JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Today, the governor of Illinois lashed out at the Trump administration and the Supreme Court. JB Pritzker is in a battle with the president. Trump has threatened to send the National Guard to Chicago to take on what he calls out of control crime. Pritzker is against the move. He calls it a power grab. Now the administration has launched a surge of federal immigration agents in Chicago. Pritzker denounced that operation in an interview today with NPR's Steve Inskeep.
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JB PRITZKER: The vast majority of the people that they detain are not criminals. They're actually just people who live here in Illinois. They may have partially documented situation, or they're undocumented. Many, by the way, are fully documented. And now, apparently, they're going to be arresting people who simply speak with a Spanish accent.
STEVE INSKEEP: There is - and you're referring to a Supreme Court ruling, without explanation overturning a lower court and making it easier for ICE to continue searches, at least in Los Angeles. What do you think of that ruling?
PRITZKER: That ruling, to me, is a reversal of progress that we've made in this country, where we've stood against and effectuated laws that oppose racial profiling. And now you've got federal ICE agents wearing masks, grabbing people off the street who speak with an accent or might be brown or Black and disappearing them. I did not think that we lived in a country like that. But that is, in fact, what they have been doing and what they now intend to do more of.
INSKEEP: Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court Justice, in a - what's called a concurring opinion, said it is perfectly reasonable to question someone if they're leaving a construction site where people who may be here without legal status might be working or if they can't speak English. And if they're legitimate or citizens, you let them go.
PRITZKER: You think they're questioning them? - because that's not what any of us are seeing in any of the bystander videos that have been made. People are being grabbed, and they're being thrown into vans. And that's different than questioning people.
And oh, by the way, I want to ask a question to everybody who's listening and to you. Do you carry with you citizenship papers? How do you prove to somebody that you're a U.S. citizen - your accent, the color of your skin? That's not the country we live in. You know, you shouldn't have to walk around with papers, the way that they did in the early days of Nazi Germany, to prove that you belong and that you're not one of them. And that is essentially the kind of country that we're becoming if you allow ICE to simply grab people after racial profiling.
INSKEEP: We spoke with a priest here in Chicago who is an activist, who says they are doing what he calls trainings and encouraging people to carry their IDs at all times. Would you encourage Chicagoans to do that?
PRITZKER: Look, I'm deeply concerned, particularly for people who have partial documentation, who are here legally but they may not be U.S. citizens, right? They've got permission to be here. I'm particularly worried for them because nothing that they will carry will be good enough for ICE. And of course, I worry about the idea that we're becoming a country where your privacy is no longer appropriate for the government to recognize. And instead, they can simply stop you on the street because of how you look and say, show me that you belong here. Show me that you're a U.S. citizen. That's, again, not the country that I grew up in.
SUMMERS: That was Illinois Governor JB Pritzker in an interview with our colleague Steve Inskeep. You can hear the rest of their conversation on Morning Edition tomorrow. You can also find it on video. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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