President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court, for the first time, to clear the way for him to use National Guard troops to support the president’s immigration enforcement and mass deportation drive.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed an emergency appeal with the high court Friday, seeking to lift lower-court rulings that are currently preventing Trump from deploying National Guard troops he pressed into federal service to aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel in Illinois.

Sauer argued that a temporary restraining order issued by a federal district judge in Illinois “improperly impinges on the President’s authority and needlessly endangers federal personnel and property.”

In response to the appeal, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, said on X: “Donald Trump will keep trying to invade Illinois with troops — and we will keep defending the sovereignty of our state. Militarizing our communities against their will is not only un-American but also leads us down a dangerous path for our democracy.”

The appeal marks the first time the high court will consider Trump’s efforts to federalize state-run National Guard troops and deploy them into states led by Democratic governors who have opposed the extraordinary moves. It comes one day after a federal appeals court panel voted, 3-0, to leave in place the Chicago-based district judge’s restraining order that prevents Trump from putting the guard troops on the streets in Illinois.

“Political opposition is not rebellion,” the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals panel wrote, rejecting the Trump administration’s argument that immigration-related protests amounted to the sort of extreme threat to government authority that is needed for the president to have authority under federal law to deploy the guard.

The rulings in Illinois followed similar decisions from federal district judges in California and Oregon blocking deployments in those states. The judges said Trump had made false claims of uncontrolled violence and infringed on states’ power to manage their own law enforcement challenges.

One of the judges — a Trump appointee in Oregon — concluded earlier this month that Trump’s basis for federalizing Oregon troops to deploy them in Portland was “untethered” from reality and warned the effort risked normalizing the use of military troops against Americans in ways the founders had warned against.

But courts have not ruled uniformly against Trump’s use of the National Guard. In June, the administration won orders from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals allowing deployments in Los Angeles to continue.

The Oregon judge’s ruling is also currently on appeal at the 9th Circuit. When a panel of that court heard arguments last week, a majority of the judges seemed inclined to allow the troops to be put on the street.

In addition to the Chicago area, Portland and Los Angeles, Trump has ordered the military into Memphis, Tennessee and Washington, D.C., citing claims of uncontrolled violent crime that local officials have sharply rejected.

The deployments have inflamed tensions with Democratic governors and city leaders, who say the presence of troops has stoked, rather than calmed, civil unrest.

Sauer’s filing with the high court Friday frames the dispute as one about the president’s powers to control the military, rather than a difference of opinion about law enforcement tactics. The emergency appeal makes 11 references to Trump as “commander in chief,” including by accusing the 7th Circuit of putting itself “in the untenable position of controlling the military chain of command and judicially micromanaging the exercise of the President’s Commander-in-Chief powers.”