Image Credit: Tasos Katopodis / Stringer / Getty Images 
The Trump administration has asked the nation’s highest court to overturn a court decision barring the deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago as part of the President’s crime crackdown.
In a court filing made on Friday, the administration said a district-court judge in Illinois had “impermissibly substitut[ed] the court’s own judgment for the President’s on military matters.”
The district court ruling, made on 9 October, prevented the administration from federalizing and deploying National Guard troops within the state of Illinois. The judge, April Perry, said the move was probably in violation of the 10th Amendment and would lead to civil unrest.
According to the Justice Department, federal officers in Chicago have been threatened and assaulted in recent weeks as they carry out their duties, including immigration enforcement.
Under Section 12406, the president is allowed to federalize National Guard troops under particular conditions, which include a breakdown of law and order.
Judge Perry, however, ruled “there has been no showing that the civil power has failed.”
“The agitators who have violated the law by attacking federal authorities have been arrested.”
The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh District subsequently declined to block the order; although it did rule that the President could federalize National Guard troops.
“President Trump determined that the situation in Chicago had become unsustainably dangerous for federal agents, who now risk their lives to carry out basic law enforcement functions,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in the application filed to the Supreme Court.
Sauer also argued that the lower court had infringed on the President’s authority.
“A federal district court lacks not only the authority but also the competence to wrest control of the military chain of command from the Commander in Chief and to adjudicate whether the Governor of Illinois, rather than the President, should be in ultimate command of particular Guardsmen after the President has called them into federal service under Section 12406.”
The Trump administration has been embroiled in a number of legal battles as it seeks to deploy National Guard troops and federal agents to states including Oregon, California and Illinois, as part of President Trump’s crime crackdown.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that Trump could federalize National Guard units, but could not deploy them to Oregon, where violent clashes continue to take place with federal immigration-enforcement agents.
The Trump administration has also been charged with violating the Posse Comitatus Act by deploying National Guard and Marine units to California, a charge the administration denies.
