Deployment of National Guard in DC through 2029 will cost taxpayers $1.4 million

The extension of the National Guard deployment in Washington, D.C. until January 2029 will cost roughly $1.4 billion, according to a Defense Department estimate provided to Congress, reported The Associated Press.

The figure offers a glimpse of how much taxpayer money will be spent on a deployment that has been criticized by local officials as an infringement of their city’s autonomy and by Democrats who say it has militarized the streets of nation’s capital at the public’s expense.

The cost estimate is for fiscal years 2027-2029 and came in response to questions from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and was provided to The Associated Press.

The deployment began last summer, when President Donald Trump issued an emergency order that launched a law enforcement surge in the city which the administration says was meant to fight crime. Hundreds of armed Guard troops have been deployed to city streets, supporting arrest operations but also helping with snow removal and carrying out beautification projects. This summer, as the city marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, their numbers surged to about 5,000.

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DOJ throttles dissent with law prohibiting "impeding" federal officials

 The videos have become commonplace. Federal officers wearing masks and bulletproof vests subdue a moped driver in the middle of a busy D.C. street. A 70-year-old protester in Chicago is pushed to the ground by an armed Border Patrol agent holding a riot gun. In Los Angeles, an agent shoves away a demonstrator, reported The Atlantic.

These videos capture the aggressive tactics of immigration officers under the second Trump administration. But they share something else, too. In each instance, following documented violence by federal officers toward protesters and immigrants, the Justice Department pressed charges—against the victim of that violence. Those three people, according to the DOJ, had all broken a law prohibiting “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials.

As the government continues to attempt mass deportations, that law, Section 111 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, has become a favored tool of the Justice Department for painting opposition to immigration enforcement as a corrosive, lawless force. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security often describe these cases in exaggerated language, even referring to defendants as “domestic terrorists,” though the law has nothing to do with terrorism. Across the country, prosecutors have charged case after case in federal court—one against a member of Congress; one against a congressional candidate; another against a bystander who happened to walk by a protest at the wrong time; and, most memorably, another against a Washington, D.C. man who hurled a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer, creating an instant symbol of protest for a city patrolled by the National Guard and other federal forces. 

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Creators: SCOTUS Wants to Hear More on Chicago Troop Deployment

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
November 4, 2025

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a significant case for the future of America's democracy. In the case of Trump v. Illinois, the Court will decide whether the president can federalize and deploy the National Guard in Illinois and Chicago.

Early last month, officials in Illinois, particularly in Chicago, filed a federal lawsuit to block the federal government's plan to deploy National Guard troops within the state. A federal district court judge in the Northern District of Illinois issued a temporary restraining order on Oct. 9, 2025, prohibiting the Trump administration from federalizing and deploying the National Guard within Illinois.

In Los Angeles and Portland, federal district judges issued similar orders blocking troop deployment after determining that protests did not rise to the level of a rebellion and that local law enforcement officials currently were capable of enforcing the law, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stayed the orders.

The Northern District of Illinois found the Trump administration had "made no attempt to rely on the regular forces before resorting to federalization of the National Guard," and it had not contended "(nor is there any evidence to suggest) that the president is incapable with the regular forces of executing the laws."

The Trump administration argued there is "no reason to believe that courts can, or should, second-guess the President's conclusion" that military force is needed to suppress an emergency. "(T)his case," the brief argues, falls in the heartland of unreviewable presidential "discretion." According to the SCOTUSBlog, even if judicial review is permissible, the government says, a court must be "highly deferential" to the president's decision.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's order finding insufficient evidence of a rebellion and that the administration was unlikely to succeed at trial. The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, requesting an emergency stay to allow the Illinois deployment to proceed. The high court did not stay the order but agreed to hear the case.

With a ruling pending, the Supreme Court requested supplemental briefs from both parties on a specific legal question: how the term "regular forces" in 10 U.S.C. 12406, the law relied on by the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops, should be interpreted and how that interpretation affects the application of the law.

Congress first delegated its constitutional power to activate state militias to the president through the Militia Act of 1792. Congress renewed that delegation of authority in the Militia Act of 1795. The 1795 Act was a precursor to the Militia Act of 1903. Like Section 12406, the 1795 Act contained a predicate "invasion" condition: "(W)henever the United States shall be invaded, or be in imminent danger of invasion ... , it shall be lawful for the president of the United States to call forth such number of the militia ... as he may judge necessary to repel such invasion."

According to Democracy Docket, "The (Supreme Court's) question appears to stem from an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court by Martin Lederman, a former DOJ deputy assistant attorney general who's now a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center."

Lederman argued that "regular forces" does not refer to federal law enforcement — ICE, FBI, border patrol— but rather the armed forces within the "Department of War," formerly the Department of Defense.

Lederman noted, according to Democracy Docket, that throughout U.S. history, and specific legal history of 10 U.S.C. 12406, "regular" was often used as a shorthand for the Army — "the regulars" — as opposed to the state militias that evolved into today's National Guard.

The argument goes, since the Trump administration never sent members of the armed forces to assist ICE in Chicago, we do not know if the administration could determine that it was unable to execute federal law with "regular forces" as required by Section 12406 and "therefore lacked the authority to federalize members of the Illinois Guard, Lederman asserted."

With the Supreme Court's new briefing schedule, we can expect a decision as soon as the end of the month.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Troops deployed to Portland in defiance of Court Order

The Trump administration briefly deployed Oregon National Guard soldiers to Portland earlier this month, hours after a Federal District Court judge had ordered any such deployment blocked, the government revealed, according to The new York Times.

The District Court judge, Karin Immergut, raised the possibility that the deployment, however brief, had put the administration in contempt of court as she began a trial to determine whether to lift a temporary restraining order, or T.R.O., on troop deployments or make it permanent.

“We’ll discuss later whether that’s contempt and a direct violation of my T.R.O.,” Judge Immergut told a Justice Department lawyer after learning of the deployment.

President Trump wants to send National Guard troops to protect the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, which has been the site of daily protests for more than four months. Oregon and the city of Portland have sued to stop that deployment, and a trial in the case began Wednesday.

But Judge Immergut imposed temporary restraining orders first on the use of Oregon National Guard soldiers beginning at 3:40 p.m. on Oct. 4, then on all guard troops the next day.

Before the trial began Wednesday morning, a Justice Department lawyer, Jean Lin, told Judge Immergut that Oregon soldiers under federal control were sent to Portland between 11 p.m. on Oct. 4 and 2 a.m. on Oct. 5. Ms. Lin did not say how many soldiers were sent or what they did at the ICE building.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Northern Command, which oversees the federalized National Guard soldiers, said military officials were looking into news of the brief deployment. Emails submitted as evidence in the case show a nine-person advance team from the Oregon National Guard, part of 200 Guard troops federalized by the Department of Defense, reported working at the ICE facility after the temporary restraining order was filed.

