WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar - Episode 19

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about the President’s law enforcement battles in Chicago, a Supreme Court case challenging President Trump’s use of law enforcement, the latest in a string of political prosecutions against Trump’s enemies, and more.

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, hear about the president's latest law enforcement battles in Chicago, a Supreme Court case challenging President Trump's use of law enforcement, the latest in a string of political prosecutions against Trump's enemies, and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media.

While they're covering the president's latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the News. The radar. First piece of news I have for you this week is a presidential memorandum issued early last week entitled Department of War Security for the Protection of Federal Personnel and Property in Illinois. The memorandum starts by saying, quote, the situation in the state of Illinois, particularly in and around the city of Chicago, cannot continue. Federal facilities in Illinois, including those directly

supporting Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and the Federal Protective Services, have come under coordinated assault by violent groups intent on obstructing federal law enforcement activities. These violent activities appear to be increasing, and the situation in the state of Illinois, particularly in and around the city of Chicago, cannot continue. So to give a little background on this, in President Trump's 2024 campaign for the presidency, one of the things that he ran on was helping to shut down violent crime in major American cities. Chicago being one of them, he also mentioned Washington, D.C., but he sees Chicago and Portland and cities like that as cities that are out of control that have been taken over by Democratic management and they're just allowing crime not only against American citizens, but also against federal law enforcement, state and local law enforcement, and that they're just letting that happen. And I'm speaking specifically about Chicago because that's the city that the memorandum refers to. But clearly this is an example.

This is to set an example for the other major cities where the Trump administration is also doing stuff like this. But the first step that the Trump administration took to deal with the city of Chicago and the crime in the city of Chicago was they set up an ICE detention facility around Chicago so that they could station ICE officials there and they could make raids against places. where they suspected illegal immigrants to be or gang members to be and carry out those ICE deportation activities. When these Immigration and Customs of Foresements officials got to Chicago, led by Kristy Nome as head of the Department of Homeland Security, they wanted to send a message very, very clearly. And that message was, the federal government is taking over this situation now. They came in very loudly with a ton of people with a major show of force to show that the federal law enforcement takes superiority over the state and local law enforcement officials. And I'll get to it later,

but that is the central point of contention between those two. Now, this openly provocative show of force by the Trump administration stoked some ire among the left-leaning citizens of Chicago, and they protested. And those protests have been going on ever since. Trump sent ICE officials to the city, and they have gotten very violent at times. They've had people ramming into ice cars and opening fire on ICE law enforcement officials at times, which has provoked the federal law enforcement officials to respond with force, to shut down people making violent attacks on.

them, which has been happening. There are people like Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker who are claiming that these protests have not been turning violent, and that's just not true. You can go anywhere and watch videos of these things turning violent. In Chicago and elsewhere, I mean, it wasn't but a month ago that in Dallas you had somebody open fire on an ice facility there and killed a couple of people who were detainees, but they weren't, the shooter was not aiming for the detainees, was trying to kill ice officials. So I'm speaking about Chicago because it's the place that is referenced in the memorandum, but this is just a microcosm of the kinds of tension that's boiling in major cities like Chicago, like Dallas, like Portland, like L.A., across the entirety of the United States. But ICE has also

been somewhat violent in their response. They've shown a lot of force. They've made it very clear that they're not going to tolerate any attacks on federal law enforcement or destruction of federal property. And sometimes that's gone too far. You can see videos of ICE officials knocking children down to the ground and using heavy-duty crowd control method. It's just a very hard line to walk for these ICE law enforcement officials when there are protests against them that are turning violent and they have to try to do their job and maintain the peace, but also not overuse their force on American citizens. And so there's almost, there's almost a battle going on between a lot of the citizens of Chicago and ICE law enforcement officials. The other side of that coin is that Illinois State Governor J.B. Pritzker is not welcoming federal ICE agents and law enforcement officials into the city, saying that we don't want them, we don't need them. We didn't ask for them to be here. We're doing just fine without them. He called it just, just, a power grab by President Trump to try to take power over the state and local government. And so as a response to this, Governor Pritzker has basically directed these state and local officials to not cooperate with federal law enforcement in these dealings. And the reason that this is a problem is that the

federal law enforcement and the Trump administration was seeking the help of the Illinois state and local officials to protect ICE agents, to protect them from these rioters, from these violent protests, and help them to do their job and carry on these deportation efforts in the city of Chicago. and the surrounding areas. Governor Pritzker has basically said to his state and local officials don't cooperate with them on this, and so they're not really helping ICE agents deal with these problems. And so it's a standoff between the Illinois governor and the Trump administration. And this leads me back to the presidential memorandum, which stated that the regular forces of the United States are not sufficient to ensure enforcement of federal law, and that Illinois

