President Trump on Monday announced plans to deploy some 800 members of the Washington, D.C., National Guard to the nation’s capital as part of his administration’s effort to crack down on street crime in the city.
Formally declaring a public safety emergency, Trump claimed the deployment is part of a citywide effort to combat violent crime such as homicides, robberies and burglaries — even as such crimes have fallen over the past two years.
“This is liberation day in D.C. and we’re going to take our capital back,” Trump said at a wide-ranging White House press conference in which he also declared he was putting the city’s police department under federal control.
“I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order, and public safety in Washington, D.C., and they’re going to be allowed to do their job properly.”
The move quickly drew the outrage of local and congressional Democratic lawmakers, who decried the move as unnecessary, “unsettling” and a “brazen power grab,” even as those in the GOP applauded it.
Here’s what to know about the deployment:
The official order
In an official memo to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump said he was invoking constitutional law to deploy the hundreds of guard members across the city, citing recent high-profile crimes there.
The memo’s text directs Hegseth to mobilize the D.C. National Guard and “in such numbers as he deems necessary, to address the epidemic of crime in our Nation’s capital.”
The order’s wording also allows for possible additional guard deployments from other states, as Hegseth is told to coordinate with state governors for any extra guard members “as he deems necessary and appropriate, to augment this mission.”
“There are other units we are prepared to bring in, other National Guard units, other specialized units,” Hegseth said during the press conference.
The document does not set a timeline for the guard’s deployment, only noting that their mobilization and duration of duty “shall remain in effect until [Trump determines] that conditions of law and order have been restored in the District of Columbia.”
The troops will be in a Title 32 status, meaning they are under local authority but are federally funded and not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits U.S. service members from taking part in law enforcement activities.
When and where?
In a statement released later Monday, Army officials said roughly 800 D.C. National Guard soldiers will be activated to help with administrative and logistical tasks in addition to providing “physical presence in support of law enforcement.”
Even as hundreds of guard troops will be in the city, only between 100 and 200 soldiers will be supporting law enforcement at any given time.
Operational details, including where the soldiers will physically be assigned and what their command and control will be, have not been released and are likely still being worked out.
When they might be seen around the city is also unclear, though Hegseth said during the press conference that guard members will be “flowing into the streets of Washington in the coming week.”
Trump also threatened to send active-duty troops into Washington “if needed,” and said he could expand such efforts to other cities if they did not deal with what he claimed are “out-of-control” crime rates.
“You’re going to have a lot of essentially military — and we will bring in the military if it’s needed, by the way,” Trump said.
A similar playbook
Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard follows a pattern seen in his first and second terms to use the military to achieve his political agenda, most recently sending some 4,000 California National Guard troops and 700 Marines to aid immigration enforcement activities in Los Angeles in June.
Trump has also deployed some 10,000 Guardsmen to the U.S.-Mexico border to support law enforcement activities against migrants, even as border crossings have seemingly been non-existent for months.
And in the summer of 2020, he deployed more than 5,000 Guardsmen to Washington to counter mostly peaceful protesters advocating for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd.
In that deployment, thousands of Guard troops came face-to-face with people on the ground in what has been largely viewed as a debacle.
Subsequent investigations found that some of the Guard troops involved had just left basic training, while others had no experience in crowd control.
In addition, Trump had ordered combat troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to hold just outside city limits, creating the potential for more dramatic clashes.
Notably, there has been no evidence that Trump ordered National Guard troops to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, during the violent clashes where Trump supporters attempted to prevent the results of the 2020 election from being certified. More than 140 police officers were injured during the seven-hour mob before Guard troops eventually showed up to help disperse the crowd.
D.C. Guard members are typically deployed to help with humanitarian efforts, particularly after hurricanes or floods.
What lawmakers are saying
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser later on Monday called Trump’s actions “unsettling and unprecedented” but said that she isn’t “totally surprised” by the move.
“I think I speak for all Americans – we don’t believe it’s legal to use the American military against American citizens on American soil,” Bowser said at a press conference, noting that she anticipated Trump would announce that he had called up the military given that she had “one brief phone call related to the National Guard issue over the weekend.”
D.C.’s nonvoting delegate in Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), called Trump’s military and police takeover “counterproductive” and “escalatory,” calling out his reluctance to order a similar Guard mobilization on Jan. 6.
“It does not escape me that the president is calling in the DCNG on the pretext of a surge in crime that the numbers do not support, while he was nowhere to be found for hours on Jan. 6, 2021, as D.C. officials tried to get him to mobilize the DCNG as the U.S. Capitol was under siege,” she said in a statement.
“The DCNG should be under the control of D.C.’s chief executive, the same way governors control their Guard units,” Norton added.
Norton, along with other Democrats, has pushed for legislation that would repeal the president’s authority to take temporary control of the D.C police and give Washington’s mayor control over the D.C. National Guard, similar to how governors control their states’ Guards.
Norton and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) have introduced legislation that would do just that, but the effort faces an uphill battle in the GOP-controlled Congress.
