Members of the California National Guard in Los Angeles in June, when US President Donald Trump deployed thousands of troops to the city. Photo / Salwan Georges, The Washington Post
President Donald Trump is taking National Guard deployments into unprecedented territory, seeking to send troops into multiple United States cities despite strong opposition from local officials and questions about the purpose and impact of the mission.
Since June, the Trump Administration has sent or pledged to send troops to more than half a dozen American cities, all led by Democrats, including Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Memphis.
The Administration has argued that military force is needed to address crime in those cities and to back up federal agents charged with enacting Trump’s aggressive push to deport suspected undocumented immigrants.
Over the weekend, the Trump Administration escalated its efforts, moving to deploy the National Guard to Chicago and Portland, Oregon, over court challenges and the objections of state and local leaders.
Democratic leaders accuse Trump and his aides of falsely portraying their cities as unruly war zones as an excuse to send the military on partisan missions in ways they believe are also designed to chill political opposition.
“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) said in a statement.
Pritzker said Trump planned to federalise 300 National Guard members from his state, who would be joined by members of the Texas National Guard.
“It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalised members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.”
Some Republican governors, including Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, have welcomed Trump’s efforts, endorsing Administration claims that troops are needed to back up beleaguered law enforcement even as crime has generally fallen from Covid pandemic-era highs.
Last week, with Lee’s support, the first of an expected 150 Tennessee National Guard troops began arriving in Memphis.
“You guys are framing this like the President wants to take over the American cities with the military,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said yesterday.
“The president wants to help these local leaders who have been completely ineffective in securing their own cities. And we have already seen there’s a positive formula for that.”
Historians and experts on the Guard say Trump’s manoeuvres are unlike any past use of military force and could impact troop readiness, training and morale for a force typically deployed to respond to the aftermath of deadly storms and other emergencies.
They also worry about how deployments might affect the Guard’s reputation among Americans, especially in communities where residents mistrust law enforcement and where the militarisation of immigration enforcement and local policing has stoked fear.
“We have proven ourselves as a reliable, ready source to help our nation, help our states, help our communities,” said William Enyart, a retired major general of the Illinois National Guard and former Democratic congressman.
“By misusing the guard in a role for which it is neither trained nor equipped to perform, all it’s going to do is cause damage.”
Adding to the concerns of critics were Trump’s comments last week during a gathering of hundreds of the country’s top military commanders where he suggested troops should prioritise domestic threats over foreign enemies and focus on American cities to fight a “war from within”.
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military - National Guard, but military,” Trump said.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) called Trump’s remarks “reckless” and “dangerous”.
Relations between the Midwestern city and federal authorities have already been strained.
A man was shot and killed last month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent as officers sought to arrest him. And last week, as many as 300 federal agents conducted an overnight raid on an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, some rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter as they detained residents and even children in a search for suspected gang members and undocumented immigrants.
Tensions escalated further at the weekend when an armed federal agent shot and injured a female motorist after Department of Homeland Security officials claimed officers’ vehicles were rammed and boxed in by several drivers in a southwest Chicago neighbourhood.
The woman, who was injured but drove away from the scene, was one of two people arrested and charged with using a deadly weapon – their vehicles – to assault and impede federal officers.
While Trump’s push to deploy the military in American cities has faced some criticism, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry (R) last week asked the Trump Administration to send as many as 1000 Guard troops to New Orleans and two of the state’s other largest cities, Baton Rouge and Shreveport. The cities have faced “elevated violent crime rates,” the Governor said, as well as “critical personnel shortages within local law enforcement”.
New Orleans City Council President J.P. Morrell (D) said protests over the deployment would be “inevitable” and was worried tensions could undermine progress New Orleans police have made in rebuilding trust with the community after years of turmoil.
In a council meeting with law enforcement last week, Morrell questioned the idea of armed Guard troops unfamiliar with the city’s parade culture being assigned to crowd-control duties and urged New Orleans police to be ready to de-escalate situations. “Your job is to protect our citizens,” he told police.
Deploying the Guard into a city billed as unruly and violent sounds familiar to Russel Honoré, a retired US Army lieutenant-general who 20 years ago was tapped by President George W. Bush (R) to lead rescue and recovery efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Honoré, a Louisiana native, arrived in summer 2005 to find tens of thousands of residents stranded without food or water for days after much of the city was swallowed by floodwaters.
Media reports of looting and lawlessness, including false reports of attacks against children and women and rooftop snipers, had prompted Kathleen Blanco, the state’s embattled Democratic governor, to order the Louisiana National Guard to retake control of New Orleans and “shoot to kill” if necessary.
In a scene captured by a news camera, Honoré angrily confronted a truck full of white soldiers pointing their guns at stranded black residents. “Put those damn weapons down!” he ordered.
“People had been looting as a survival mechanism because they were out of food and water,” Honoré said.
“We don’t tell our soldiers to kill our own people,” he recalled later explaining to Blanco. She relented.
The retired general said Trump’s suggestion that troops could train for war in American cities “scares the hell out of me”.
Like others, Honoré said he was also worried about the impact of sending citizen soldiers who were largely trained to respond to natural disasters into “questionable” situations they were not trained or prepared for.