state and local government is either unable or unwilling to cooperate with federal law enforcement. So it calls upon the Department of War to send National Guard troops, the Illinois State National Guard, and the Texas National Guard, to send at least 300 troops to the city of Chicago to protect federal law enforcement there. This is not unprecedented for the Trump administration. Earlier this summer, they deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles during the anti-ice riots that were going on there. And in early September, they deployed the National Guard to Portland

for similar anti-ice protests and violent crimes that were going on there. This one is unique in the sense that it is seriously pitting the authority of the state government and the governor of the state of Illinois against the Trump administration, against the presidential administration, and they both have their police forces and they're at odds with each other. That creates a very disturbing political warfare kind of situation when you've got Pritzker and his law enforcement that is obedient to him, and they are completely opposed to President Trump and his law enforcement that are obedient to him. Plus, you throw in the optics of citizens of Chicago who are fighting against federal law enforcement officials. Those federal officials are using force on American citizens to stop that. It just creates a very, very tough situation. That's why President Trump signed this memorandum to bring in National Guard forces to do what the Illinois state and local law enforcement officials would not do, protect federal ICE agents while they carry out their agenda in the city of Chicago. Now, there's two contradictory precedents

that really make this such a difficult situation. First of all, in the United States, we do not use military force against our own citizens. That's just something that we have not done in the past. It's something that's been against the rules, not even necessarily fully illegal to do, but it's just something that you don't do. It's something that the people see as a problem. We don't want to live like that. We don't want to live under a military regime. And so presidential administrations have not historically really used military force against our own citizens, which is going on to some extent here with the National Guard dealing with these American citizen anti-ice protesters. I will note, though, that the only reason that this is necessary is because the Illinois state and local law enforcement have been commanded

not to do their job and prevent violent, illegal crimes against law enforcement by American citizens. They're just refusing to do that. The other side of that coin is state governments generally cannot get in the way of federal policy. And that's something that the Trump administration has been dealing with a lot in this term. And the Biden administration dealt with a lot in his term. As you'll recall, when the Biden administration was trying to open the border and shut down the process of building a border wall, Governor Greg Abbott in the state of Texas basically said we're not going to let the federal government come in and stop us from enforcing the border, and the Biden administration kind of bullied their way into making it happen. They overruled the state policy in favor of the federal policy.

Whether you disagree or agree with that federal policy doesn't really matter. What matters here is the precedent of federal policy overrules state policy when it comes to actual enforcement. like that. And that's something that's at stake here, too. The policy of this administration is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going to carry out deportations of illegal immigrants across the United States. And Pritzker, whose state policy disagrees with that, is trying to stop the federal government from fulfilling its policy. Or at least he's saying he will not cooperate with the federal government in their efforts to do that and is tacitly allowing for violent protesters to impede upon the federal government's deportation efforts there. So I say all this to say, the memorandum is another escalatory

step. It's another step in this political warfare kind of game that the Trump administration is playing with Governor Pritzker in Illinois and with the state of Oregon and the state of California and all of them when it comes to the federal police versus the state police operating in opposition to each other. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a Supreme Court case in which the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago are suing the Trump administration to try to stop the deployment of the National Guard to the state of Illinois. The state is calling this use of force unnecessary and illegal, and on October 9th, U.S. District Judge April Perry issued a temporary restraining order that barred the Trump administration from, quote, ordering the federalization and deployment of the National

Guard of the United States within Illinois. Here is a summary of what the U.S. District Court judge from the state of Illinois had to say in agreement with the state of Illinois's challenge to Trump's use of executive force. One of the things she talked about was describing what rebellion was. She described it as deliberate, organized resistance openly opposing the government as a whole. And she said, I have seen no credible evidence that there has been rebellion in the state of Illinois. And that's critical because, again, the government had been arguing that the protests threatened this state of rebellion.

