From LA to Portland: Tracking Trump’s expansive use of the National Guard

The city of Portland, Oregon, is bracing for the imminent arrival of 200 National Guard members, called up by President Donald Trump. His stated plans for the troops – to protect the city and immigration facilities from “domestic terrorists” – come amid objections from local Democratic leaders. The state and city have sued.

Mr. Trump’s plans echo his earlier deployment of thousands of National Guard members to blue-state California in June. Thousands more in August were sent to Democrat-led Washington, D.C. The president has suggested other left-leaning cities, including Chicago, could be next.

In a speech to hundreds of U.S. military leaders gathered for a rare meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Trump suggested using “dangerous” domestic cities as “training grounds for our military, National Guard.” He also said “America is under invasion from within.”

For months, the Trump administration has tapped the National Guard for novel use in its domestic fight against crime and illegal immigration. The Portland plans are one more test of the boundaries of executive power and an upending of the traditional reluctance to use troops on domestic soil. Critics note the president’s activation of troops in areas where Democrats outnumber Republicans.

“It does seem, from a historical sense, as a political maneuver,” says Kevin Greene, co-founder of the Center for the Study of the National Guard at the University of Southern Mississippi. Mr. Trump’s reliance on the National Guard is “unorthodox, but not unprecedented,” he says. In the 1950s and ’60s, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy both deployed National Guard troops in southern states to assist with school integration against governors’ wishes.

What concerns Andrew Wiest, the center’s other co-founder, is whether “public perception of the Guard might be impacted” by President Trump’s moves.

“The last time the American soldier became not a hero, but something else, was Vietnam,” says Dr. Wiest. “We kind of paid for that for years.”

What’s going on in Oregon?

On Wednesday, President Trump declared on Truth Social that “The National Guard is now in place” in Oregon. Members of the Oregon National Guard are “reporting for duty, conducting training, and preparing to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other U.S. Government personnel,” according to Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. National Guard troops had not yet been seen in Portland, as of Wednesday, according to a local NBC News affiliate.

Ongoing protests at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland since June have at times turned violent, according to local reports. On Sept. 27, Mr. Trump said on social media that he was authorizing troops to save Portland and its ICE facilities from Antifa and “other domestic terrorists.” He added that the troops could use “Full Force, if necessary,” which has raised confusion.

There’s no clear legal meaning to the phrase, experts say, and the Department of Defense referred the question to the White House. Yet retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor’s interpretation is that in the military, full force means “you can shoot people. You can use deadly force. You can detain people.”

“You can’t use full force against the American people unless they’re in uprising against the United States,” says Dr. Mansoor, now a professor of military history at Ohio State University. “In no conceivable universe are cities such as Los Angeles or Portland, Oregon, or Chicago in rebellion against the United States.”

The state of Oregon and the city of Portland have sued the Trump administration in federal court over its plans. The plaintiffs claim the government’s move “threatens to escalate tensions” and are seeking a temporary restraining order.

The adjutant general of the Oregon National Guard underscored the tense state-federal relations in a letter to his force dated Sept. 29.

“I’ll be honest with you — I know this isn’t easy,” wrote Brig. Gen. Alan Gronewold. “We are professionals who do our duties, regardless of how it’s received.”

President Trump’s suggestion that American cities could be training grounds for U.S. troops was met with disapproval by retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army from 2008 to 2012. “Those words should never have been said,” he told the Monitor.

Plans for Portland follow Mr. Trump’s decision in June to activate around 4,000 California National Guard and 700 Marines amid immigration-related protests in Los Angeles. In August, he deployed 960 D.C. National Guard troops to the nation’s capital. Another 1,170 state National Guard troops were sent to Washington by Republican governors, according to Joint Task Force-DC. The president has also requested the use of National Guard troops in Memphis and has spoken of sending troops to additional cities such as Chicago and Baltimore.

Most U.S. adults (52%) disapprove of deploying the National Guard to their local area for law enforcement efforts, according to an NPR/Ipsos poll last month – with Republicans seven times more likely to be supportive than Democrats.

Rationale for sending troops

Proponents of the Guard’s expanding role say recent deployments are necessary due to failures of local governance, given rising attacks against federal agents and facilities. A shooting outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas last week killed two immigrant detainees and injured a third. The same facility experienced a bomb threat in August, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“I’m sure civilians don’t want to see, on one level, armed military people in the streets of their cities,” says Cully Stimson, a former Defense Department official and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. But when local leaders treat federal law enforcement – including ICE – “like the enemy,” he says, “it’s entirely appropriate, and sadly necessary, for the president to protect federal law enforcement.”

President Trump described Portland as “War ravaged,” but officials in the city offer a different picture. Police Chief Bob Day has said the confrontations at the ICE facility have been confined to one city block. On Monday, he announced the arrests of one adult and one juvenile for assault. By contrast, racial justice protests in the city in 2020 brought thousands of people to the streets and resulted in property damage.

“We are paying attention. We are engaged,” said the chief. “Political violence is not acceptable.”

New duties for National Guard troops

Several legal experts raise alarms about the Guard’s use.

President Trump appears to want the military to “spend a lot more time pointing their weapons at Americans, and a lot less time defending Americans,” says Joseph Nunn, counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. “It has always been the case in this country that we use the military for law enforcement as a last resort when civilian authorities are completely overwhelmed.”

States have their own Army and Air National Guard, which can be activated by the governor or the president. Domestically, in recent years, troops have run drive-through COVID-19 testing sites and rescued survivors of natural disasters. These soldiers and airmen can also deploy overseas, as they did during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Whether troops are operating under state or federal authority determines what they can do legally. When troops are federalized, as Mr. Trump did in California and now Oregon, the National Guard is generally barred from engaging in domestic law enforcement under the Posse Comitatus Act. A federal judge in California ruled last month that the Trump administration's use of National Guard troops in Los Angeles violated that act. The administration has appealed.

Outside the spotlight of protests, the National Guard is supporting immigration enforcement in other new or unusual ways.

Several Republican-led states – including Missouri most recently – have offered their troops for administrative aid at ICE facilities. The National Guard in some states, including West Virginia and Florida, have signed agreements with ICE that typically deputize state and local law enforcement with immigration enforcement powers. In Texas, the U.S. Border Patrol has deputized thousands of National Guard members. The scope of the troops’ roles in those examples remains unclear.

In terms of using more cities as “training grounds” for the military, as Mr. Trump suggested, Professor Mansoor looks to Congress to act.

“They need to take back their power, their constitutional powers,” he says. “They’ve simply ceded the ground to a president who’s using those deployments for political ends.”

Staff writer Anna Mulrine Grobe contributed reporting.