The issue marked the second time this week that the Justice Department had to come clean before judges considering Mr. Trump’s planned deployment in Portland. Federal lawyers have said the National Guard was needed in Portland because the federal government had exhausted existing resources, even after moving Federal Protective Service officers and other law enforcement agents with other federal agencies to Portland from other parts of the country.

But in a filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Monday, U.S. attorneys acknowledged that they overstated the number of federal agents reassigned to Oregon.

In a brief filed before an Oct. 20 appeals court hearing, the government said that 115 Federal Protective Service officers from other parts of the country had been surged as a group to the ICE building and stated that “it is undisputed that nearly a quarter of the agency’s entire F.P.S. capacity had to be redirected over a relatively short period to a single location in one medium-sized American city due to the unrest there.”

But in a letter to the appeals court on Monday, a federal lawyer said 86 F.P.S. officers were actually sent to Portland over the summer, including some who were deployed multiple times. The lawyer also noted that the reference to “nearly a quarter” of the federal agency’s capacity being sent to Oregon was simply incorrect.

What the federal government meant to report, the lawyer wrote, was that 13 percent of the agency’s inspectors — who are responsible for crisis response, investigations and security assessments at federal buildings — had been deployed to Portland over the course of the summer.

On Wednesday, in the first day of what’s expected to be a three-day trial, lawyers for the city of Portland and the state of Oregon argued that the federal response to protests at the Portland ICE facility has been disorganized and needlessly violent.

“The court will hear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have staffing challenges,” Scott Kennedy, a senior assistant attorney general for Oregon, told the judge. “But that has nothing to do with Portland.”

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Can the president unilaterally deploy federal troops in the U.S.?

The Supreme Court is poised to decide a potentially momentous question for U.S. democracy: can the president unilaterally deploy federal troops on U.S. soil over the objections of state governors? In Trump v. Illinois, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether to issue a stay of a district court’s injunction of the deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago, reported Just Security. The government’s brief argues there is “no reason to believe that courts can, or should, second guess the President’s conclusion” that military force is needed to suppress an emergency. “[T]his case,” the brief argues, falls in the heartland of unreviewable presidential “discretion.” Even if judicial review is permissible, the government says, a court must be “highly deferential” to the President’s decision.

The Government’s position cannot withstand even rudimentary analysis. This is because the president’s authority is dramatically weaker when deploying troops domestically than it is when fighting enemies overseas.

Power Over the Military is not Exclusive to the President

The government’s interpretation suggests that a president may deploy military forces anywhere in the United States for any reason, and that courts would have no authority to determine its legality. This assertion runs counter to U.S. history, the structure of powers related to the military in the U.S. Constitution, and the theory of checks and balances.

The Framers and the generation that fought the American Revolution were well aware of the dangers of domestic use of the military. Among the grievances enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, abuse of the military was persistent theme: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our Legislature,” and “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.” The Third Amendment to the Constitution reflects these concerns in its prohibition on quartering soldiers in civilian homes during times of peace without legislation.

For this and other reasons, the Framers wisely disaggregated the military power horizontally across the three branches of the federal government, as well as vertically between the states and the federal government. They gave Congress the unique power to declare war and appropriate funds for military exploits, along with a series of other war-related powers. They gave the executive branch the authority to command troops in battle. They gave the judiciary the ability to arbitrate disputes among the branches and to protect individual rights. They left to the various states the power to call forth a militia to protect the people within their particular jurisdictions.

In addition to the structural constitutional dissipation of control over the military, statutes like the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act forbid the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Congress similarly banned the use of troops at polls around the same time. Even the Insurrection Act, which champions of presidential power cite as an ace-up-the-president’s sleeve, says that the president’s power to use the militia or armed forces is, among other purposes, to protect against the deprivation “of a right, privilege, immunity or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law” when the state is unable to protect such rights of the people (emphasis added).

In other words, the power of the president to use the military in times of emergency is arguably tethered to the need to protect the constitutional rights of the people. This is consistent with the president’s articulated duty under Article II of the Constitution to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed.”

No Cause for Deference

The claim of extreme judicial deference to the president rests on a false equivalence of foreign and domestic use of the military. There is plenty of case law that supports broad deference for presidential determinations regarding foreign troop deployments. Of course, federal judges have  been reluctant in our more recent history to second guess the decision to use the military to defend the United States against foreign enemies, or to micromanage tactical decisions during the course of a war. But when the president seeks to deploy the U.S. armed forces into American streets, the constitutional rights of Americans are potentially under threat, and courts are therefore duty-bound to exercise the utmost vigilance.

It is no accident that President Donald Trump is sending military forces into places in which there are some displays of opposition to his policies, based on an unsubstantiated and politically-motivated claim that these pose a threat to the country. It is no coincidence that in the midst of these deployments, he summoned every U.S. General from around the world to Washington to inform them that they need to focus on “the enemy within,” and urged them to use American cities as training grounds for the use of military force.

History tells us that deploying the military against one’s own people is the sine qua non of an authoritarian state, and represents the corruption of the military to solidify power. Be it Jews or other religious minorities, immigrants, infidels, suspected criminals, or alleged traitors, the “strong” leader convinces the population that these “others” are the true threat to national security and that therefore a military response is needed. Extreme deference to the president’s domestic use of the military abdicates the fundamental duty of courts to closely examine threats to fundamental constitutional rights of free speech and assembly that are the bedrock of a democracy.

The United States military swears an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. The oath of office of military officers, unlike that of enlisted servicemembers, contains no explicit commitment to follow presidential orders. Following military orders is obligatory, but only insofar as such orders are lawful. The same was true in Nazi Germany until August 2, 1934, when, following the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, the oath to follow the Weimar Constitution was replaced with an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Following that date, the German military was under the control of the Führer, sealing the death of German democracy until well after the end of the Second World War. More recently, two weeks ago in Madagascar, the civilian government was toppled by a military coup, the latest in a series of African countries to lose civilian control of the government—including military takeovers in Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan, and Burkina Faso, not to mention those in other regions, including Myanmar.

If the Supreme Court decides to grant certiorari in the Illinois case or in a similar case involving use of the National Guard, such as the Oregon or California cases, the question of deference to presidential authority as Commander-in-Chief will be front and center. The government will once again argue that there is no basis for federal courts to second-guess presidential decisions regarding the deployment of U.S. troops, and that under Article II such second-guessing would be a violation of the separation of powers. Yet this appeal to presidential deference would ignore the basic distribution of military powers in both constitutional and statutory form that has existed for the entirety of U.S. history.

