Trump asks Supreme Court to OK National Guard deployment in Chicago

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump on Friday urged the Supreme Court to allow him to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, putting the explosive legal fight over his ability to use those troops on American soil before the justices for the first time.

The filing sets up a showdown over presidential power at a moment when the administration is attempting to deploy the National Guard to multiple US cities.

The emergency appeal follows a series of decisions from lower federal courts, temporarily blocking the administration’s efforts on the grounds that Trump vastly overstated the need for deploying the National Guard. On Thursday, the Chicago-based 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals let stand an order temporarily blocking that effort.

Trump filed the appeal at the Supreme Court in a case involving his effort to deploy the guard to Chicago. In the appeal, the administration said that lower court order “improperly impinges on the president’s authority and needlessly endangers federal personnel and property.”

The litigation puts the controversy before a Supreme Court that has rarely ruled on such deployments – but that has often deferred to the president on matters of security and defining what constitutes a national emergency. The administration asked for a quick order that would allow them to carry out the deployment while the high court considers the case.

In the appeal, the Trump administration argues lower courts were impermissibly encroaching on the president’s authority to control federalized guard members.

The lower court order temporarily blocking the deployment, the administration said, put the judicial branch “in the untenable position of controlling the military chain of command and judicially micromanaging the exercise of the president’s commander-in-chief powers, including the decision about which military forces the president can deploy.”

The appeal uses striking language to describe the situation in Chicago, asserting that federal officials there “have been threatened and assaulted, attacked in a harrowing pre-planned ambush involving many assailants.”

“Federal agents are forced to desperately scramble to protect themselves and federal property, allocating resources away from their law-enforcement mission to conduct protective operations instead,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court.

That framing starts in stark contrast with how US District Court Judge April Perry described the situation on the ground in an order earlier this month.

Perry, a Biden nominee, pointed to what she described as a “a troubling trend of defendants’ declarants equating protests with riots and a lack of appreciation for the wide spectrum that exists between citizens who are observing, questioning, and criticizing their government, and those who are obstructing, assaulting, or doing violence.”

To make its case for the deployments, the Department of Justice has relied heavily on a Supreme Court decision from 1827 – Martin v. Mott. The case dealt with Jacob Mott, a member of the New York militia who disobeyed President James Madison’s order to mobilize during the War of 1812. The Supreme Court balked at Mott’s argument that Madison had misjudged the danger and wrote that “the authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen belongs exclusively to the president.”

In the administration’s appeal on Friday, Sauer said that case “squarely controls” Trump’s current deployments.

Based on that, the Trump administration has argued, federal courts may not even review a president’s decisions to call up the guard.

But the states challenging those decisions have scoffed at the notion that the protests against ICE agents are akin to an invading foreign army. And they have pointed to a 1932 decision, Sterling v. Constantin, in which courts reviewed a former Texas governor’s decision to deploy the National Guard to shut down certain oil fields in the state in order to limit production. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that courts could review such deployment decisions that fell beyond a “range of honest judgment.”

Just how fast the Supreme Court will move in the case was not immediately clear, but the court requested a response from state and local officials by Monday evening – a faster than usual turnaround.

The 6-3 conservative court has sided with Trump in the vast majority of emergency cases he has filed since returning to power in January.

This story has been updated with additional details.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.