Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: The financial backing of these groups, particularly Antifa, is certainly something the administration is looking into aggressively, and the federal government has never really been mobilized or tasked with doing that, so we're kind of kick starting that into gear. The FBI is working on it, alongside the White House's Homeland Security Task Force. We have our intelligence community looking into this as well, and even the secretary of the Treasury is involved with these matters since they are financial in nature. And we will continue to get to the bottom of who is funding these organizations, and this organized anarchy, against our country and our government. It's a question the American people have been begging the answer for for many years, and we're committed to uncovering it.
LIVE: Chicago Police press conference
Chicago Police Superintendent [press conference]: Federal agents; ICE, HSI, are officers. They are agents of law enforcement. If you box them in with vehicles, it is reasonable for them to believe that they are being ambushed, and that this could end in a deadly situation. And it is reasonable for them to use force based on those conditions…following law enforcement agents around, the question is why. What do you plan on doing? It's also reasonable for them to believe that you're eventually going to do harm to them…when you plow into a vehicle that contains law enforcement agents, you are using deadly force, and they can use deadly force to stop you.
You can't essentially stalk federal, state, or local law enforcement, by following them around during operations, especially since they have recently been targeted with violence and physically attacked. Try that in your city and see what happens.
If you follow around ICE agents, FBI agents, DEA agents; whoever, while they are conducting an operation, they will stop you. That's going to happen.
ICE isn't going anywhere. In fact, their operations are going to increase exponentially over the coming months and years.,
LIVE: Governor Pritzker press conference on National Guard deployment
Governor Pritzker: Let me be clear. Donald Trump is using our servicemembers as political props, and as pawns, in his illegal effort to militarize our nation's cities.
Governor Pritzker: The Trump administration is following a playbook. Cause chaos. Create fear and confusion. Make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and teargas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act, so that he can send military troops to our city. He wants to justify and normalize the presence of armed soldiers under his direct command.
Pritzker looks both incredibly mad and massively defeated.
Mayor Johnson: We do not need or want the National Guard to police our streets. We want to continue our holistic strategies and partnerships that have led to the safest summer in the city of Chicago in sixty years.
Governor Pritzker: The job of our State Police, the mission that they've been given, is to keep the people who are in Broadview, and who are protesting, safe from ICE, who have been firing gas pellets at people when they have been peacefully protesting.