No case holds that the courts are powerless to prevent an illegal deployment of troops within the United States. How could it? Such a holding would render separation of powers meaningless and destroy the judiciary’s role as a bulwark against tyranny. The Court must remember its statement from 1972 in Laird v. Tatum:

“[T]here is nothing in our Nation’s history or in this Court’s decided cases… that can properly be seen as giving any indication that actual or threatened injury by reason of unlawful activities of the military would go unnoticed or unremedied.”

Military rule and military coups have been fanciful, far-off threats in the United States, but President Trump has now made this threat real in his war against “the enemy within.” The Supreme Court must not shirk its obligation to ensure that presidents cannot conscript the military in an effort to undermine democracy.

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Judge: Trump administration’s 'perception of events' around Chicago 'are simply unreliable'

For U.S. District Judge April Perry, it all came down to credibility.

Should she believe local law enforcement officials, who say they have protests over President Donald Trump’s immigration campaign well in hand? Or Trump, whose aides claim a “brazen new form of hostility” targeting federal law enforcement had broken out in Illinois?

In the end, Perry concluded the Trump administration’s “perception of events” around Chicago “are simply unreliable.” She’d seen “no credible evidence that there is danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois,” nor that Trump “is unable … to execute the laws of the United States,” reported the Chicago Sun-Times.

And after a historic hearing that lasted more than three hours at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse, the judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from “ordering the federalization and deployment of the National Guard of the United States within Illinois.”

Perry ruled orally from the bench and promised a written opinion Friday. The order is effective for two weeks, and Perry set a hearing for Oct. 22 to determine whether it should be extended for two more. Trump’s lawyers are sure to appeal in the meantime.

Gov. JB Pritzker reacted in a statement, saying, “Donald Trump is not a king — and his administration is not above the law.

“Today, the court confirmed what we all know: There is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois. And no place for the National Guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago.”

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul told reporters after court that “this is an important decision not just for the state of Illinois, but for the entire country.

“The question of state sovereignty was addressed in this decision. The question of whether or not the president of the United States should have unfettered authority to militarize our cities was answered today,” Raoul said.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said Perry “established that the Trump administration is unreliable. They lie, misrepresent, and put people in danger.”

But White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson insisted that Trump “exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets” amid “ongoing violent riots and lawlessness, that local leaders like Pritzker have refused to step in to quell.

“President Trump will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities and we expect to be vindicated by a higher court,” Jackson said.

The hearing amounted to one of the biggest legal showdowns yet between Trump and Illinois’ Democratic leaders including Pritzker as well as Raoul and Johnson, who both watched portions of Thursday’s hearing from the courtroom gallery.

It also took on national significance as Trump pushes for deployment in cities long known to be Democratic strongholds. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which considers cases from western states, also heard arguments Thursday over deployment in Oregon.

In crafting her scathing ruling, Perry turned to recent events in the same federal courthouse in which she once served as a prosecutor. In recent days it has seen grand jurors reject criminal charges brought by a U.S. attorney’s office long revered for its credibility, and a judge rule against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security when it comes to the treatment of protesters.

“In the last 48 hours, in four separate, unrelated legal decisions from different neutral parties, they all cast significant doubt on DHS’ credibility and assessment of what is happening on the streets of Chicago,” Perry said.

However, about 200 troops from Texas and 14 from California had already started arriving earlier this week, joining about 300 federalized Illinois National Guard troops. Texas National Guard members were spotted Thursday morning at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview.

Asked after court how Perry’s ruling affects those troops, Raoul said, “There’s a temporary restraining order that they should not be active within the state of Illinois.”

When asked if he’d direct them to leave, Raoul said it’s up to the Trump administration “to abide by the judge’s order.”

Earlier Thursday, Perry spent 80 minutes interrogating Eric Hamilton, the Justice Department lawyer who’s been defending deployment of National Guard troops across the country. He said the “brazen new form of hostility” toward the feds comes not from protesters, but “violent resistance to duly enacted immigration laws.”

Still, Perry told him there had been peace outside the Broadview ICE facility for 19 years, until federal border agents showed up this summer. She asked him if it mattered, under the law, if Trump’s claimed inability to execute federal law was by his “own provocation.”

Hamilton told her it did not.

“The fact still remains,” Hamilton told the judge, “that we are seeing sustained violence against federal personnel and property in Illinois.”

Perry questioned Hamilton about the treatment of protesters by federal agents and about the accuracy of a claim that the National Guard had been called upon to protect the Dirksen Federal Courthouse. It had not.

She tested the boundaries of Hamilton’s arguments, asked whether she should take Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks and social media posts into account, and said she struggled with Hamilton’s reluctance to set clear limits on the deployment.

“You have not committed that they are only going to be deployed at federal property or in support of immigration and customs enforcement,” Perry told Hamilton. “I am very much struggling to figure out where this would ever stop.”

This all thrust Perry onto the national stage 11 months after joining the bench. Former President Joe Biden once nominated her to be Chicago’s top federal prosecutor. That nomination was blocked by then-U.S. Sen. JD Vance, who is now Trump’s vice president.

Biden then nominated her to be a judge.

Despite the gravity of the moment, Perry managed to lighten the mood at times with quips like “riddle me this,” talk of people doing things for “funsies” and comparing claims of minor vandalism at Broadview’s immigration facility to a “Carrie Underwood song.”

She also took a moment to acknowledge the threats being leveled toward public officials everywhere.

“Mine started about 10 minutes after I got this case,” Perry said.

Arguments revolved around a federal law that allows the president to call into federal service members of the National Guard of any state if there is an invasion or rebellion — or if the president is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

Perry made reference to a grand jury’s so-called “no bill,” in which it refused prosecutors’ request for an indictment. She asked Hamilton about a claim in one filing about two people who had been arrested outside the Broadview facility on Sept. 27 “armed with loaded handguns.”

“Are these the guns that were seized from Ray Collins and Jocelyne Robledo?” Perry asked. She added that “those were the two people who were no-billed by the grand jury.”

Hamilton told the judge, “I have no idea.”

The couple had been carrying the weapons lawfully.

The fact that the Trump administration would point to such a case “indicates to me a certain lack of credibility,” Perry said.

She also asked Hamilton whether the troops will be “solving crime in Chicago?” Hamilton said they would, to an extent, through a mission to protect ICE facilities and personnel.

Perry later questioned Illinois attorney Christopher Wells for only 15 minutes. She pressed Wells on whether Trump actually owes an explanation to the state, or even to her, for why he decided to deploy the troops.

Perry also noted that the state sought an order blocking the deployment of military troops in general, in addition to the National Guard. She asked Wells if there’s “any reason to believe that’s about to happen?”

