Pritzker: There Isn’t an Emergency, It Looks Bad Due to Feds, It’s Only in Two-Block Area

On Tuesday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) stated that there isn’t a national emergency in Illinois, the federal officials are “the ones that are creating mayhem on the ground, specifically because they want to claim that there’s some sort of emergency. There isn’t. This is occurring in a two-block area of a suburb of Chicago, Broadview. So, yes, they can take their own video of an incident that occurs in that two-block area and make it seem like that’s all of Chicago.”

Pritzker said, “Well, remember, the Insurrection Act has the name insurrection in it for a reason. It’s only something that you can effectuate if there is an insurrection, a foreign invasion, a true national emergency. That doesn’t exist here, and it doesn’t exist in Portland. It didn’t exist in Washington, D.C. or in Los Angeles. So, I realize that President Trump, who does no reading and doesn’t understand anything, uses the words Insurrection Act like he understands it.”

Co-host Juana Summers then cut in to say, “The President might disagree with your characterization there. He has argued that it is [an] emergency. He has described that there — it looks like war in some of these cities.”

Pritzker responded, “Yeah, but he’s the one that’s causing that situation. That is to say, it’s ICE and CBP that have been launching grenades with tear gas, that have been pelting people with plastic or rubber bullets. They’re the ones that are creating mayhem on the ground, specifically because they want to claim that there’s some sort of emergency. There isn’t. This is occurring in a two-block area of a suburb of Chicago, Broadview. So, yes, they can take their own video of an incident that occurs in that two-block area and make it seem like that’s all of Chicago. That’s not even in the city of Chicago. In fact, our crime rate has been dropping and dropping, half the homicide rate that it was a few years ago, double-digit declines each year now. Donald Trump just — he, honestly, doesn’t read. He doesn’t understand what’s going on in the cities. He just has some notion in his head. There’s some sort of dementia going on, and he just keeps repeating things from years gone by.”

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