* From the holiday break…

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a 6-3 decision rejecting for now President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy National Guard troops in Illinois.

It was a significant, if preliminary, win for those challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to send troops into American cities — and a notable loss for the Trump administration on the shadow docket.

The Supreme Court held that the statute Trump relied on to federalize the National Guard likely requires both that the U.S. military is authorized to “execute the laws” in a given situation where the president wants to federalize the National Guard and that the president is “unable” to execute the laws even with the use of the military.

Here, however, the court held that Trump didn’t succeed in meeting that first factor: “[T]he Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.” […]

In the order and opinions, six justices preliminarily adopted the argument advanced at the Supreme Court in an amicus curiae brief submitted by law professor Marty Lederman that the term “regular forces” used in 10 U.S.C. 12406 refers to the U.S. military. The initial submission of the amicus brief appears to have led the court in late October to call for supplemental briefing about the question.

* Friday…

* Yesterday…

Several days after President Donald Trump said he’s removing the National Guard from three major cities, he suggested that troops could return to U.S. cities “when the crime starts.”

“We can go back, we’re allowed to go back in, but we’ll go back in when the crime starts,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “Look, the crime will soon start because they now know that we’re out. And at the appropriate time we’ll go, go back in and we may, if we, you know, we’re allowed to. The most powerful thing we have, we haven’t used the Insurrection Act.”

Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Dec. 31 that he was retracting the guard from Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland.

Also yesterday…

We also helped, as you know, in Chicago. And crime went down a little bit there. We did a very small help, because we have no, no, we had no working ability with the governor. The governor was a disaster. The mayor was a disaster. But it knocked down crime, but we’re pulling out of there.

1) The National Guard was never actually deployed to Chicago itself;

2) As far as we know, the federal government did not attempt to inform the state about the NG deployments nor try to work with it;

3) Crime has been dropping in Chicago for years, particularly murder rates…

The 29 percent decrease in homicides in Chicago last year outpaced declines in other major cities like New York and Philadelphia. It also kept with a larger national trend in violence reduction that generally stood in stark contrast to the spikes experienced around the COVID-19 pandemic. […]

The 416 murders reported in the latest police data for 2025 — which will be finalized this month — marked the lowest annual number since 1965 and represented an almost 50 percent decline since 2021, when Chicago reported 805 murders.

Chart…

* Meanwhile…

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit Monday against Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and Attorney General Kwame Raoul (D), challenging a state law that aims to limit the scope of federal immigration action and protect people against unconstitutional conduct by agents during civil immigration enforcement.

Justice Department officials say the “Illinois Bivens Act” and the “Court Access, Safety, and Participation Act” — measures included in H.B. 312, which Pritzker signed into law earlier this month — represent an “unconstitutional attempt to regulate federal law enforcement officers” and “threaten the safety of federal officers,” who they say have seen a rise in harassment and threats of violence in recent months. […]

The Illinois Bivens Act gives individuals the right to sue anyone who knowingly violates the Illinois Constitution or U.S. Constitution while conducting civil immigration enforcement. It aims to provide legal recourse for individuals amid concerns about the aggressive tactics used during heightened federal immigration enforcement in Illinois.

The Court Access, Safety, and Participation Act prohibits civil immigration arrests at courthouses of anyone who, in good faith, is attending state court proceedings.

Click here to read the suit.

* More from Isabel…

* Politico | Supreme Court blocks Trump effort to deploy National Guard troops to Illinois: In their ruling Tuesday, the justices noted that federal law generally bars use of the military for law enforcement, and they declared that the law Trump used to activate the Guard is likely to apply only when regular armed forces — the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines — are insufficient to maintain order. “At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois,” the high court said in an unsigned order released more than two months after the administration asked the justices to weigh in.

* Block Club Chicago | Chicago under siege: How Operation Midway Blitz changed our city: In the past, ICE agents detained undocumented immigrants in addition to those they were aiming to pick up, but at least they “tried to disguise it as targeted enforcement,” Fleming said. But with Operation Midway Blitz, agents have dropped “pretenses of trying to comply with what the law required of them,” revealing a “shocking” change in how federal agents have interacted with the American people, not just the immigrants they’re pursuing, Fleming said.

* Block Club | ICE’s Illinois Arrests During Trump’s Crackdown Were Among Nation’s Highest: From President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January through mid-October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel arrested nearly 210,000 people across the country, including more than 3,300 in Illinois. And that doesn’t include thousands of additional arrests by Border Patrol and other federal agencies. By this fall, ICE agents were arresting people at a higher rate in Illinois than almost anywhere else in the country.

* Tribune | Cost of Operation Midway Blitz: $59M and counting: Since Midway Blitz began in early September, the federal government has spent at least $59 million deploying and equipping federal personnel and detaining the roughly 4,500 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents during that period, the Tribune found. The analysis — a conservative, back-of-the-envelope estimate — offers one of the first examinations of the operation’s price tag as criticism has escalated over the lack of transparency surrounding how it was conducted and its taxpayer cost.

* The Hill | Border Patrol commander: We’re going to be in Chicago ‘for years’: U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino said Tuesday federal immigration enforcement officers would remain in Chicago “for years,” even after months of controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants in the Windy City. “If you think we’re done with Chicago, you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself,” Bovino wrote in a statement on social platform X.

* Tribune | ‘Help is on the way’: Audio captures Border Patrol and 911 dispatchers before CPD response: An investigatory stop report obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request shows that a Town Hall District police officer gave the driver of the Nissan, Omar Luna, “a verbal warning about the dangers of operating a motor vehicle while in use of a cellphone.” Luna, speaking to the Tribune the day of the stop, said he had been trying to keep up with the Border Patrol cars to record and broadcast their movements. “We follow them to alert people,” Luna said. “I have never injured them or tried to crash into them.”

* AP | DOJ sues Illinois’ governor over laws protecting immigrants at courthouses and hospitals: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday fired back against a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit over state protections of immigrants from federal arrest at courthouses, hospitals and day cares. Justice officials filed suit on Monday, claiming new Illinois measures prohibiting detention of immigrants going about daily business at key locations are unconstitutional and “threaten the safety of federal officers,” according to a department statement.

* Sun-Times | Faith leaders denied access to pray with detainees at Broadview ICE facility on Christmas Eve: The Rev. Brendan Curran of the Resurrection Project said members of his organization sent letters and made calls to the Department of Homeland Security prior to arriving at the facility, but government officials refused to grant permission to enter. Curran said access to the facility by religious representatives had been allowed in previous years. It has been denied since President Donald Trump’s administration launched its deportation campaign in the Chicago area in September, Curran said.

* The Hill | Illinois lawmakers gain access to Chicago-area ICE facility after pushback: A group of Illinois Democrats accessed a Chicago-area Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility after previous pushback, some of the lawmakers said on the social platform X “@repdeliaramirez @RepDannyDavis @RepChuyGarcia and I finally were able to enter the Broadview ICE Facility after being denied entry in June,” Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) said Tuesday in a post on X.