Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wants Democrats to prosecute Trump administration officials and federal law enforcement agents if his party recaptures the White House in 2028. Not figuratively. Not through oversight hearings or sternly worded letters. Criminally prosecuted. Civilly prosecuted. His words.
The billionaire governor, now running for a third term in Springfield, laid out the threat in an interview with The New York Times. He proposed that Democrats build their own counter to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint that has been published in some form nearly every election cycle since the 1980s. Pritzker’s version: “Project 2029,” a plan he says would “restore the rule of law” by hauling administration officials and agents into court.
As Fox News Digital reported, when New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro pressed Pritzker on whether he meant Trump officials and law enforcement agents would face criminal prosecution, the governor did not flinch.
“I’m talking about the people in this administration who’ve broken the law and federal agents who’ve broken the law. Criminally prosecuted, civilly prosecuted. Whatever it is that we can do.”
That is a sitting governor openly promising to weaponize the justice system against federal officers enforcing immigration law. And he said it like a man who expects applause.
Pritzker has already started naming names. In January, his office shared a press release calling on the Illinois Accountability Commission to review the “public statements and policy decisions” of senior officials involved in Operation Midway Blitz, the federal immigration enforcement surge in Chicago. The release accused those officials of leading “the escalation of aggressive enforcement tactics” and demanded they be held accountable.
The list reads like a who’s who of Trump immigration policy: White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, border czar Tom Homan, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, former assistant DHS secretary Tricia McLaughlin, acting ICE Director Tom Lyons, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott, and Corey Lewandowski, who served as a special government employee at DHS. Seven people singled out by a governor’s office for doing their jobs.
The press release came shortly after the removal of top Border Patrol leader Greg Bovino from Minnesota and coincided with the Trump administration’s withdrawal of federal troops from Illinois in January.
The prosecution talk did not come out of nowhere. Pritzker has spent months fighting federal immigration enforcement through the courts, through rhetoric, and through raw political confrontation.
In October, Pritzker filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago. The suit argued the deployment was “unconstitutional and/or unlawful.” U.S. District Judge April Perry issued a temporary restraining order blocking the troops from deploying to Illinois while the case moved forward. The Supreme Court upheld that decision.
The governor has accused federal agents of “waging war on our people” and “acting like jackbooted thugs.” That language, comparing immigration officers to fascist enforcers, tells you everything about where Pritzker sits on the spectrum of Democratic resistance politics.
A separate lawsuit accused federal agents of violating protesters’ constitutional rights by using tear gas and force during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago. District Judge Sara Ellis issued a preliminary injunction barring agents from using force and tear gas on protesters. An appeals court overturned that injunction earlier this month.
So the courts have already pushed back on one of the key legal claims underlying Pritzker’s narrative. That hasn’t slowed him down.
To be fair to the timeline, the political hostility runs in both directions. Trump himself posted on Truth Social that Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!” AP News reported that when asked what specific crimes the two Democrats had committed, the White House did not identify any.
Pritzker responded to those remarks by casting himself as a defender of democratic norms. “I will not back down,” he said. “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”
That framing, governor as brave dissident standing against tyranny, is exactly the brand Pritzker is building as he campaigns for a third term. The Washington Times noted that the state and city have both filed suit to block the Guard deployment, and that Trump’s remarks fit a broader pattern of publicly urging prosecution of political opponents.
But there is a critical difference between a president venting on social media and a governor laying out a policy framework, complete with named targets and a branded initiative, to use the apparatus of government to prosecute the other side’s officials and agents after a future election.
Strip away the branding and the interview polish. What Pritzker described is a plan to criminally charge federal officers for enforcing the law as directed by the executive branch. He named no specific statutes they violated. He identified no particular acts that crossed a legal line. He offered a slogan, “restore the rule of law”, and a list of people he wants investigated.
“I don’t think you can speak of it in shorthand, but we’ve got to restore the rule of law, and that means holding people accountable who’ve broken the law.”
The irony is thick. Pritzker governs a state where Chicago logged one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation. He has spent political capital shielding illegal immigrants from federal enforcement. And his answer to public safety is not more cops on the street or cooperation with federal authorities. It is a promise to prosecute the cops.
This is the governor who sued to stop National Guard troops from entering his state, who called ICE agents jackbooted thugs, and who now wants Democrats to build a four-year plan around dragging those same agents into criminal court. The message to every federal officer considering a posting in Illinois could not be clearer: do your job and a future administration may come for you.
Consider what Pritzker’s proposal would mean in practice. A Border Patrol agent follows orders from the White House. He detains illegal immigrants in Chicago as part of a lawful operation. Four years later, a new Democratic administration hauls him before a grand jury. His crime? Doing what the president told him to do.
That is not the rule of law. That is the rule of political revenge dressed in legal language. And every federal officer in the country should take note.
Pritzker is not some backbench state legislator floating a fantasy. He is a three-term governor candidate with a personal fortune, national ambitions, and a media apparatus that treats his pronouncements as serious policy. When he says “criminally prosecuted,” he means it as a platform plank.
Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who knows a thing or two about politically motivated prosecutions, has accused Pritzker of pandering to what he called the “lunatic fringe” of the Democratic Party. That characterization stings because it rings true. Pritzker’s base is not the working-class voter in downstate Illinois worried about crime and the cost of groceries. His audience is the progressive donor class and the activist left that views immigration enforcement as inherently illegitimate.
“Project 2029” is not a governing agenda. It is a fundraising pitch and a primary strategy. It tells the Democratic base: elect us, and we will punish them. Not reform policy. Not change the law. Punish the people who carried it out.
Fox News Digital reached out to both Pritzker’s office and the White House for comment on the governor’s remarks. The article did not report receiving responses.
Meanwhile, the legal landscape around Operation Midway Blitz continues to shift. The appeals court’s recent decision overturning Judge Ellis’s injunction suggests that at least some courts see the federal enforcement actions as legally defensible. Pritzker’s narrative depends on those actions being criminal. The judiciary, so far, has not agreed.
When a governor’s plan for 2029 is not safer streets or lower taxes but a promise to jail the other side’s officials, voters should ask a simple question: whose law and whose order is he really talking about?
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