Trump v. Illinois

As part of his repeated abuse of power in his second administration, Donald Trump has deployed federal forces, including federalized National Guard troops, into communities across the country. The forces, in large measure, have been designed to augment the Administration’s reckless and violent immigration enforcement policies. The Administration has claimed that the widespread protests of those policies in Illinois – and state and local laws that forbid state and local police from engaging in immigration enforcement – amount to a rebellion, and attempted to seize command of National Guard troops over the objections of Illinois’ governor.

We filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the State of Illinois’ successful legal challenge to the President’s efforts to federalize and deploy Illinois National Guard members, as well as National Guard forces from other states.

The ACLU of Illinois and National ACLU joined other free speech organizations in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court of the United States after both the federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit blocked the deployment.

The groups explained that such a deployment would severely chill the free speech rights of residents across the Chicagoland area. As the brief explains, the right to protest is part of the fabric of our free society, and President Trump’s deployment of military troops in response to protests of administration policy is incompatible with settled First Amendment law. It underscores that the founders of this country feared and rejected the military’s use as a tool of oppression and would have viewed President Trump’s claims of unreviewable authority to deploy troops in response to political protest as an intolerable threat to liberty. The Trump administration asserts that courts have no role, or at most only an extraordinarily deferential one, in reviewing the president’s legal and factual justifications for troop deployment.

In late December 2025, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump Administration’s request to lift the injunction issued by the district court, finding that the Trump administration had not met its burden to show that the deployment was necessary to protect federal personnel and property in Illinois.