J. B. Pritzker Sounds the Alarm

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As the Illinois governor, J. B. Pritzker, begins a run for a third term and contemplates a campaign for President in 2028, he has fashioned himself as a pugnacious spokesman for the resistance to Donald Trump and the sweeping raids by government agents who are carrying out the Administration’s mass-deportation policy. He has called the President “the modern embodiment of tyranny” in jibes that have made him a target of Trump and his lieutenants, who have said that he should be thrown in jail. His response: “Come and get me.”

Pritzker has confidence in his ability to deal with the onslaught. When I interviewed him a few weeks into the COVID pandemic, he was struggling to get help from the Trump Administration and feeling frustrated with the White House response. I pointed out that he was still pretty new to the business of governing. “I think I was built for this,” he replied. “I have been through crises and I have managed crises. I don’t get flustered.” One of those crises was the death of his father, when Pritzker was seven; another was the death of his mother, after years of severe alcoholism, when he was seventeen. Raised in a wealthy household, he is now a billionaire several times over. He spent most of his career devoted to investing before winning public office. He once reflected that grief “never stops stealing a piece of your joy in the moments when you deserve to be happiest.”

When Pritzker lambastes ICE and Border Patrol officers moving with impunity through Chicago and its suburbs, arresting more than three thousand people, at last count, he speaks not just of his outrage at the tactics but of the pain and fear felt by individuals, families, and communities. In a detailed and forceful ruling on Thursday, the U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis said that the use of force by federal agents in Chicago “shocks the conscience.” Earlier in the week, a different federal judge called conditions in an ICE detention facility near Chicago “unnecessarily cruel.”

As Trump’s camo-wearing agents intensified their raids last week, hauling more into detention, I spoke with Pritzker in a farmhouse dining room in downstate Illinois for The New Yorker Radio Hour. He had just filed paperwork to run for another term in 2026, and he spoke of his worries that the Trump Administration will try to steal the midterm elections. We talked about what he is seeing on the streets of Chicago, what he thinks everyone should do to “stop tyranny,” and whether he is prepared to be arrested on the orders of the President of the United States. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What has been going on in these weeks since federal agents have shown up in Chicago, have shown up in the suburbs? What are you seeing, what are you hearing?

I appreciate your recognizing that it isn’t just the city of Chicago that’s been invaded by ICE and by the Customs and Border Patrol, because they’ve also been in the suburbs and downstate—Urbana, for example. So, this is happening in more than just the city of Chicago.

It has been a very trying time for the people of Illinois as a result of Donald Trump’s desire to cause mayhem on the ground, so that he can bring in National Guard or military troops into American cities. They’re trying to do it in Portland; already did it in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C.; and are now talking about Memphis, New Orleans, and other places. But they seem to be trying out everything new in Chicago.

We’ve seen C.B.P. and ICE agents dropping tear gas in communities where people are just standing on the sidewalk holding signs and protesting outside of an ICE facility—many people are yelling whatever it is they want to yell, they’re holding up signs, but they’re not doing anything illegal. And yet we’ve seen pepper pellets fired at people in the crowds, we’ve seen rubber bullets fired at people. And they’re getting hurt, injured. Then the ICE officials claim that, Oh, they were attacked somehow.

But we have video. I’ve told all Chicago residents that if they have a phone in their pocket that has the capability of gathering video, they should turn on their phone and film everything. Because I think it’s a bit of a deterrent. If ICE knows that they’re being filmed, they might not perpetrate the kinds of activities that they are now, which are so offensive and illegal in many cases. And we are also capturing evidence so that we can take them to court, so that later, when perhaps there’ll be a Congress that might hold them accountable, we could actually do something to push back. Right now, they have federal immunity. It’s quite difficult for a state to hold people accountable because of that federal immunity.

And, so far, the federal courts are helping us. I’ve been very pleased with that. We’ve got people who know their rights on the ground, so people are not getting dragged away if they stay in their own homes. ICE is not allowed to burst in your door and take you away if all they have is a detainer and not a judicial warrant.

You’ve called it an invasion, and you’ve said that some of what they’re doing is illegal. You’ve referred to racial profiling. You’ve said that it is unconstitutional. In what ways is it those things? In which ways do you see it that way?

Well, racial profiling is unconstitutional. You cannot do what they are currently doing. You’re not supposed to be allowed to do it. It is unconstitutional to just look at somebody and say, “Oh, they’re brown-skinned or black-skinned, and therefore we are now going to detain them or tackle them or throw them in the back of a car, and take them away and disappear them.”

And that is what’s happening. And it’s happening to U.S. citizens, just to remind everybody. They’re not grabbing people that they know to be undocumented. They’re just looking at somebody and assuming that because you’re brown-skinned, there’s some likelihood that you might be undocumented. And they’re grabbing these people, they’re harassing them, they’re abusing them. And then later, after a couple of hours of being detained, they’re let go, oh, because they’re a U.S. citizen.