President Donald Trump is conducting a partisan war on America, claiming extraordinary powers to target immigrants and deploy military forces to cities run by Democrats. In doing so, he has found willing allies: Republican governors have lined up behind him, providing troops to further his administration’s aims.
An Intercept analysis finds that almost all Republican-led states — 23 of the 27 with Republican governors — have been involved in deploying National Guard troops in support of Trump’s war on immigrants and his urban occupations. In a least 19 states with Republican governors, Guard members are assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. National Guard troops from two additional red states have deployed to the nation’s capital, along with D.C. Guard members and soldiers from six of those 19 states assigned to help ICE. Another two Republican-led states have sent troops to aid Trump’s further militarization of the southern border.
Trump doesn’t hide the fact that he is targeting Democratic strongholds. “Almost all of these cities, most of these cities are Democrat-run,” Trump said on Monday, threatening that he might invoke the Insurrection Act — one of the executive branch’s most potent, oldest, and rarely used emergency powers — to facilitate the military occupations of Portland, Oregon, and Chicago against the wishes of the Democratic mayors and governors of those cities and states.
National Guard troops serve under three statuses: Title 10 or federal control; Title 32, a federal-state hybrid; and state active duty, under full state control.
Members of the National Guard have been activated or deployed under Title 10 authority in at least seven states — Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas — as occupation forces or to conduct anti-immigrant border operations. While the Democratic governors of California, Illinois, and Oregon have tried to fight off Title 10 deployments, Trump has found eager support from Republican governors.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cheered his state’s support of Trump’s domestic military agenda. “I fully authorized the President to call up 400 members of the Texas National Guard to ensure safety for federal officials,” Abbott posted on X on Sunday night, touting his state’s other major contribution to Trump’s anti-immigration initiatives. “America must also know that Texas still has thousands of National Guard assisting with the Border security.”
About 200 soldiers from the Texas National Guard activated into Title 10 status were already in the greater Chicago area, a Northern Command spokesperson told The Intercept on Wednesday. They join 300 members of the Illinois National Guard who were also called into federal service by Trump.
The occupation of Washington, D.C., is technically a Title 32 deployment, but since the capital has no governor, the D.C. National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general to the secretary of the Army, to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, to Trump. Guard members from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia — all of them Republican-led — have deployed to Washington alongside D.C. Guard troops.
Deployments to Memphis and New Orleans, under Title 32, are backed by the Republican governors of Tennessee and Louisiana.
After Trump floated a military occupation of New Orleans, in fact, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry did him two better. Late last month, Landry sent a letter to Hegseth asking him to “activate up to 1,000 Louisiana National Guard personnel under Title 32” to “deploy throughout the state to urban centers,” naming not only New Orleans but also Shreveport and Baton Rouge.
Other states headed by Republican governors, such as Alaska and North Dakota, have sent National Guard forces to aid the president’s anti-immigrant agenda at the southern border.
Governors can and have declined to supply troops for Trump’s domestic military campaign.
Republican Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont “politely declined” a federal request to deploy members of the Vermont National Guard to D.C. after also denying the Trump administration’s request to use Vermont National Guard soldiers to perform administrative duties at ICE detention facilities. Republican-led Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma Guard members also have not aided either mission yet.
Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, the chair of the National Governors Association, on Thursday criticized the deployment of Texas National Guard troops to Illinois as a violation of “states’ rights” in an interview with the New York Times. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” he said.
“Neither the National Guard’s legitimacy nor a governor’s political career can long survive being the face of a menacing police state.”
Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, urged more governors to resist Trump’s militarization of America. “Governors should think seriously before rushing to implicate their state National Guard units in Trump’s mass deportation campaign,” she told The Intercept. “Communities ripped apart by ICE will long remember who abetted the raids they are experiencing. Neither the National Guard’s legitimacy nor a governor’s political career can long survive being the face of a menacing police state.”
Some red states have, however, gone above and beyond. The South Carolina National Guard are aiding ICE, joined the occupation forces in the nation’s capital, and have deployed as part of Joint Task Force-Southern Border in support of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. National Guard members from Democrat-led states, like Arizona and Oregon, are also involved in operations along the increasingly militarized southern border.
Attorneys representing Illinois and Oregon argued that the muted protests in their cities didn’t justify Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops, as legal hearings played out in two federal courtrooms at the same time on Thursday.
