritzker said.
Trump said Tuesday at a ceremony for Illinois native Charlie Kirk that his administration is “done with angry mobs.”
Pritzker said he will continue to fight what he characterized as the Trump administration’s overreach.
“And we’re going to do everything that we can, again, to protect our residents, but also to get the courts to step in and stop them from abusing just everyday people that they are firing gas pellets and, rubber bullets,” Pritzker said.
While the courts have stopped Trump of deploying the National Guard to Chicago at this point, the president said he has the right to use the Insurrection Act, but he’d rather have cooperation.
“Fifty percent of the presidents have used the Insurrection Act because they don’t want to go through this stuff with somebody who said ‘there’s no crime’ and 4,000 people get shot,” Trump said.
The Trump administration’s motion to overturn a lower court’s temporary restraining was denied. The case is still pending with the Guard’s deployment blocked.