“Specifically?” she asked. “Other than just your gut?”

“The gut is a powerful instinct in this instance,” Wells told her.

“Well, I need evidence,” Perry retorted.

Later, during closing arguments, Wells cited a separate appellate court ruling on the matter that said courts have to be “highly deferential” to the president when it comes to the law in question.

He also said the ruling mentions “public virtue.”

“This case is replete with evidence of bad faith, of an abandonment of public virtue,” he said. “Of a lack of honest devotion to the public interest and of a grave risk of usurpation or wanton tyranny.”

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Trump administration threatens to invoke Insurrection Act

White House officials have held increasingly serious discussions in recent days about President Donald Trump’s invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used 19th century law that gives the president the power to deploy active-duty troops inside the United States for law enforcement purposes, five people with knowledge of the talks told NBC News.

Trump has sought to deploy National Guard troops in several major cities — including Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon — saying they are needed to reduce crime and protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from protesters. Critics have said the Trump administration is exaggerating issues in those cities.

A decision to invoke the act is not expected to be imminent, a senior administration official said. Were it to happen, it would be a notable escalation. The guard is currently deployed in limited support roles since active-duty members of the military are forbidden from conducting civilian law enforcement actions, such as conducting searches and making arrests. But the Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy troops inside the United States for that purpose.

Trump’s plans to deploy the National Guard have occasionally hit legal hurdles. A federal judge in Oregon on Sunday blocked him from sending guard members from any state to Portland. The next day, Trump said publicly that he would invoke the Insurrection Act “if it was necessary.”

“If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that,” Trump said. As of now, he said, it has not been needed.

Talk inside the White House about invoking the act has ebbed and flowed since Trump took office again in January, said the five people, who include the senior administration official, two people familiar with the discussions and two people close to the White House.

But the debate inside the administration has shifted recently, from whether it makes sense to invoke the act to more deeply exploring how and when it might be invoked, both people close to the White House said.

Administration officials have drafted legal defenses and various options for invoking the act, two of the people said.

But the current, broad consensus among Trump’s aides has been to exhaust all other options before taking that step, the senior administration official and one of the people close to the White House said.

The person close to the White House described the process as working its way up “an escalatory ladder.”

Asked about discussions regarding invoking the Insurrection Act, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement: “The Trump administration is committed to restoring law and order in American cities that are plagued by violence due to Democrat mismanagement. And President Trump will not stand by while violent rioters attack federal law enforcement officers. The administration will work to protect federal assets and officers while making American cities safe again.”

The act gives the president broad discretion regarding its invocation. It can be invoked at the request of a state or when the president determines that conditions like “unlawful obstructions,” “rebellion” or “insurrection” have made it difficult to enforce the law. During the Civil Rights era, three presidents — Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson — used the act to protect activists or enforce court orders mandating desegregation. It was last used, at the request of California’s governor, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

The governors of Oregon and Illinois both oppose sending troops to their states. There are no riots, and authorities there are not defying court orders.

The White House expects that any potential invocation of the act would be met with swift legal challenges and ultimately land at the Supreme Court.

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Trump appointed judge stops deployment of California National Guard to Oregon

By Sunday night, a second temporary restraining order was issued in the case challenging the Trump’s administration’s National Guard deployment in Oregon. The new order bars the Trump administration from sending any National Guard federalized under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to Oregon from any state or D.C. The move followed actions by the Trump administration overnight to send members of the California National Guard to Oregon and plans to do so as to the Texas National Guard as well, reported LawDork.

At a hastily called hearing on Sunday night, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut harshly questioned the Justice Department lawyer before her, Eric Hamilton, asking him — while noting that he is an officer of the court — “Do you believe this is appropriate way to deal with my order?”

Issuing the second TRO in as many days in the case, Immergut called the Trump administration’s actions in apparent response to her first order “in direct contravention” of it.

Read much more on the Sunday night developments in this thread from me over at Bluesky.]

Highlighting that America’s “historical tradition” makes clear that “this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut on Saturday issued an order temporarily blocking President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy the National Guard in Portland, Oregon.

It was a blunt 31-page opinion issued by a judge Trump appointed to the bench in his first term in office declaring that Trump’s effort to federalize Oregon National Guard troops likely “exceeded his statutory authority” and likely violated the Tenth Amendment.

Immergut issued the opinion and order just one day after hearing arguments in the case, which was brought by both Oregon and Portland, and just two days after the case was reassigned to her. Immergut, who took her seat on the bench in 2019, is presiding over the case because Justice Department lawyers successfully asked the judge initially assigned to the case to recuse himself.

The Trump administration officials and agencies being sued “have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation,” Immergut wrote in concluding her opinion.

Under the temporary restraining order, which lasts through the end of the day on October 18, the Trump administration is “temporarily enjoined from implementing” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s September 28 memorandum federalizing the Oregon National Guard and ordering their deployment to Portland.

Before the end of the day Saturday, the Justice Department had filed a notice that it was appealing the TRO.1

At the same time, Stephen Miller — Trump’s deputy chief of staff and one of the key voices behind Trump’s immigration policies — was lashing out, referring to Immergut’s order as “[l]egal insurrection” and, by doing so, providing yet more evidence to be used in this and other cases.

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Sending the Texas National Guard to Chicago is unconstitutional

 Why sending the Texas National Guard to Chicago is unconstitutional, from Richard Primus on Politico.

The Supreme Court’s recognition of that principle is at least as old as its 1819 decision in the landmark case of McCulloch v. Maryland. The question in McCulloch was whether Maryland could tax a branch of the Bank of the United States, located within Maryland. The Bank was a controversial institution — opponents like Thomas Jefferson argued it gave the federal government too much power — and Maryland didn’t like it much. So the Maryland legislature cleverly wrote a statute imposing a prohibitively high tax on all banks doing business in the state without charters of incorporation granted by Maryland’s own legislature. At the time, there was precisely one such bank: the Bank of the United States, which was chartered not by Maryland but by Congress. And in one of the most influential judicial opinions in American history, Chief Justice John Marshall held the tax unconstitutional.

As Marshall explained, a fundamental problem with Maryland’s tax was the misalignment between the people who imposed it and the people who had to pay it. When the Maryland legislature taxes Marylanders, it will keep the tax burden reasonable, because Maryland taxpayers can vote their legislators out otherwise. That’s why states can be trusted with the power to tax their own. But the people of State A would never authorize the legislature of State B to tax them, because they’d have no mechanism for holding State B’s lawmakers accountable for abuses of the power. (Taxation without representation, as someone once said, is tyranny.) And for a single state to tax the Bank of the United States would, in effect, be for that state to tax the people of all the other states, because the costs incurred by the Bank of the United States would be borne by the entire American public. By the same token, Marshall noted that Maryland could collect a tax from the Bank of the United States if it were a tax imposed uniformly on all banks, or all businesses, in the state of Maryland: The votes of other taxpayers, exercised to protect themselves from excessive taxation, would have the effect of protecting the Bank of the United States, too. What Maryland couldn’t do was impose a cost specially or disproportionately on people who could not hold Maryland’s lawmakers to account.