Asked to define the limits of the Guard deployment in Illinois, a lawyer for the Trump administration insisted it would be a “limited mission” of protecting federal property and federal agents, but he would not rule out its expansion. “I am very much struggling to figure out where this would ever stop,” the judge responded.
Trump and his top aides are increasingly using the word “insurrection” in their discussions of Chicago and Portland after a federal judge ruled last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles was illegal, and lawsuits have sought to block the occupations of Portland and Chicago.
During hyperbolic, and sometimes incoherent, comments on Monday Trump continued to claim that Portland was war-ravaged and in a state of rebellion. “Portland has been on fire for years and not so much saving it. We have to save something else because I think that’s all insurrection. I really think that’s really criminal insurrection,” he told reporters. “We have an Insurrection Act for a reason. If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I’d do that.”
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The Insurrection Act was signed into law in 1807 by then-President Thomas Jefferson and has roots in the Militia Acts of 1792, which defined the president’s power to call state militias into federal service during emergencies. Since the 1790s, the powers have been invoked in response to 30 crises including armed rebellions, like the U.S. Civil War of the 1860s, when normal law enforcement and courts ceased to function. Under the Insurrection Act, the president can circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement that is seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in the United States.
Trump has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. “We’re going to make Chicago really great again, and we’re going to stop this crime,” Trump said on Monday. “Then we’re going to go to another one, and we’re going to go city by city.”
“This level of involvement of the military within the United States is unprecedented and dangerous,” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program. “The general prohibition, both in the law and in norms, against using the military for domestic law enforcement is intended to protect democracy and individual liberty. If we reach a place where the President can use the military against the American people at his whim, the danger to our democracy cannot be overstated.”
Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project, echoed these concerns and pointed to the danger of the president militarizing America’s cities. “We can’t let this president normalize military and armed federal policing in our country. Not only does it put troops in legal and ethical jeopardy, it does the same to our civil rights and civil liberties. It leaves, for example, the protection of vital Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights in the hands of those who are not trained to uphold those rights,” she said on a Monday press call. “It risks chilling the rights to speak and to assemble. In other words, that very fundamental American right to protest.”
Trump, in a rambling address to hundreds of generals and admirals late last month, threatened to unleash the military on more American cities and use the occupations to hone the skills of the armed forces. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he threatened, calling out cities he said are “run by the radical left Democrats.” “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within,” he continued. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Goitein sees Trump’s threat as one of the most worrying developments in his efforts to militarize the United States. “That is so far beyond the pale it’s hard to even know where to begin,” she said. “The military is trained to fight and destroy an enemy. That is what they’re trained to do — and he is saying he wants them to practice that training in the streets of U.S. cities. Every American should be horrified at that notion.”
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which began in June, was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers as law enforcement in colonial America. He warned that Trump intends to transform the National Guard into a presidential police force.
“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. Nearly 140 years later, Defendants — President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense — deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced,” Breyer wrote in his 52-page opinion. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
Breyer ruled that the Pentagon systematically used armed soldiers to perform police functions in California in violation of Posse Comitatus and planned to do so elsewhere in America. “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth,” he wrote, “have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country … thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
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The administration has appealed the ruling and, in the face of the scathing opinion which applies only to California, Trump doubled down by ordering the occupations of Memphis, Portland, and Chicago.
“This is wildly out of step with American traditions and principles,” said Goitein. “If you just compare what’s happened in the last eight months with what happened in the nine presidencies before this — discounting Trump’s first term — there were exactly two deployments in those nine presidencies to quell civil unrest or enforce the law. Now we’ve seen five that have happened or been authorized or requested in eight months.”
The urban military occupations and National Guard deployments to aid ICE come as lines between local, state, and federal law enforcement and the military have increasingly blurred and the Trump administration pursues a raft of authoritarian measures designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy, like attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech, the exercise of expansive unilateral powers like deporting people without due process and rolling back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers; and using the Justice Department to target the president’s political enemies.
Goitein said the United States was not yet a police state, but that between the militarization of cities, aggressive actions by armed federal agents, officials stopping people to ask for identification, and the government stoking fear and chilling dissent, America was on the precipice. “I would say we’re dangerously close to that. I think we are getting a taste of it in D.C.,” she said. “We don’t live in a police state yet. But that’s the direction in which we seem to be heading unless this is stopped.”
The post Republican Governors Eagerly Join Trump’s Military Campaign Against Blue Cities appeared first on The Intercept.
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