J. B. Pritzker Sounds the Alarm

This is not the country that any of us thought that we were going to have in 2src25.

And certainly not one that I’ve grown up in. You know, Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I have to humbly offer an amendment to that. It only bends toward justice if we bend it that way. And right now, the Trump Administration and ICE and C.B.P. and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan—they are bending justice the wrong way. And it’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever seen—the federal government is working against the people of the United States, and breaching four of the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights.

I imagine you were pleased with what Judge Sarah Ellis said yesterday. She had another hearing with one of the local heads of the Border Patrol, with Gregory Bovino. She recalled an event from last weekend when there was tear gas thrown in a neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. And she pointed out that there were kids who were tear-gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween. And she said, “I can only imagine how terrified they were. These kids, you can imagine, their sense of safety was shattered on Saturday, and it’s going to take a long time for that to come back.” She seems rather skeptical, and she’s asked Gregory Bovino to show up every night in court to describe what the Border Patrol is doing on the streets of Chicago and in the suburbs. What are you seeking from the courts? What are you hoping the courts will do?

The way Trump has organized ICE and C.B.P. now, they are like a secret police. They wear masks. They do not carry or show their badges or their names. They are in unmarked cars. They’re grabbing people without telling you who they are and throwing those people into their cars and taking them away. And like I said, later, you find out that that wasn’t somebody who was undocumented and certainly most often was not somebody who has a criminal record or has committed a crime.

You know, Donald Trump did this under the guise that he was going after the worst of the worst. And I think many people voted for him thinking, Great, you’re gonna get the worst of the worst violent criminals off the streets of our big cities. That’s not what they’re doing. They attacked a building in Chicago, in South Shore. There were a hundred and thirty people in that building, and they came in the middle of the night with a Black Hawk helicopter, dropped people from those helicopters onto the building—and, by the way, you would assume that this building must be full of gang members and violent criminals. That wasn’t the case. In fact, it turns out the four people that they identified out of a hundred and thirty that live in the building—they’re not Tren de Aragua, the gang that they said they were going after.

And what did they do? Most of the hundred and thirty people there were zip-tied, put in the back of a U-Haul, held for hours during the middle of the night. Children were traumatized in the process. And this is just kind of a small metaphor for all that they are doing across the city of Chicago.

You talked about the judge who was talking about a quiet neighborhood on the North Side. To be clear, that’s just one neighborhood that they’ve been in. They are going into virtually every neighborhood. Into Latino neighborhoods, into Little Village, into Pilsen. They’re going into Black neighborhoods in Austin and Englewood in Chicago, where they’re literally disrupting the peace. And then they’re acting in a way that is clearly inciting people who live there.

Now, you can imagine that after days and days—indeed, it’s been three months—of people being oppressed by these ICE and C.B.P. officers, people have put themselves in a position to push back. So what are they doing? They’re buying whistles. There’s a kind of whistle that is being sold at many of the local stores, because everybody wants one. There’s a big demand for them. What are they doing with the whistles? When they see their neighbors—they might be a white suburban soccer mom, you know—but when they see somebody who is being harassed by C.B.P. and ICE, they’re coming out into the street and blowing their whistles so that everybody will know ICE is here, be careful, stay in your home, stay away. They might be throwing tear gas at you. They might tackle you.

So, this is happening all across the city of Chicago. It’s shocking to me that the rest of the country is not paying attention to what’s happening all across the neighborhoods of Chicago and the suburbs and, frankly, the rest of the state of Illinois.

There’s a real battle over narratives, isn’t there? The Administration on its social-media channels is putting out videos allegedly about Chicago—not always about Chicago, as you have pointed out—and you had the Department of Homeland Security in court just this week saying that rioters and terrorists have opened fire on officers, thrown rocks, bottles, and fireworks. Their lives are on the line to arrest murderers, rapists, and gang members. How do you fight back against the narrative that they’re creating?

The misinformation—the misinformation that they are pushing. The only thing that we can do is have everybody video everything, because it’s easy to go produce a video that produces disinformation, misinformation, for the public. It’s not so easy to push back on a live video that somebody who happened to live on a street, you know, is holding up their phone and showing and posting online.