Using military personnel for domestic law enforcement is dangerous and fraught, and any political leader who does it should be held strictly accountable for the consequences. Given the absence of any real need for militarized law enforcement in Chicago, it would be a grave abuse of power for the president to send any troops there on a law-enforcement pretext — as it was when he mobilized the National Guard for law enforcement in Washington, D.C. But for more than one reason, that mobilization in D.C. is easier to defend constitutionally than sending the Texas National Guard to Chicago would be. Justifiably or not, constitutional law treats all of D.C. as an exception to the McCulloch principle: The people of D.C. are, as a general matter, subject to a lawmaking authority — Congress — that they play no part in electing. (That’s why some D.C. license plates bear the protest slogan, “Taxation Without Representation.”) But regardless of whether that exception is justified in D.C., it has absolutely no application in Illinois. Like Nebraskans and Pennsylvanians and Kansans, Illinoisians are constitutionally entitled to be constituents of whatever body governs them.

Any military force is likely to behave with less restraint toward a population to which its leaders are not responsible than toward a population to which its leaders must answer democratically. If the Texas National Guard behaves poorly in Chicago, the locals have no electoral mechanism for holding Texas authorities to account. The governor of Texas never appears on any ballot in Illinois. He has nothing to fear, politically, from the people his National Guard will police. Surely a militarization at the hands of a non-responsible power is no less tyrannical, and no more constitutional, than a tax imposed by one.

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CREATORS: Trump Administration Breathes Life Into Lost Cause of the Confederacy

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
September 2, 2025

The Trump administration is talking about making the nation's capital and places like California and Chicago safe again — reminiscent of the campaign's mantra that evolved into an acronym that represents a political movement MAGA, Make American Great Again.

At the same time, President Donald Trump's acolytes are using the criminal justice system to get even with his political opponents. The FBI raided the home of former national security adviser John Bolton.

According to a carefully calculated leak to The New York Post, Bolton — a major critic of Trump — had the search of his home personally authorized by FBI director Kash Patel. Greg Sargent recently wrote in The New Republic, "Patel had openly declared in 2023 that 'the conspirators,' that is enemies of Trump and MAGA, must be prosecuted, and also that more loyalists with the resolve to see this through would be recruited to carry this out."

The Department of Justice appears to be Trump's personal enforcers. Patel's hit list is common knowledge, and his open involvement in the investigation of Bolten is meant to send a message to Trump's critics. This sounds more like the Mob — who decades ago federal prosecutors successfully crushed — than the Department of Justice.

At the same time, the Trump administration is doubling down on its crime crackdown in major cities. Trump has long painted major U.S. cities as unsafe and lawless. This is nothing new. During 2017 inaugural address, Trump spoke of "American carnage" in urban areas, pointing to crime and poverty, particularly in places led by Democrats.

The focus has not changed. Even though, cities like Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago have been the focus of Trump's wrath, Southern cities like Memphis and Jackson, Mississippi have been ignored.

Not only is it a lie to say that cities like Chicago are "a mess" and dubious at best to suggest that the National Guard needs activated to clean up the mess — the rationale for deploying the National Guard is not about making cities safe it is about creating a "police state."

It has long been a staple of American governance that local and state law enforcement is to be conducted by civilians, not the military.

Ordinarily, a state's governor controls its National Guard. Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president can "federalize" the National Guard, placing them under federal control and funding for federal missions like overseas deployments or suppressing domestic insurrections.

Trump invoked this authority first in Los Angles in June during immigrations protests. He cited "incidents of violence and disorder" tied to ICE operations. According to Katie Couric Media, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials challenged the deployment, "arguing the order violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits U.S. troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. A federal judge agreed, but the ruling was ultimately put on hold by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."

The Posse Comitatus Act was meant to prevent the federal government from using the military as a domestic police force after Reconstruction.

This struggle is again evolving into a fight between red states and blue states — code for rural v. urban. While Los Angeles, Washington, DC and soon Chicago are under siege, there are plans to mobilize up to 1,700 National Guard troops from 19 Republican-controlled states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia and Texas.

This is a modern-day Reconstruction. Major urban areas being occupied by troops from predominately southern states. The Trump administration is breathing life into the lost cause of the Confederacy.

As Ty Seidule, professor emeritus at West Point, described in his book, "Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause," the south rebelled against the north because "(T)he Confederate States of America ... refused to accept the results of a democratic election in 1860."

Sound familiar?

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino 

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Trump's deployment of federal troops to California illegal

The Trump administration illegally used thousands of military troops in Southern California, a federal judge said. in a ruling that accused the president of effectively turning nearly 5,000 Marines and National Guard soldiers into a national police force, reported The New York Times.

The ruling, by Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, came more than two months into a contentious deployment that was set off by immigration protests in June and has since dwindled to about 300 National Guard soldiers. Judge Breyer placed his injunction on hold for 10 days.

The judge found that President Trump’s deployment had exceeded the limits of federal laws that generally prohibit the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

The decision was a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a possible presidential candidate who filed the lawsuit and who has rebuked Mr. Trump for sending the military into Los Angeles. But the Justice Department, which defended the Trump administration in the lawsuit, is expected to appeal the decision and could receive more favorable consideration from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The ruling was the latest in a series of judicial battles over claims of expansive unilateral powers by the administration. Mr. Trump and administration officials have deported people without due process, imposed widespread and unpopular tariffs and rolled back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers that have been disputed in federal court.

The president also declared crime in Washington, D.C., to be an emergency in order to send federal troops there in August, although crime rates in the nation’s capital have actually been falling and local officials said the deployment was not needed. Since then, Mr. Trump has publicly mused about sending the National Guard into other Democratic-led cities. Federal law gives the White House more latitude to conduct local law enforcement in the District of Columbia than in the states.

The decision on Tuesday arose from the president’s deployment this summer of about 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, where demonstrations had erupted over immigration raids.

In an executive order that was issued on June 7 over the objections of Mr. Newsom, who normally controls the state’s National Guard troops, the president wrote that “violent protests” had grown into “a form of rebellion,” and that the military was needed to “temporarily protect” federal agents and property.

City officials in Los Angeles vehemently disputed the president’s justification, noting that the police had been capably handling the protests, which were mostly confined to a few blocks in downtown Los Angeles near government buildings.

