I will not back down.

Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power.

What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism? His masked agents already are grabbing people off the street.

Separating children from their parents.

Creating fear.

Taking people for “how they look.”

This evening, President Trump is ordering 400 members of the Texas National Guard for deployments to Illinois, Oregon, and other locations within the United States. No officials from the federal government called me directly to discuss or coordinate. We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion. It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.

This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will. It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will. In the coming hours, the Trump Administration intends to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard.

Federal agents reporting to Secretary Noem have spent weeks snatching up families, scaring law-abiding residents, violating due process rights, and even detaining U.S. citizens.

They fail to focus on violent criminals and instead create panic in our communities. Secretary Noem should no longer be able to step foot inside the State of Illinois without any form of public accountability.

Last time when the secretary was here, she snuck in during the early morning to film social media videos and fled before sunrise.

My aunt Cindy Pritzker passed away on Saturday, and it leaves a hole in my heart.

She was not only a loving mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, a loyal friend to so many, and a committed Chicagoan through and through, but she also played an important role in my life. When my father died, my mother was ill, and I was just 12 years old, she and my uncle Jay took me in and made sure I felt safe and loved.

I would not be who I am today without her love, laughter, and kindness.

The root that tears apart your foundation begins as a seed of distrust, hate, and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe didn’t arrive overnight.

It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame. I'm watching alongside Illinoisans what's happening in our country right now with dread.

The authoritarian playbook is laid bare: they point to a group of people who don't look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

What comes next?

Today, I'm announcing a series of additional vaccine requirements aimed at protecting our most vulnerable residents, unvaccinated children and their families, and the ability of hospital systems to handle the #DeltaVariant surge in Illinois. Our current vaccination levels are not enough to blunt the ferocity of Delta variant hospitalization surges in some regions.
 
Hospital administrators are asking for more help to manage the sheer number of incoming patients – who are almost exclusively unvaccinated residents.

Today, it’s my privilege stand with the @IllinoisLBC to sign the Illinois Health Care and Human Services Reform Act into law.

This legislation advances a key belief of mine that is shared by millions of residents across Illinois: healthcare is a right, not a privilege. This legislation takes sweeping action:
▶️ Requires implicit medical bias training
▶️ Caps costs for blood sugar testing equipment
▶️ Builds out a Community Health Worker certification and training program
▶️ Launches new Anti-Racism Commission

This criminal justice package that I signed today helps make Illinoisans safer. We're advance our values in the law, because of the passion and push of the @IllinoisLBC, activists, and residents intent on leaving a better Illinois for all our children. It achieves three priorities that @LtGovStratton and I outlined:

1⃣ Transform the pretrial detention system, which hurts low-income people while the wealthy walk free

2⃣ Divert low-level drug crimes into substance treatment programs

3⃣ Reduce excessive stays in prison

Today, I'm signing HB 3653, The Safe-T Act, into law. This police reform and accountability and criminal justice legislation is a substantial step toward dismantling systemic racism by bringing us closer to true safety, true fairness and true justice.

Here are the facts: ✖️MYTH: The bill endangers communities and emboldens criminals.

✔️FACT: It moves Illinois from a pretrial detention system which prioritizes wealth to one that prioritizes public safety. It also improves access to substance use programs and modernizes sentencing laws.

It’s incumbent upon us not to forget the ways that COVID highlighted the inequities that low-income families have long faced – and the ways it’s accelerated the need for us to respond. One of the largest gaps – made even more significant in the pandemic – is the digital divide. Long before COVID-19, I set the goal of bringing broadband digital infrastructure to every corner of Illinois by 2024 through Connect Illinois, and I'm happy to report we are well on our way toward our goal of making broadband accessible for every Illinoisan.

The pandemic has caused every state in the nation to face tremendous revenue shortfalls, and Illinois is no exception.