And actually we’ve created, as you may know, an accountability commission now, headed by two former federal judges, very well-respected ones. And this commission is gathering the evidence and information, including videos, including testimony, so that we have a record of what’s going on. Because I think people are incredulous. It’s hard to believe, in fact, that this could be happening in the United States, and yet it is. And so we wanna make sure we’re capturing all the information. It allows people to go to court, as happened with the court that Judge Ellis is in, and actually push back. What have they done? Well, Judge Ellis has required that ICE and C.B.P. wear body cams now, so that they can prove whether something happened or didn’t the way they claim.

You know that a man was killed, Silverio Villegas González, in a Franklin Park community. And they said that the ICE agent had been dragged and seriously injured. And they put out a press release, and the press release claims that there was serious injury. Later, the officer himself said no serious injury, and yet they killed the man. They killed the man for committing this crime. This is just one example. People have been shot. What I’m concerned about now is that we’re gonna see ICE and C.B.P. shooting at our local and state law enforcement. Remember, our job here is to manage, to push back on crime, to make sure that we have safe communities with our local law enforcement.

They’ve now come in with these invaders who are wearing uniforms and automatic weapons, and they’re marching down the streets sometimes in downtown Chicago and scaring people, and even now firing their weapons at people. And I am very afraid that this is going to end up in a clash between our law enforcement and federal law enforcement because federal law enforcement is breaking the law. And what do you do if you’re a local law-enforcement official, local police officer, Chicago police officer? What do you do when someone right in front of you is breaking the law? You’re supposed to arrest them. So I think something really dangerous and terrible could happen.

Let’s talk for a minute about crime, and the various reasons that President Trump and others have said they are sending these federal agents to Chicago. While violent crime has declined significantly in Chicago in the last few years, there’s still an awful lot of people getting killed in Chicago. Three hundred and forty-five this year. Your argument is, Yes, Chicago would like federal help, but not this particular approach, which you’ve said you don’t think is helping at all.

I want to just make sure that you have the bigger picture. What the Administration claims in court is the reason for being in Chicago is not what the President is saying. The President claims he’s trying to fight violent crime. But on the ground what they’re claiming is that they’re just trying to protect their facilities, and just to go after undocumented people so they can be deported.

So, which is it? It’s clear that the President wants to create an environment in which people believe that everywhere you go in Chicago, you are going to be shot or killed. And that’s just not true. And I might add that violent crime is now at a low that we haven’t seen since 1965. The homicide rate has been cut in half, and we’re proud of the work that we’re doing. I have invested in state law enforcement—we have more Illinois State Police than we had before I took office, six and a half years ago. And we’ve invested in community violence interruption—a program that works, and we’ve proven that it works.

You know what Donald Trump is doing? He’s taking money away from police. He’s literally taking F.B.I., D.E.A., and A.T.F., which we work with all the time—he’s taking them out of their departments and moving them over to ICE. And they’re not enforcing the law or helping us catch bad guys. They’re doing what I was describing earlier, that ICE is doing. And he’s taken away those community violence-interruption grants that come from the federal government.

So this is not somebody who actually wants to reduce crime, and he is not helping us reduce crime. In fact he’s creating mayhem on the ground. Because you know what he wants? He wants troops on the ground in American cities, and the only way he can get that done is by proving that there’s some sort of insurrection or revolution or rebellion that’s taking place on the streets of Chicago, and he tries to prove that by putting up cameras and then creating that mayhem and then showing that to the public and claiming this is what’s going on.

You’ve said that you believe the presence of armed federal officers on Illinois streets is not only about immigration, that it’s about future elections. That you think that it’s trying to normalize, is your argument, the presence of guys with big guns and camouflage and masks. What is it that you do fear in 2src26, a year from now, on that front?