The White House, the officials said, had unnecessarily inflamed local outrage by sending masked and armed immigration agents into workplaces in a liberal city where immigrants make up roughly a third of the population, and then had used the ensuing demonstrations as a pretext to send in the military.

A 19th-century law, the Posse Comitatus Act, generally prohibits the use of the U.S. military for domestic civilian law enforcement, absent an insurrection. But the president did not invoke the Insurrection Act. Rather, he argued that an overarching federal law, Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which lays out the role of the armed forces, allowed him to commandeer National Guard units to execute federal law.

The administration contended that the troops were needed in California for federal agents to do their jobs because protesters were impeding their efforts. California officials quickly challenged the deployment, and Judge Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, temporarily blocked it in June.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ruled that the judge had erred. The protests had been violent enough, they found, that the president could at least make an argument for deployment, and legal precedent required them to give “a great level of deference” to the president in weighing the facts underlying his executive order.

The decision allowed the troops to remain under the president’s control, pending a decision on a secondary request by the state to restrict how the troops could be used. Lawyers for California demanded that the military be limited, at most, to guarding federal buildings, and the appeals court determined that the administration’s use of the troops remained subject to judicial review.

By mid-June, the protests in Los Angeles had largely ended, but instead of releasing the troops, the administration kept them on duty in a sprawling tent city near Long Beach. The administration sent soldiers and Marines out with federal agents executing search and arrest warrants and conducting immigration raids.

Mr. Newsom challenged the administration’s claim that the troops were not conducting law enforcement. During a three-day hearing in August before Judge Breyer’s order, lawyers for California showed numerous photographs of armed National Guard troops engaged in what appeared to be police work — forming security perimeters around cannabis farms and workplaces where raids were being conducted, or wielding batons behind police tape as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents handcuffed people.

In at least two instances, the state’s lawyers noted, members of the deployment briefly detained people. One occasion was early in the deployment in Carpinteria, when National Guard troops prevented a protester from entering an area where a raid was in progress. The other episode occurred later, when Marines held a man for about a half-hour after he tried to enter a Los Angeles federal building.

A field agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles testified that, for at least the first month of the deployment, about 75 percent of ICE operations involved federalized troops.

Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, a 33-year Army veteran who led the task force overseeing the Los Angeles deployment, testified that troops took great care not to cross the line into law enforcement. But the line was fraught.

The general testified at length, for example, about a mission, code-named Operation Excalibur, in which federal immigration agents on foot and on horseback marched through MacArthur Park, a Los Angeles landmark in a neighborhood now largely home to immigrant families with low incomes.

General Sherman said the administration initially wanted to conduct the mission on Father’s Day and to stage troops and military equipment in the middle of the park in a “show of presence,” but he objected. The placement of troops, he said, seemed to inappropriately involve the military in what appeared to be a risky and low-value operation.

Only after federal officials planned to reposition the troops outside the park did he recommend approval. But when he expressed his concerns, he said, Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol chief who is overseeing the federal immigration crackdown in Southern California, questioned his loyalty to the country.

The mission, which General Sherman said was ultimately approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was postponed twice before taking place on July 7. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles condemned it as a callous act of political theater that terrified children in the park as well as social workers who were providing services to homeless people.

Scores of National Guard troops drove to the area and stayed for about 20 minutes in case trouble erupted, the general testified, but never left their trucks.

Trump administration lawyers argued that California’s lawsuit was moot because the Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute that cannot be enforced with a civil lawsuit.

Moreover, even absent an insurrection, Eric Hamilton of the Justice Department argued, presidents have the inherent power to deploy the military to protect federal property and employees.

The Justice Department lawyers defended how the troops were used during the deployment, saying they violated no law and served a “purely protective function” for federal agents who were facing daily assaults from protesters.

Judge Breyer sharply pushed back, questioning how anyone could limit the power of the White House if the president could legally dispatch the military to enforce any conceivable federal function.

Normally, he noted, local law enforcement officers protect public employees going about their duty. Shouldn’t the president have to prove that a threat exists and rises to a specific threshold in order to summon the military?

“Where are the limits?” Judge Breyer repeatedly asked.

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Trump escalates federal intervention in DC, seizes Union Station from Amtrak

The Trump administration announced  it had seized control of Washington’s Union Station from Amtrak, escalating federal intervention in the nation’s capital as National Guard troops patrol city streets, according to Jurist News.

The takeover was announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who claimed the goal was to ensure sanitary conditions and the absence of unhoused individuals from the busy transportation hub.

Critics have slammed the move as the latest instance of the Administration’s federalization of DC, particularly as it comes on the heels of Trump’s establishment of a “special unit” of the National Guard to address crime in the nation’s capital. Prior to that, Trump issued an executive order to place DC’s police force under federal control. One commentator said that “the federal surge of officers in DC and deployment of national guardsmen on our streets are dangerous, unnecessary, and an affront to Home Rule.” Another blatantly warned that “DC is under siege.”

While DC mayor Muriel Bowser said the heightened presence of federal officers has lowered crime, she said that the presence of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and National Guard members “is not working.” Moreover, she noted the importance of federal officers’ working in tandem with local law enforcement:

The difference between this period, this 20 day period of this federal surge, and last year, represents an 87% reduction in carjackings in Washington DC [but] what we want is local control of our public safety ecosystem… we want federal officers that work in coordination with us, DEA, ATF, FBI, who…work with us on major crime issues all the time. And our officers are familiar with working with them, and they have been helpful in the field.

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Autocracy 101: Martial law by any other name . . .

 President Trump directed the Defense Department to take a larger role in domestic law enforcement, including by “quelling civil disturbances,” as he threatens to broaden deployments of the National Guard in cities run by his political enemies, reported The New York Times.

The executive order, released by the White House on Monday morning, also formalizes the creation of specially trained National Guard units in the District of Columbia and all 50 states that can be mobilized quickly for “ensuring the public safety and order.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions about the order, which came two weeks after Mr. Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the District of Columbia and deployed National Guard troops to the nation’s capital, over the objections of local officials who have said crime in the city is at its lowest level in decades.

In a statement, the White House said the president was ordering “common-sense measures to ensure long-term safety of our nation’s capital.”

The statement said the executive order would increase “participation across agencies” in enabling more specially trained personnel to deliver on Mr. Trump’s campaign promise and “constitutional obligation to make D.C. safe and beautiful again.”

Mr. Trump has mused openly about expanding the deployments to other cities, particularly Democratic strongholds like New York, Chicago and Baltimore, saying crime there is out of control. On Monday, Mr. Trump said he could “solve” crime in Chicago in a week, though he hedged about whether he planned to move ahead with sending troops there.