So this helps shed some light on the claims of Governor Pritzker and the state of Illinois, that because there has been no act of rebellion against the United States government as a whole, the deployment of National Guard forces is illegal, unconstitutional, and unnecessary. The district court judge even said that she did not doubt that there have been acts of vandalism, civil disobedience, and even assaults on federal agents, but she rejected the Trump administration's claims that there was the actual danger of rebellion that would allow Trump to call up the National Guard under federal law. She says, quote,

the unrest defendants complain of has consisted entirely of opposition, indeed sometimes violent, to a particular federal agency and the laws it is charged with enforcing, which does not amount to opposition of the authority of the federal government as a whole. The district court judge claimed that there was not enough evidence that the protesting activities in Chicago and in the state of Illinois generally has impeded the ability of these ICE officials of federal law enforcement officers to execute federal immigration laws. As you might imagine, Governor J.B. Pritzker was very happy that the court sided with him in this whole debacle, saying Donald Trump is not a king and his administration is not above the law. Today, the court confirmed what we all know, there is no credible

evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois and no place for the National Guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago. And in appealing this case to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is offering a plethora of evidence that that's just not in fact true. They're saying that, quote, federal officers in Chicago have been threatened and assaulted, attacked in a harrowing, pre-planned ambush involving many assailants, rammed in their government vehicles, shot out with fireworks and other improvised weapons, injured and hospitalized, and threatened in person and online. So the issue that the Supreme Court is going to have to decide is what constitutes a rebellion against the federal government of the United States, which is what it requires under the Constitution for the president to deploy the National Guard in situations like these. The state of Illinois is saying this isn't an insurrection, this isn't people trying to overthrow the United States government, it's not a rebellion in that sense. It is simply people protesting, sometimes violently, one particular agency and a particular policy that the agency is trying to fulfill, namely ICE trying to carry out deportations.

And so the state of Illinois is on somewhat solid ground there, saying that this is not a challenge to the authority of the federal government as a whole. However, the Trump administration is also coming at this from a somewhat new perspective. They're saying that, yes, this does constitute a rebellion against the federal government of the United States. One, because violent protesters are impeding on the ability of federal agents to fulfill United States policy. And the Trump administration points out that they didn't immediately deploy the National Guard after this took place. They asked for help from state and local officials to protect federal agents while they did this work. And J.B. Pritzker refused to do that. And so the Trump administration is claiming that they too are contributing to the rebellion in that sense.

Because not only is this federal agency ICE having to deal with violent protesters, but they're also having to deal with indignant state and local law enforcement who have been charged by the governor with not cooperating with the federal government in this situation. And on some level, Governor Pritzker having his state and local officials actively defy the requests of the federal government and tacitly allow violent protesters to impede and attack the federal government is a rejection of the federal government's authority. It's not to say it's an insurrection. It's not to say that Governor Pritzker is trying to overthrow the Trump administration. but on some extent he is undermining federal authority there. And so the Supreme Court is going to have to decide whether that constitutes a rebellion or not. The last thing I want to mention on this issue is the fact that in this weird political warfare kind of situation

that's going on between the Trump administration and Governor Pritzker in the state of Illinois, we're now bringing in the judicial branch of the government into this whole dilemma. You have a lot of district court judges who make decisions like these based on political bases rather than on legal bases. And then you have several members of this current Supreme Court who are, appointed by President Trump. So my worry is that one side is going to reject whatever the Supreme Court has to say here based on the issue of bias. So we'll see how the Supreme Court decides this. We'll see how the situation unfolds. But it is becoming increasingly complex and increasingly tense in how these sides are standing off against each other.

You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio for Hillsdale 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is the Department of Justice is bringing charges against former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton. So John Bolton was one of Donald Trump's national security advisors during his first term. He served for 17 months. He had a lot of clashes with President Trump while he was serving in his first administration. And then Trump fired Bolton in 2019. Since then, John Bolton has been very outspoken against President Trump,

including releasing a book called The Room Where It Happened in the run-up to the 2020 election. And the book was highly critical of Trump and gave kind of inside information and how Trump did his national security dealings in his first term. The charge is being brought against him. There are 18 counts, all accusing him of violating national security laws by revealing classified information with friends and family, particularly with his wife and his daughter. The indictment claims that he shared over a thousand pages of notes that he took during his time as national security advisor in the office. And all of that stuff is, is classified. He was revealing those things to his family. He was sending messages to people on the app signal, which is a private server. It's not secure according to government standards.

and in those messages he discussed future U.S. military plans. The reason that he was sending this kind of information to people was to compile documents so that he could use it when he would later write a book about it, which says a lot about him right there, that he was, while he was working for the Trump administration, he was compiling things that were supposed to be confidential to put into a book to bash President Trump essentially in the lead up to the 2020 election. It's important to note that the investigation into Bolton started under President Biden, and there is no doubt that what he did violates the law. You cannot do that. He faces 180 years' worth of charges for this, which is kind of insane. I don't think that he would get that, even if he has found guilty. But the thing that's really worth noting here is that the Trump administration has now pursued charges against

