Calling a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling a “straightforward path” to a legal victory, lawyers for the state of Illinois said Friday they hope to quickly resolving ongoing litigation over President Donald Trump’s controversial efforts to deploy National Guard troops to the Chicago area to bolster immigration enforcement.

The status filing in U.S. District Court comes two weeks after the high court’s denial of a request from the Trump administration to allow the Republican president to deploy troops to Illinois streets while a court battle over a restraining order plays out.

In the filing, lawyers for Attorney General Kwame Raoul said that although the Supreme Court’s ruling made no final determinations, it “effectively resolves as a matter of law” that the federalization and deployment orders by Trump were illegal.

“Plaintiffs’ reading of the Supreme Court’s Dec. 23 ruling is that it creates a straightforward path to judgment as a matter of law in their favor,” the filing stated.

While Illinois’ attorneys said they are prepared to proceed with summary judgment proceedings before U.S. District Judge April Perry, such litigation could be costly and drawn out, and the state is open to discussing other possible resolutions, the filing stated.

That posture is based partly on a dramatic change in circumstances. When the lawsuit was filed in October, National Guard troops from Illinois and Texas had already been “federalized” and were assembling at bases for imminent deployment.

Now, those forces have been largely demobilized, though some 195 Illinois National Guard troops remained in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as of this week “completing the demobilization process,” which is expected to conclude next week.

The filing also made note of Trump’s social media post on Dec. 31 announcing he was ordering the National Guard removed from Illinois, which also threatened: “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again – Only a question of time!”

Quoting from settled case law, the lawyers for Raoul said Trump’s “voluntary cessation of the contested conduct” is only binding if it’s “absolutely clear” the wrongful behavior will not recur.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice, meanwhile, asked for more time to decide how to proceed, saying they were “continuing to evaluate the implications of the Supreme Court’s recent stay decision,” which potentially affects pending cases in Oregon and California.

In the same status filing, the DOJ asked for one-month extension to file a response to the complaint, which the attorney general’s office has opposed.

The divided opinion by the conservative-majority Supreme Court represented a significant political victory for Gov. JB Pritzker and other Democratic governors in their escalating battle with Trump over his authority to go against their wishes and use federalized troops on U.S. soil to assist immigration enforcement personnel carrying out the president’s mass deportation efforts in Chicago and other American cities.

“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’s order said. “Thus, at least in this posture, the Government has not carried its burden to show that (the law) permits the President to federalize the Guard in the exercise of inherent authority to protect federal personnel and property in Illinois.”

Three of the court’s conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, lodged dissents, with Thomas and Alito writing that the court “has unnecessarily and unwisely departed from standard practice.”

The fight landed at the Supreme Court days after Perry issued a temporary restraining order barring Trump from deploying Guard troops to the state.

That order has since been continued indefinitely pending the resolution of the lawsuit.

_____

©2026 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.