He cited the 1970 shooting at Kent State University, when Guard troops opened fire on students protesting against the Vietnam War, killing four.
“We do know, with Kent State, if you send the National Guard out without clear rules of engagement what can happen,” Honoré said. “They shot protesters, people who had the right to protest.”
While National Guard duties have varied by city, they have generally been tasked with protecting federal facilities or agents.
In Los Angeles, they were allowed to temporarily detain people until authorities arrived to make an arrest, the Department of Homeland Security has said.
In DC, they also took on “beautification” tasks such as rubbish removal and groundskeeping around the National Mall and other federal property.
The multiple deployments to US cities are “absolutely going to be the beginning of driving a wedge between the military and the American people”, said Randy Manner, a retired Army two-star general and former acting vice-chief of the National Guard.
“The National Guard has always been there to help citizens in times of need. Now, this Administration is using the military to watch the American people, and particularly in a very targeted way, which is in blue cities, as well as people who are predominantly of colour.”
Manner said ultimately that will affect recruiting and who decides to serve.
While the President and the Defence Secretary have touted high current recruiting numbers, much of that is the result of work that took place before the new administration was sworn in, Manner said.
It will be another six months before this Administration’s recruiting results are reported.
Most Americans, 58%, oppose Trump’s deployment of guard troops to US cities, according to a poll last week by CBS News and YouGov.
Tom Arceneaux, the Republican Mayor of Shreveport, said he was unsure why his city of about 177,000 was on Landry’s list of those in need of National Guard troops.
Shreveport has experienced a recent decline in crime, he said, including double-digit percentage drops in homicides and a decrease in most violent crimes the past two years.
While Shreveport’s crime rate has exceeded the state average, it was not among the top 10 in the state with the highest crime rates this year, Arceneaux said, and he was worried people would now think the city is dangerous.
“I’m not unhappy with additional assistance in law enforcement at all; I just want to make sure it’s done in a way that has a positive impact, not a negative impact,” Arceneaux said.
“Whatever assistance we get from the National Guard needs to augment that trust rather than go the other way.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s immigration strategy, has cheered the National Guard deployments, accusing the federal judge who blocked the Portland deployment of “legal insurrection”.
As scores of federal agents and Guard troops began to roll into Memphis last week, Miller, Attorney-General Pam Bondi and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth travelled to the city, where they addressed law enforcement in meetings that at times had the air of a Trump campaign rally.
All three made lofty promises. Bondi pledged that Memphis, “the most violent-crime city in the country, would have no crime” by the time they were done.
“We will liberate this city from the criminal element that has plagued it for generations,” Miller vowed.
“The idea that there is square block in this city where a citizen doesn’t feel safe is unacceptable. This is Memphis. This is the United States of America, and all that bulls*** is done. It’s over.”
In another meeting, Miller declared that law enforcement personnel were now “unleashed” in their policing of Memphis.
The language sparked alarm in the majority-black city, which has seen decades of mistrust between the community and law enforcement.
In 2023, a black motorist, 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, was beaten to death after a traffic stop turned into an altercation with Memphis police. Those officers employed many of the same aggressive tactics now used by federal agents in their immigration crackdown.
At a recent town hall, Mayor Paul Young (D) was relaying what little information he knew about the Guard deployment when a man stood and asked him a more perplexing question: what could the city do about the fear some residents were feeling?
In an interview, Young said he was hearing similar expressions of fear from across the city, including from residents who were cautiously hopeful that an influx of federal assistance could be a positive.
To some, memories of the aggressive role the Guard had played in some of the city’s darker moments, including their deployment to quell unrest after the 1968 killing of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King jnr, remained painfully fresh. What would troops on the ground in one of the country’s largest majority-black cities feel like now?
“The greatest fear is the unknown,” Young told the man. And in Memphis, at this moment, “The National Guard … seems to be the entity that brings the most fear and concern”.
While Trump and Administration officials have cast the mayor as welcoming of the operation, Young, a moderate Democrat who has made public safety a priority of his administration, has repeatedly said he does not support the deployment of the National Guard in his city.
“But I don’t have the luxury of being in my feelings about it,” he said.
He is working with state and federal officials in hopes of “having a seat at the table” and perhaps shaping what happens there.
Lee, the Tennessee Governor, has said he expects about 150 National Guard members to be deployed to Memphis, a small number compared with those in other cities.
He said the troops would not be directly engaging in law enforcement. But Miller’s aggressive comments seemed to contradict the tone set by Lee and Young.
Young said he had repeatedly pressed officials for more specific details, including what soldiers would be wearing and where they would be positioned.
“What kind of guns are they going to have? Are they going to be in close proximity to our children and kids in schools?” Young said.
He received some responses, he said. “But even their answers are still given with a certain amount of uncertainty because they are still figuring things out.”
In a letter to constituents, Young urged calm amid the unknown.
“No matter where you stand, I want us to remember this: the men and women who have arrived here are not our enemies,” he wrote.
“We must hold them accountable, yes. But we must recognise their humanity, even as we protect the dignity and rights of every Memphian.”
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