Letitia James, against James Comey, against John Bolton, all people who have been outspokenly, politically opposed to President Trump. There are legal cases to be made against all of these people. but the concern is that we are spiraling down to the bottom of the barrel in how we conduct politics. As of 10 years ago, it was just kind of a given that you did not prosecute your political opponents for things like clerical errors, for classified documents, for things like that. Major example of being Hillary Clinton, who did a lot of these same things that are, that John Bolton is being charged with right now during her time as Secretary of State. And she was never charged because it would give the appearance of being a political prosecution done for political means as revenge. However, as the last 10 years have gone on, President Trump was prosecuted for classified documents, violations, and obstruction of justice, things that there was a significant case to be made against him for those things. There were prosecutions against Rudy Giuliani, other Trump staff, other Trump lawyers, Trump supporters. And we got started in this spiral of using political lawfare against your political opponents. And President Trump is continuing that. Now, it's one thing to say, yes, they brought the same exact charges against him. And so if we're being just, if we're being fair, no one's above the law. We should prosecute people who make those same crimes.

But to go right alongside that, this week, President Trump pardoned George Santos, Republican, former congressman who was sentenced to seven years in prison for financial campaign crimes, of which he was found guilty in court. So it's not consistent. It's got to mean something. Either we stand for justice or we don't. So I mentioned this to just point out another aspect of the tension that's rising right now, unfortunately, across the United States.

That's further dividing the political parties when we've got states who are using their police to defy federal law enforcement. and reject the federal government's authority to some extent, which is arguably based on party politics. We're bringing in the judiciary to help try to win these battles, and we're using the Department of Justice to prosecute political enemies. Both sides of the political divide are provoking each other right here, but Republicans are in power. And you better believe if you provoke the other side while you're in power by doing stuff like this, which only furthers the political divide and raises political tension, you better believe the other side is going to continue that spiral downhill when they get back into power.

The last piece of news I have for you this week is an executive order entitled Ensuring Continued Accountability in Federal Hiring. Since the beginning of this second Trump administration, they have announced the elimination of more than 200,000 federal positions. Now, not all of those have gone into effect yet. Many, many of those have been held up by district courts around the country who are not letting them fire as many federal employees as they would like to. But there has been significant cutbacks in the federal workforce in just this year.

Particularly since the government shut down, so just in the last couple of weeks alone, there have been over 4,000 federal positions that have been eliminated or federal layoffs. So what this executive order does is it starts a hiring freeze. It says that no vacant federal civilian position may be filled and no new positions created unless allowed by law or exempted under the order. So this starts with Doge and the work that Doge did in the first half of this year, the Department of Government Efficiency, looking through the government receipts for waste, fraud, and abuse and determining that there were a lot of federal positions.

They were not absolutely vital to the functioning of the government. And so Doge recommended that those positions be eliminated and that those workers be laid off. President Trump has done his best to go through with this. And at the end of the summer, there was a Supreme Court ruling that allowed for a lot of these firings to go into effect. And to note an interesting effect of this, in the month of September, the U.S. posted a record high surplus of $198 billion, according to the Treasury Secretary. So the United States operates in an annual budget deficit approaching $2 trillion.

dollars and in the month of September we had an almost $200 billion budget surplus and that's not because we've cut a whole lot of spending doge cut very little spending particularly like institutional spending that takes place in the federal government the one big beautiful bill and the 2026 budget that has been proposed that hasn't gone through because of the shutdown none of that really cut spending at all what has cut spending in the federal government has been all these layoffs these federal layoffs eliminating positions in the federal government so that they're not spending so much much money on such an inflated workforce. This executive order wants to maintain that. It wants to maintain those cuts and make sure that that spending does not come back into play, at least during the Trump administration.

Now, there are certain exemptions to the hiring freeze, particularly in the military, which can keep hiring, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol can keep hiring. The president can keep appointing people to positions in his direct vicinity. And though I've had my doubts about the Trump administration's real desire to cut spending, particularly because they won't touch the, the major factors in government spending like Social Security, the welfare programs, things like that. I've had my doubts, but this seems to be working, and this executive order is trying to institutionalize and maintain the savings that the federal government has achieved by cutting down on the inflation of the workforce. So to recap this week, we had an executive order

which deployed the National Guard to the state of Illinois to protect ICE agents and facilities from violent protests. We had a Supreme Court case challenging the deployment of the National Guard over the claimed rebellion of protesters and state law enforcement. We had the Department of Justice's prosecution of John Bolton for classified documents crimes, and we had an executive order freezing federal hiring and confirming the reduction of the federal workforce. Tune in next week for more. Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and I want to thank you for listening

and encourage you to tune back in next time for more coverage of the news that fell Under the Radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Lerner. Luke Miller, here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.