Donald Trump completed his goal of “sending in the troops” this week as he announced that the D.C. National Guard would be mobilized to fight crime in the District of Columbia, where federal officials would also be taking over the local police force.
But will he stop there, or will other cities be next?
After reportedly spending months debating how best to achieve the humiliation and cowing of a liberal-run urban center, the president’s second go at it appears on track for greater success. Trump previously ordered National Guard troops to begin protection duties in Los Angeles and the surrounding area following unrest in January over ICE deportation raids. That deployment, once thousands of troops, is now down to less than 300 as federal officials squabble with local leaders in the courts over whether the whole thing was a political stunt.
That dynamic playing out on the West Coast is a sign that Trump will likely be less successful at duplicating his takeover of the nation’s capital in blue states around the U.S., even as he pledged to do so during his Monday press conference at the White House.
“We’re not going to lose our cities over this. This will go further. We’re starting very strongly with D.C., and we’re going to clean it up real quick,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to take back our capital. And then we’ll look at other cities also. But other cities are studying what we’re doing.”
In D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has meekly pushed back against the image of her city being “war-torn” and drug-infested as being shared by the White House.
Aside from refusing to sign on to that characterization, she’s painstakingly avoided direct confrontation with Trump, clearly fearful that the president (with the backing of a GOP House and Senate) could pursue a full federalization of D.C. city government by asking Congress to revoke the Home Rule Act.
The reality is simple: Trump can’t deputize federal troops, including state National Guard detachments, to conduct crime-control activities without the cooperation of state leaders and some kind of actual rationalization for doing so. Pointing at crime trends and graphs won’t cut it.
Especially in states with uncooperative leaders, his deployment of National Guard troops is limited to his administration’s ability to come up with rationalizations for their use; in California, Guardsmen were dispatched in response to large-scale protests around federal buildings housing detained undocumented immigrants.
In Chicago, Baltimore, New York and other cities, Trump lacks even the minimal standards that the administration would need to defend such deployments.
So what can Trump do?
The answer may still end up being more than Democratic state and local leaders would like to see from the White House. This week, federal attorneys battled with California in court over whether National Guard troops deployed to the state in June overstepped their constitutional authority by providing support to ICE agents during raids and other enforcement actions, where National Guard troops served to protect law enforcement personnel but were directed not to participate directly in arrests of migrants.
The director of the Los Angeles field office testified that the support provided by the Guard on these raids was critical for preventing assaults against officers: “We still had officer assault situations, but they did reduce drastically.”
That’s the loophole Trump and his team will use, should it be upheld as legal. Democratic state leaders can force the Guard to operate under solely federal authority, known as “Title 10,” which bars troops from performing law enforcement activities and forces them to operate solely with federal funding and oversight.
In California’s case, this was used; and it severely restricted the usage of the Guard to support roles for enforcement operations.
But Trump simply could use further demonstrations against ICE agents as the impetus for launching similar operations in Democrat-run cities such as Chicago or New York. The president needs no additional authority to ramp up immigration raids in those areas, and now has the funding to do it, thanks to the GOP’s budget reconciliation package containing money for tens of thousands of new ICE agents and detention centers.
It’s the question of whether he would be able to sustain a supporting guardsman presence for any extended amount of time, or whether court challenges in those states would force him to close up shop that’s still uncertain.
Trump could find more leeway in red states, where state governors could cooperate with the Trump administration and change the game. If Guardsmen were activated under “Title 32” authority, which shares oversight and funding for the deployment between state and federal officials, those deployed troops would not be subject to the same restrictions on carrying out law enforcement activities.
It was under this authority that the president is calling in the Guard to Washington D.C., which falls constitutionally under federal jurisdiction and likely can’t block the president from wielding that power.
Federal officials haven’t said that National Guard troops in D.C. will directly conduct law enforcement operations, however. The Guard is currently slated to provide support roles to assist the newly federalized Metropolitan Police Department, the city’s primary law enforcement agency.
It’s a sign that even under the broadest authority Trump is willing to grant U.S. troops operating on American soil, the White House is still hesitant to lean into the full militarization of American cities.
As midterm season approaches, Democratic state leaders can likely breathe a sigh of relief knowing that blue states remain shielded from Trump’s ambitions of bringing local police forces under his control, and from seeing troops on city streets putting down dissent or conducting law enforcement in an attempt to smear the president’s critics as pro-crime.
Voters in red states, however, could be in for a ride if the president decides that leaning into immigration raids is his party’s ticket to protecting congressional majorities next year.