While Guard troops have been temporarily mobilized by governors in the past to respond to natural disasters and occasionally for civil unrest, the order appears to carve out a much larger domestic role for the National Guard.

According to government documents, Guard troops can be mobilized for duty within a state or territory by a governor in response to “a crisis or a natural disaster, or in support of special events when local, tribal and state capabilities are overwhelmed, exhausted or unavailable.” The president can also federalize the Guard himself, as Mr. Trump did in deploying members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles in June — over the objections of the state’s governor.

Monday’s order appears to create a force of Guard soldiers that could be called out by the White House regardless of whether state and local law enforcement are available and able to handle civil disturbances, raising significant legal questions.

“Quelling civil disturbances is the responsibility of state and local law enforcement except in the most extreme instances,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. “Having soldiers police protests, as this order envisions, threatens fundamental liberties and public safety, and it violates a centuries-old principle against involving the military in domestic law enforcement.”

Under an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, it is normally illegal to use federal troops on domestic soil for policing purposes. But Mr. Trump, in federalizing the California Guard, invoked a statute, Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, that allows him to call National Guard members and units into federal service under certain circumstances, including during a rebellion against the authority of the federal government.

In California, where Mr. Trump deployed roughly 4,000 members of the National Guard to Los Angeles, citing protests over immigration raids, state officials opened a legal challenge to the deployment, which a federal judge had ruled to be illegal before an appeals court blocked the ruling.

The order also directs a task force in Washington led by a White House adviser, Stephen Miller, to create an online portal for “Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” to apply to join federal agents in enforcing Mr. Trump’s “crime emergency” order in the District of Columbia.

As of Sunday, there were 2,274 Guard troops deployed to Washington. Only 934 of those troops are part of the D.C. National Guard. The rest have been mobilized from units in Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.

On Sunday, Guard soldiers in Washington who were previously unarmed began carrying their service weapons while on patrol, a task that is outside traditional norms for Guard troops on domestic missions. According to a report published by the Congressional Research Service in April, the typical jobs given to U.S. military personnel who have been mobilized to assist civil authorities include transporting supplies, clearing or constructing roads, and controlling traffic during missions such as border security, natural disaster response and public health emergencies.

The specialized force proposed for the Guard in Washington would be deputized to enforce federal law, according to the executive order, which also directs the creation of a standing National Guard “quick reaction force” that would be available for rapid deployment anywhere in the country. (Federal law enforcement entities already maintain a nationwide network of trained special agents who can respond in times of crisis, like the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team based in Quantico, Va., which can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the United States for counterterrorism missions, and special weapons and tactics teams at each F.B.I. field office.)

By directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to train a specialized D.C. National Guard unit dedicated to “ensuring public safety” in Washington, Mr. Trump is essentially requiring the city’s Guard to come up with a rapid-response-style unit that can deploy quickly when he decides the need has risen.

Military analysts say that is what the National Guard trains to do anyway — deploy quickly, although usually in the event of a natural disaster like a hurricane. Guard troops have also deployed to respond to political crises, like the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, and during the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in 2020.

It is unusual, though, for National Guard troops to just live on standby waiting for the president to decide he wants to target crime in a city of his choosing. Guard troops train part time, often one weekend a month and two weeks a year, to respond to emergencies. They do not sit around waiting for the president to deploy them as a law enforcement arm.

“Most of them are not full-time soldiers; they have separate jobs,” said Pete Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University. “Maintaining a specialized force at a high amount of readiness is tantamount to mobilizing them.”

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Autocracy 101: 'Mortal danger and unbridled chaos'

 Moustafa Bayoumi of The Guardian writes:

A key chapter in the fascist playbook has always been to convince the public that it is living in such a state of mortal danger and unbridled chaos that the only chance of survival is to cede individual rights to the determined will of the Dear Leader. That’s why fascist leaders have constantly demanded that their populations venerate all violence performed in the service of the state and revere the apparatuses of state violence, such as police forces and the military. In this scenario, state violence is not only necessary for the nation’s survival. State violence is understood as even beautiful, something the public can and must believe in.

Buying into state violence this way produces something historian Robert Paxton has called a “mobilizing passion”. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton described how “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will” is produced and then mobilized by fascists by creating “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions”. In other words, there’s always a grave, existential threat lurking around every corner, and only fascist violence can restore order to a lawless world. To the fascist, as Umberto Eco once put it, “life is a permanent war”.

Enter Donald Trump. Whether it’s an existential threat of “wokeness” run amok in American universities, or the extraordinary danger of unauthorized immigrants picking our vegetables, Trump is prepared to battle everyone and everything, including his own windmills, to restore the country to some illusory past glory that we are all supposed to believe in, and be willing to sacrifice ourselves for.

But the sad truth is that many, if not most, of Trump’s justifications for his policies, are unsurprisingly based on bald-faced lies or gross exaggerations simply to further his pursuit of absolute power. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. With each new announcement, Trump continues to prove how excellent he is at crafting the illusion of problems where there basically are none and leading his followers down an often-violent path of retribution. (Remember January 6, DC’s most violent day in recent history?) By doing so, he seeks to constantly expand his authority while also deflecting from all the substantial problems that are staring him in the face. And these problems are not insignificant. Think of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the continuation of global conflicts that he promised months ago he would uniquely be able to end.

The federal takeover of the Washington DC police department, announced with loud fanfare by Trump on Monday, is the latest example of this phenomenon. About 800 national guard troops will be deployed in the nation’s capital because, according to the president, “our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.”

This does sound rather frightening. Fortunately, it’s not true. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter.

First, the facts. Crime in DC is at historic lows. “Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years,” the justice department announced earlier this year. And crime numbers for 2025 are even better, substantially lower than 2024. Violent crime in 2025 is down 26% compared with 2024.

The DC council understands this. The council responded to Trump’s announcement with an angry joint statement: “This is a manufactured intrusion on local authority. Violent crime in the District is at the lowest rates we’ve seen in 30 years. Federalizing the DC police is unwarranted because there is no Federal emergency. Further, the National Guard has no public safety training or knowledge of local laws. The Guard’s role does not include investigating or solving crimes in the District. Calling out the National Guard is an unnecessary deployment with no real mission.”

Such facts ought to matter. So why don’t they to Trump?

Facts don’t matter for Trump because facts have always operated as nothing more than an inconvenience for him. Just ask Erika McEntarfer, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was recently fired by Trump after accurately reporting employment statistics, and those specific numbers contradicted Trump and his policies. But with every new policy enacted by this administration, Trump’s fact-free worldview becomes a lot more worrisome.

