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Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker defiantly challenged President Donald Trump’s plan to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, holding a press conference with local officials in which he declared the plan was unnecessary and unwelcome — and took a swipe at the president’s “mental faculties.”

The Trump administration has controversially deployed federal agents in Washington, D.C., two months after doing so in Los Angeles, claiming it was necessary to fight crime. Chicago is one of the main cities Trump has said he intends to target soon, and Pritzker blasted the plan as “exactly the type of overreach that our country’s Founders warned against.”

“What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted,” Pritzker said during remarks he delivered in Chicago on Monday. “It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

He also criticized the White House for not reaching out to him or the mayor or their staff, making it clear they had “made no requests for federal intervention” and found out about Trump’s plans “the same way that all of you did,” by reading the story reported in The Washington Post.

“This is not about fighting crime,” Pritzker argued. “This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his

complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Deploying the military in an American city “to invade our streets and neighborhoods and disrupt the lives of everyday people is an extraordinary action, and it should require extraordinary justification,” he said, urging reporters to talk to local residents, citing statistics about dropping crime rates, including violent crimes.

Pritzker responded directly to Trump’s comments in the Oval Office earlier Monday, not just rejecting Trump’s claim that the federal deployment was needed but questioning Trump’s “mental faculties”:

Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy. Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander in chief for the members of the military, that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever more alarming grabs for power.

Pritzker continued, saying that calling up the National Guard was a “responsibility” he took “seriously,” and that he hoped the president would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city’s sovereignty.”

But if

not, Pritzker continued, the city was “going to face an unprecedented and difficult time ahead,” urging local residents “to continue Chicago’s long tradition of nonviolent resistance,” and “remember that the members of the military and the National Guard, who will be asked to walk these streets, are, for the most part, here unwillingly.”

For the president to send troops to Chicago would be “violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator,” Pritzker said, vowing that Illinois would respond and “is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have,” including in court.

He closed with a warming “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous”:

We are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we’re going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.You can delay justice for a time, but history

shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.As Dr. King once said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Humbly, I would add, it doesn’t bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed, to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

Tags: Chicago, Donald Trump, Illinois, JB Pritzker