The attorney general for the District of Columbia says the nation’s capital is suing the Trump administration for deploying the National Guard within the city’s boundaries.
The attorney general’s office alleges the administration’s efforts are an “involuntary military occupation.”
“No American city should have the US military – particularly out-of-state military who are not accountable to the residents and untrained in local law enforcement – policing its streets,” Attorney General Brian Schwalb said. “It’s DC today but could be any other city tomorrow.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson downplayed the lawsuit Thursday, telling Military Times in a statement that the president’s actions fell “well within” his authorities.
“This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of DC residents and visitors — to undermine the President’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in DC,” she said.
More than 2,200 National Guard troops are deployed in Washington, D.C., where crimes were already on the decline prior to their deployment, according to FBI crime data.
Since the deployment, crime has continued to decrease with the administration’s surge of federal resources.
“Guard members … remain committed to the President’s directive to address the epidemic of crime in the Nation’s capital,” said a spokesman for the Guard’s joint task force in the capital.
Homicide rates in 2024 were 68% lower than the record highs of the 1990s, from about 80 homicides per 100,000 residents to about 25 homicides per 100,000 residents, FBI crime data shows. But those rates last year were almost twice as high as in 2012, when the nation’s capital experienced a 50-year low in the number of homicides per capita.
President Donald Trump has vowed to deploy the National Guard to other cities in the United States. He initially told reporters Tuesday that the Guard would be “going in” Chicago, which he described as a “hellhole” and “the murder capital of the world.”
On Wednesday, he shifted to say that the White House was making a determination on whether to go into Chicago or New Orleans, which he described as “a very nice section of the country that’s become quite tough.”
Neither city ranks among the top 10 for total crime rates of cities with more than 250,000 residents, and neither city ranks in the top 10 for violent crimes per 100,000 residents.
Memphis, Cleveland and St. Louis are plagued with the highest total crime rates, according to FBI crime data.
Critics of deploying the Guard say the president’s description of the two cities, one in a Blue state and the other in a Red state, emphasizes that politics, rather than a public safety emergency, are leading the White House’s deployments.
“It is absolutely the case where he is attacking and occupying Blue cities. There is no doubt about it, and the military members, these young men and women, they know they are political pawns, and it bothers them greatly,” retired Maj. Gen. Randy Manner, who served as vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, told Military Times.
Manner said the United States is in an “extremely dangerous situation” that is beginning to “drive a wedge, quite frankly, between our military and our citizens in these various cities where [Trump is] deploying them.”
He said that he feared further deployments could give rise to a divide reminiscent of when soldiers like his dad returned from Vietnam, a period when those protesting the war often took frustrations out on the military.
“It will no longer be that our military is part of us. It’ll be it’s those guys in uniform, those armed thugs,” he said.
Even as Chicago’s crime rates are down across the board this year, dozens of people were shot and at least seven people were killed in the city in a surge of violence over the Labor Day weekend.
Chicago and Illinois leaders have said they do not want U.S. troops to assist in the city.
“National Guard troops are not trained to do local law enforcement, but FBI agents, DEA agents, ATF agents are trained to fight crime, and they have collaborated with local law enforcement. So I would prefer more resources on that, [rather] than sending the military illegally into the streets of American cities against American citizens,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul told CNN on Tuesday.
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for governor in Tennessee, praised Trump’s efforts to fight crime by deploying troops to American cities.
“If your local leaders are going to fail and not accept that responsibility to keep their community safe, then it is going to be up to the president to bring that attention to that city,” Blackburn said Wednesday.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in California determined that the president illegally violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the power of the federal government to use military force for domestic matters, when he deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in June.
“The judge ruled that the president failed to show there was a rebellion or inability of civil authorities to respond to the demonstrations, which is the requirement in federal law to use troops over the objections of the governor. Accordingly, he will have the same issue should he try to do this in Chicago, and likely the same result,” retired Maj. Gen. William Enyart, a former congressman who also served as the 37th Adjutant General for the Illinois National Guard, told Military Times on Tuesday.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly called Breyer “a rogue judge” trying to “usurp the authority of the Commander-in-Chief” and vowed to fight the decision.
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