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Balko: Trump's DC police state, testing the limits of his power — and our democracy

Radley Balko writes on The Watch:

The Justice Department announced in January that violent crime in Washington, D.C. hit a 30-year low in 2024. So far this year, it’s down an addtional 26 percent. This, in other words, is a curious time for the president to declare that the nation’s capital is a violent cesspool that demands the sort of crime-fighting expertise that only a 79-year-old man who fetishizes dictators and whose entire worldview is perpetually stuck in the 1980s can provide.

The motivation for Donald Trump’s plan to “federalize” Washington, D.C., is same as his motivation for sending active-duty troops into Los Angeles, deporting people to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador, his politicization of the Department of Justice, and nearly every other authoritarian overreach of the last six months: He is testing the limits of his power — and, by extension, of our democracy. He’s feeling out what the Supreme Court, Congress, and the public will let him get away with. And so far, he’s been able to do what he pleases.

The incident that apparently precipitated Trump’s D.C. crackdown was entirely pretextual. It wasn’t the overall amount of violent crime, it was that the wrong person had fallen victim to it. Both Trump and Elon Musk declared D.C. to be a crime-infested wasteland after photos emerged of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, formerly of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, beaten and bloodied from an alleged carjacking. The attackers ran off when a Metro police officer arrived on the scene — which is far more protection than crime victims usually get from law enforcement.

In response, Trump raged on social media over the weekend. He immediately sent hundreds of agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security Investigations, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the city (who then responded to a fender bender as if someone had detonated a dirty bomb.)

Trump is now deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the city too. While state National Guards report to governors, the D.C. National Guard reports to the president. The federal government also has jurisdiction over Washington. Oversight power is supposed to lie with Congress, not the president. But this Congress has essentially dissolved itself into Trump’s agenda.

These legal distinctions mean that Trump’s “federalization” of D.C. isn’t quite as extraordinary a power grab as his deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June. But as he made clear at an unhinged press conference on Monday, Trump himself is either unaware of that distinction or doesn’t acknowledge it. He vowed to send troops into Oakland, Baltimore, and New York as well.

But as with Washington and Los Angeles, violent crime in Oakland and Baltimore has fallen dramatically this year. New York, meanwhile, remains one of the safest big cities in the country, despite what the trembling cowards on Fox News may tell you.

There was no emergency in Los Angeles, either. With the aid of the right-wing media bubble, the administration exploited a couple incidents of property destruction with a surge in peaceful protests against the administration’s immigration raids to depict the city as a dystopian hellscape.

The important thing Trump learned from Los Angeles is that the federal courts failed to intervene. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard over the objections of a state governor is reviewable by federal courts, the court also took at face value Trump’s claim that the protests presented a threat to immigration enforcement.

There’s little evidence that this was true. But more importantly, that was never the real reason Trump cracked down on the city. As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump himself, and internal documents made clear, the real reason was to intimidate protesters, terrify immigrant communities and their advocates, and “liberate” blue cities and states from the “socialists” elected to office. It was a projection of power.

If this were all truly motivated by Trump’s deep commitment to fighting crime, he wouldn’t have cut security funding to D.C. by 44 percent. (I’m dubious of the link between such funding and crime rates, but the important thing here is that Trump thinks they’re linked.) If it were truly about crime, he wouldn’t have released a convicted triple murder on the streets of Orlando. If it were truly about crime, he wouldn’t have hired a man who told his fellow January 6th protesters to kill the Capitol police to a top-level position at the Justice Department. It this were about crime, Trump would have said something — anything — about the shooter who fired 150 rounds into the Center for Disease Control building in Atlanta.

This is about projecting power. Trump has long disparaged cities with large Black populations and Black leadership. New York, D.C., Baltimore, Oakland, and Los Angeles are all cities with large Black populations who are run by Black Democrats. The front-runner to be the new mayor of New York is a Muslim Democratic socialist. Trump isn’t planning to “protect” the residents of these cities from crime. He’s planning to impose his will on them.

The crackdown in D.C. comes 10 days after the New Republic reported on a Pentagon memo authored by Phil Hegseth, the Defense Secretary’s brother, laying out the administration’s plans to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement “for years to come.” The Washington Post then reported just today that the Pentagon has developed a plan for a “reaction force” of National Guard troops Trump can deploy to any city on a moment’s notice.

These policies would end once and for all this country’s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement, it would eradicate one of the cornerstone principles that drove the American Revolution, and it could well end with U.S. soldiers firing their guns at U.S. citizens. (If you’re wondering what — other than being the brother of the least qualified person ever to lead a Cabinet-level agency — makes Phil Hegseth qualified to plan and implement a policy that would fundamentally alter the relationship between America and its military, the answer is apparently that he once started a podcasting company.)

Tough-on-crime politicians have long used Washington, D.C., and its residents as political pawns rather than real Americans with real constitutional rights. When Richard Nixon was pushing a crime bill that would make the D.C. the test city for his crime policies in 1970, his Justice Department suppressed statistics showing that crime in the city had been falling for five months. They needed people to fear the capital to get the bill through Congress. The bill passed, but D.C.’s progressive police chief at the time refused to implement policies like no-knock raids, preventative detention, and aggressive crackdowns on protest. Crime would continue to fall in D.C. even as it rose in the rest of the country.

In 1989, in his first televised speech as president, George H.W. Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine that he claimed had been seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in Lafayette Park, just a few blocks from the White House. It had not. It hadn’t even been “seized.” Undercover agents from the DEA had persuaded a small-time, 18-year-old drug dealer to sell them crack at the park so they could give it to the White House for Bush to use in his speech. In other words, the DEA arranged for an illegal drug sale near the White House that otherwise wouldn’t have happened solely so Bush could say an illegal drug sale had just taken place near the White House.

Demonizing Washington, D.C., then, is an old tactic from an old playbook. But the threat today is uniquely authoritarian and dangerous. The Nixon and Bush administrations were pushing policies that were wrongheaded, counterproductive, and in a few cases unconstitutional. But they weren’t attacks on democracy.

This most certainly is.

The memo reported by the New Republic seeks to replicate what Trump did in Los Angeles in other cities. It conflates peaceful, constitutionally protected protest with international crime syndicates and Al Qaeda or ISIS. And it puts heavy pressure on the Pentagon to scrap Founding-era principles about the role of a standing army in favor of a military increasingly directed inward, against U.S. residents and citizens, to do the president’s bidding.

This is what Trump has always wanted. He has always expressed his envy of and respect for authoritarians who could sic the military on protesters and critics.

One of the healthier things about our democracy is that when politicians have advocated to get the Pentagon more active in domestic policing, the strongest resistance has tended to come from the Pentagon itself. It’s long been a core principle in U.S. military culture that soldiers should not be deployed against their fellow citizens. It’s a bright red line.

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