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Thus far, President Donald Trump has deployed National Guard members in two major American cities. He’s not going to stop there.
In recent days, Trump made clear that additional liberal cities in blue states are going to receive the same treatment as Los Angeles and Washington DC. Meanwhile, red state governors are lining up to make their National Guard members part of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Even by the bleak standards of Trump’s second term, this is horrifying.
While all of these efforts are part of Trump’s militaristic assault on democracy, terrorizing blue states and DC require different mechanisms. But in reality, there’s not supposed to be any mechanism by which the president can do any of this.
There was never any doubt that the deployments in DC are a test case. DC’s Guard is commanded by the president, and the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel has opined that it does not need to be federalized to do federal work. DC’s unique structure allows Trump to do his fascism on easy mode, and he’s been making the most of it. At Trump’s request, six red states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia — have sent 1,200 of their own National Guard troops to torment DC as well.
At the start of the deployment in DC, Trump gave a press conference where he threatened to deploy troops to New York, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Perhaps Trump forgot he’d already sent a combo of 5,000 federalized California National Guard members and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles months ago, only roughly 250 of which remain.
Unnamed administration officials told the Washington Post that a plan for military intervention in Chicago had long been in the works and could begin as soon as September. As with DC, the ostensible impetus for all of this is that Chicago is in the grip of a historic crime wave. Also as with DC, it’s not. Homicides in Chicago are down over 30 percent over the past year, and shootings have decreased by almost 40 percent.
Crime has been plummeting in DC as well, but Trump has decided to just declare those statistics to be fake.
All those extra guard members in DC don’t seem to be in the areas of the city that actually struggle with high rates of crime, yet arrests of immigrants by roving bands of ICE agents have increased over tenfold.
Never-ending ICE raids
Regardless of whether Trump genuinely believes his own pants-pissing rhetoric about crime in blue cities, the swiftness with which the DC occupation became yet another immigration crackdown shows that mass deportation was always the end goal.
Every city he has alleged is a crime-ridden hellhole that must be fixed by military occupation is a sanctuary jurisdiction. If the deployments were really about crime, he would be threatening to occupy cities with rates much higher than that of DC, like Memphis, Cleveland, and Hattiesburg, but instead those GOP states have sent their guard members to DC. Meanwhile, it’s Baltimore that Trump says is “out of control” even as it sees its lowest homicide rate in half a century.
In blue states, Trump would theoretically have to declare an emergency to justify the federalization of state guard, but things are way easier for him in red states. The administration is planning on mobilizing up to 1,700 state National Guard members from 19 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. Those troops would be tasked with assisting ICE in their respective states with clerical and logistical support, including interacting with people in ICE custody. Per border czar Tom Homan, this is necessary because “ICE is overwhelmed. ICE has fewer than 5,000 deportation officers. We’ve got well over 20 million illegal aliens.”
You will probably not be surprised to learn that Homan pulled both of these numbers out of thin air. As of 2023, the most recent data available, there were 14 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Nearly 40 percent of that number, though, were people with some sort of protected status, such as asylum seekers. So, the real number is more like eight million-ish, and the acting director of ICE says there are currently 6,500 deportation officers. Also, given that ICE has literally $30 billion to spend on new hiring, the notion that staffing issues can only be solved by dragooning part-time National Guard members into ICE is ridiculous.
Unlike what happened in Los Angeles — or what is almost certainly about to happen in Chicago and Baltimore — those red state guard members would not be federalized.
Guard members mobilized under Section 502 of Title 32 of the United States Code can support federal missions at the request of the president or defense secretary, and they are paid with federal funds. However, they remain technically under the command and control of their respective state governors, so the Posse Comitatus Act doesn’t apply. That law only prohibits federal troops from engaging in domestic civilian law enforcement efforts, but if state guard members are not federalized, they are not federal troops.
Because they remain state officials, those guard members cannot operate outside of their own state, with the only exception being DC. They can’t be deployed to another state, as it would violate the sovereignty of, say, Minnesota, to have Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds send her state guard members across the border. It should go without saying that wouldn’t change if those Iowa Guard members were supporting a federal mission at the request of Trump.
However, a lot of things that used to seem like foundational guarantees of American democracy just … aren’t any longer.
What guardrails?
It seemed inconceivable that Trump would be allowed to federalize the California National Guard over Gov. Gavin Newsom’s objections back in June. It seemed inconceivable that he would be allowed to deploy hundreds of active-duty Marines in Los Angeles as well.
It seemed inconceivable that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would allow Trump to use thousands of military personnel overtake an American city. But once they did, it wasn’t just bad for Los Angeles. As the ACLU of California noted when the ruling came down, “The court’s ruling gives Trump legal cover to call up the National Guard over the objections of governors in other states with large immigrant communities — including Illinois and New York — where he has promised to conduct mass detentions and deportations.”
As of Monday, it looks like Trump has settled on something even worse than forced federalization of a state’s national guard over the objection of its governor, though the title of his latest executive order (“Additional Measures to Address the Crime Emergency in the District of Columbia”) makes it sound like it’s only about DC. Here, however, DC is just the beginning, an appetizer before the main course:
The Secretary of Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law. In coordination with the respective adjutants general, the Secretary of Defense shall designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.
That looks a lot like giving Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth power over state National Guards. And it looks a lot like it creates a permanently federalized standing force that can be dropped into blue states.
Sure, Trump may not be able to force Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to turn over state National Guard members to the tender loving ministrations of Hegseth. But — see those 19 states above. What this latest executive order purports to do is to allow Trump to send red state guard members into blue states, shattering the entire concept of state sovereignty.
The temptation is to say this will not stand, that surely state guards would rebel, or red state governors would wise up, or that the courts will not allow this to continue. But it doesn’t seem like any of that is going to happen, that anyone is going to curb Trump’s behavior.
What’s evident is that there is no amount of manpower that Trump will feel is enough, and that no law or principle binds him in any way. He doesn’t want to put down crime. He wants to subjugate the residents of cities he hates.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate this edition, please do your part to keep Public Notice free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading.
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.”
― Rod Serling
(Closing narration: "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", Twilight Zone episode, aired March 4, 1960)
With ICE as his brown shirts, Trump moves to make the National Guard - especially in Confederate states - his black shirts. Perfect. Though not trained for police work, they ARE trained to invade and eliminate the “enemy”.