Trump's Armed Force to Take Over Democratic Cities Is Nearly Ready to Deploy

[Celerity]

Today on TAP: Courts will now consider whether he needs any actual justification for sending them in.

https://prospect.org/2025/10/30/trumps-armed-force-to-take-over-democratic-cities-nearly-ready-to-deploy/


National Guardmen patrol outside Union Station in Washington, October 28, 2025. Credit: Rahmat Gul/AP Photo

On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court voted to hear the case of the Trump administration’s attempted deployment of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon. Also on Tuesday, that case became even more important, as the globetrotting Trump told U.S. troops stationed in Japan that he was prepared to deploy “more than the National Guard” into American cities (well, those where elected Democrats govern) to combat crime and undocumented immigration. He followed up yesterday, telling the press, “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I could send anybody I wanted. But I haven’t done that because we’re doing well without it.”

Not coincidentally, our Department of War (more accurately, our Department of Government-Instigated-and-Waged Civil War) yesterday ordered the National Guard to complete its civil unrest mission training in the next couple of months so that it had a ready armed force, numbering in the tens of thousands, that it could send into cities at a moment’s notice. As if seeking to validate the apprehensions of the No Kings demonstrators, Trump prefaced his remarks to the press about his ability to deploy the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines to our cities with the words “The courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved.”

Which makes the case that 11 judges of the Ninth Circuit will hear en banc all the more important. It concerns the ruling of Federal District Judge Karin Immergut, a 2019 Trump appointee to the federal bench, to block his deployment of the National Guard to Portland. As I noted in a Prospect piece just after she issued her ruling, the lawyers from Trump’s Justice Department argued that the president had the legal authority to send in the Guard to suppress rebellions and repel invasions. Immergut agreed that the courts must provide “significant deference” to the president’s authority to do just that—provided there actually was a rebellion or invasion. As I wrote at the time, the judge had:

Trump’s attorneys appealed her ruling to the circuit’s appellate court, where a three-judge panel ruled that Trump’s authority effectively overrode the facts on the ground. They split two-to-one on their ruling, with the two Trump-appointed judges saying it was entirely up to Trump to decide whether or not there was reason to send in the troops, while the third judge, a Bill Clinton appointee, argued that the president’s authority in so grave a matter required some link to reality, and recommended that the case should go up to a full en banc hearing. Now, it will.

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