President Donald Trump’s plan to add Chicago to the list of American cities under U.S. military occupation could cost almost $1.6 million per day, according to an expert estimate furnished exclusively to The Intercept.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Tuesday that members of the Texas National Guard are poised to deploy to Chicago. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office disputed this claim. Trump, when asked about his plans to send National Guard troops to Chicago, said, “We’re going in,” but added, “I didn’t say when.”

“In the coming days, we expect to see what’s playing out in L.A. and D.C. happen in Chicago,” Pritzker posted to Xon Tuesday. “These efforts are not about fighting crime or making communities safer. This is about Donald Trump testing his power and producing political drama to cover up his own corruption.”

An analysis by Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, found that if Trump deployed 3,000 National Guard troops to Chicago it would cost taxpayers around $1,590,000 per day. It’s the latest runaway expense — expected to climb into the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — connected to Trump’s efforts to turn the U.S. into a genuine police state.

“Deploying National Guard troops to Chicago is only going to add to taxpayers’ growing tab for these law-and-order optics,” said Stephen Ellis, the president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group. “Spending millions of dollars a day on troops milling about major American cities is a waste of their time and squanders precious resources.”

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers as law enforcement officers in colonial America. He warned that Trump intends to transform the National Guard into a presidential police force.

It remains unclear whether that judicial decision will be enforced. Given the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year decreeing that federal district courts cannot issue injunctions against federal policies nationwide, any decision on a Chicago occupation would have to come from a case of its own.

Trump has threatened to deploy troops to Chicago for weeks, following militarized crackdowns in Los Angeles in June and in Washington, D.C., last month. “I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in D.C. Chicago will be safe again, and soon,” Trump posted to TruthSocial on Tuesday, the same day that the federal judge deemed the California troop deployment illegal.

Trump signed a wide-ranging executive order last week directing the Defense Department to take a larger role in domestic law enforcement, as he threatens to deploy troops to numerous cities led by Democratic mayors in states with Democratic governors. Trump directed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to create “a specialized unit within the District of Columbia National Guard” to police “the Nation’s capital” and ready each state’s National Guard to assist in “quelling civil disturbances.” The order stated that the defense secretary “shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.”

Experts, including a federal judge, say that the increasing

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