Trump announces he will deploy the National Guard to Memphis to combat crime
The president says he plans to send the force to the state of Tennessee, following the controversy sparked by its deployment in Washington
Donald Trump is once again preparing to send the National Guard into a Democrat-governed territory under the argument of fighting crime —after doing so in Washington and Los Angeles, and dispatching immigration agents to Chicago
“We’re going to Memphis, that’s the next thing,” the U.S. president announced this Friday in an interview with Fox News. The decision comes a month after the Republican ordered troops into Washington, the nation’s capital and one of his political rivals’ strongholds — a move that sparked public protests and drew criticism from the Democratic opposition.
Memphis, Elvis Presley’s hometown, is under Democratic local government but belongs to the state of Tennessee, which is controlled by Republicans. That Republican control is no small factor in the White House’s calculation: under U.S. law, while the president has the power to order the deployment of National Guard troops in certain cases — such as a serious risk of insurrection — he must in principle secure the governor’s approval.
According to Trump, in the case of Memphis — unlike what happened in Los Angeles or Washington — local authorities support the measure. “The mayor [Pal Young] is happy, he’s a Democrat mayor, the mayor is happy. And the governor, Tennessee, the governor [Bill Lee] is happy,” Trump claimed in his remarks to his favorite TV channel.
As in the previous cases, Trump said the reason for the deployment is a campaign against “violent crime” in Memphis, a city of about 600,000 residents, which he described as “deeply troubled.” He promised, “We’re going to fix that just like we did Washington.”
The federal government previously took control of local police and ordered the deployment of the FBI and National Guard in Washington, arguing that the District of Columbia — home to half a million people in the city proper and six million in its metro area — had become a lawless city. “The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City, or some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth,” Trump declared about one of the most reliably Democratic cities in the country, where nine out of 10 residents voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election.
In Washington, although local law only allows Trump to keep control of the Metropolitan Police for 30 days, the deadline has expired with no sign that the more than 2,200 soldiers brought in from Republican states will be returning to their bases anytime soon.
Until now, Trump had hinted for weeks that Chicago — another major Democratic stronghold — would be the next big city to see its public security militarized. “I would have preferred to go to Chicago,” the president admitted in his Fox News interview.
Instead, it appears he has, at least for the moment, opted to launch a major immigration raid operation: the Department of Homeland Security announced last Monday the start of the campaign dubbed Midway Blitz.
The apparent decision not to send troops into the Windy City came after a court last week ruled that June’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles — amid protests against Trump’s hardline immigration policy — was illegal. In response to a lawsuit filed by the California state government, which opposed the soldiers’ presence, judges found that the use of the National Guard violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits U.S. military forces from carrying out police functions.
Trump had also considered taking similar measures in Baltimore, in Democratic-run Maryland. More recently he mentioned New Orleans, another majority-Democrat city in a Republican-led state. In 2020, during his first term, Trump sent federal agents to Memphis to curb crime.
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