The loss of state tax revenue from COVID-19 will cost us in excess of $4 billion over two fiscal years. I've worked with governors of both parties and spoken countless times with members of Congress to aggressively advocate for federal support to make up for the missing dollars that fund schools, pay caregivers and first responders & deliver essential services to residents in need.

The COVID-19 vaccine is a critical tool to safely reach the other side of the pandemic and begin Phase 5 of our Restore Illinois plan. Illinois will only distribute a vaccine that's deemed safe. Experts will review vaccines at the state level, in addition to reviews by @US_FDA. The @US_FDA is reviewing 2 COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020, w/ multiple others in the final stages of evaluation. The @pfizer vaccine recorded a 95% effective rate and is being considered on Dec 10. The @moderna_tx vaccine recorded a 94% rate and is being considered on Dec 17.

We need to re-center the conversation on what matters most: the health of our people, and the trends that are moving that health in a precarious direction.

Statewide, we have a real problem on our hands, and people’s lives hang in the balance. We are seeing substantially more confirmed cases right now than we ever saw in the spring. Today, we are at a new high, a seven day average of 5,043 new cases per day – closing in on twice what we saw in May.

From the beginning, we've used encouragement and education to get businesses to follow our public health guidance. But unfortunately, some business owners refuse or don’t want to follow the rules, thereby putting their patrons, the public and their workers in danger. That's why @ILStatePolice has ramped up random checks of businesses that are subject to mitigation rules to identify those that aren’t following them, and they’ve begun progressively taking more stringent action to hold scofflaws accountable.

Today, we stand to deliver a message to Peoria and beyond: cases, positivity, and hospitalizations are all rising around the state, and we have got to reverse the trend and slow the spread of the virus. Peoria’s Restore Illinois region, Region 2, is currently the best performing of our state’s 11 Restore regions – but a 7.2% positivity average is nothing to write home about, and that’s on top of a slight uptick in hospitalizations this month after leveling off in Aug. and Sept.

Over the weekend and into today, Southern Illinois has triggered our failsafe metric of a sustained average positivity rate above 8%. So starting Thursday, Region 5 will move to increased mitigations, including the temporary closure of indoor dining and indoor bar service. While we take action to save lives, we're working to save livelihoods as well. @IllinoisDCEO has distributed $24.6 million to Region 5 businesses and communities, and they'll receive priority consideration in the currently open round of BIG Grants, worth a total of $220 million.

To date, Illinois has had relative success in keeping this virus at bay, and we’re still doing better than many of our neighbors, but the latest data indicates a concerning direction. All 11 regions have seen an increase in positivity compared to where we were at last week’s update.

Statewide, our positivity rate has grown by more than one full percentage point in the last week alone, and in most regions, COVID-like hospital admissions have also increased.

Family gatherings, celebratory vacations and travel have all taken on a new meaning — and a new sense of concern — in a way we never expected a year ago.

But just as was true for Easter and Eid and the Fourth of July, this virus doesn’t make exceptions for traditions. Yesterday, the @CDCgov director reiterated a concern that epidemiologists have been expressing for a few weeks now: Small family gatherings are one of the most prevalent ways the virus is being transmitted. cnn.com/2020/10/14/hea…

I want to wish everyone a Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! While we're celebrating virtually this year, this an opportunity for our Latinx residents to celebrate traditions and for all of us to understand the work that lies ahead to build a state that truly serves all its people. The same obstacle that forces us to join together virtually – COVID-19 – has also underscored how far we have to go in that work, as Latino communities, as well as Black and Indigenous communities, have disproportionately shouldered the economic & health burdens of this pandemic.

Illinois now has the lowest infection rates among all our neighboring states and one of the lowest positivity rates in the country — but this virus hasn't gone away.

Here's our plan to preserve the progress we've made: www2.illinois.gov/Pages/news-ite… Unlike in late February, we now have significantly greater ability to test, trace & limit the spread of #covid19:

➡️ More than 33,000 tests per day, a record weekly average

➡️ Triple the number of contact tracers

➡️ 3% average positivity rate, down from a peak above 23%