My fear is that he’ll carry out what he and his sycophants talked about in 2src2src, after they lost the 2src2src election. He knows that he’s very, very unpopular and that in 2src26, during the congressional elections, he is likely to lose the Congress. And the problem for him about losing Congress is not just that he can’t push his agenda further but, rather, that he will begin to be investigated by Congress. Right now, his Congress is afraid of him, this MAGA Republican Congress, and they’re not doing any investigating, even when we all know and can see with our very eyes that he’s breaking the law. So that is one thing he’s very fearful of.

And so he’s doing two things, in my mind, to challenge those elections and indeed to steal them, in my view. One is troops on the ground and the other, of course, is redistricting. Going to Republican governors across the country and asking them to breach the Voting Rights Act, which they did in Texas with their redistricting. And he’s asked others to do the same, to just maximize the number of Republicans that could go to Congress. So that’s the other thing.

But the troops on the ground are the most insidious, and I think even more dangerous. The dangerous part is they’ll do two things. One, they could post people at polling places, which I think will make quite a number of people fearful to even go vote. Not people who’ve committed any crimes—it’s just frightening to see people with automatic weapons and in camouflage uniforms the way you would in some military junta in South America, guarding the front gate of your polling place.

The second is what Michael Flynn suggested to President Trump back in 2src2src and 2src21 after he lost the election, which is: maybe the military should confiscate the ballot boxes so that the military can count the ballots. Now, I don’t know about you, but that is not how we run elections in the United States. I’ve never seen anything like that. It shouldn’t happen on the ground. And we have had fair and free elections in Illinois and in Chicago for many years. They get counted by county clerks who get elected in each county. Many of them are Republican county clerks. They count, and they count fairly. We’ve seen almost no fraud in our elections.

Let’s talk for a minute about how you have decided to fight back. You’ve used the courts, you’ve used humor, you did a little riff on “Jimmy Kimmel.” I mean, you’ve been dealing with Donald Trump for years. I remember we talked in the early months of COVID when you were deeply frustrated with the White House response. I remember in your victory speech in 2src22, for your second term in office, you said Trump is “the modern embodiment of tyranny.” You seem to have a theory of the case. “Pugnacious” comes to mind. How have you decided how to fight back?

Why is it that I’m standing up and speaking out? I think a lot about the importance of stopping tyranny early in its tracks. Because the further you let it move along the tracks, the harder it is to stop. After another three and a half years, at the end of his final term in office, what he’s doing to our elections, and to our military, and to constitutional rights will be made permanent just by virtue of the fact that he’s taken away the institutions that could stop it.

So it’s not like there’s a strategy book that has ever existed in the United States for pushing back on this. Except I guess I could summarize it in the Martin Niemöller poem “First They Came.” It’s a poem that says, first they came for the communists; I wasn’t a communist, so I said nothing. And then they came for the socialists, and I wasn’t a socialist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, then they came for the Jews. And I wasn’t a Jew. And then they came for me, and there was no one left for me.

I have to summarize what I’m driven by with that poem, because I really believe that there are a lot of people out there who are thinking, Well, this isn’t gonna affect me. They’re going after undocumented people, or they’re going after brown people, or they’re going after Black people, or they’re going after—you know? And then when you get through the list of all the people they’re going after, they’re coming for you. And I think that people have to recognize we need to protect all Americans. The only people that I would like them to go after are the violent criminals who are undocumented. That’s not who they’re going after, though.

Donald Trump thinks you should go to jail. Stephen Miller thinks you ought to be arrested. J. D. Vance was asked about this and said you’ve violated your fundamental oath of office. “That seems pretty criminal to me,” he said. Are you worried about going to jail? How do you respond to that?

It’s funny, this Administration and the President and his sycophants—it seems like when they’re talking about somebody in an outlandish and outrageous fashion, accusing them of something, it’s usually because they themselves have committed those offenses. And they don’t want you to look at them. They want you to look at somebody else. So that’s what it’s all about. There’s absolutely no reason to go after the governor of California, the mayor of Chicago, the governor of Illinois. We’ve not done anything except that we’re political opponents of his, and guess what tyrants do when they have political opponents? They try to jail them.

So you’re not carrying your toothbrush every day as you go out and about?

I’m doing what I need to do, which is push back every single day. I hope more people will join me in that. ♦