Tag: national guard
Our Inner Cities Deserve Respect -- And Anti-Crime Policies That Work

Our Inner Cities Deserve Respect -- And Anti-Crime Policies That Work

“Of course, Baltimore,” said Donald Trump when ticking off the list of cities that required federal forces to quell the hordes of violent urban criminals who live in the president’s head, if not in reality.

It’s clear he never bought into the nickname coined to counter the city’s negative image. No “Charm City” for a man who fails to see any positives in a place he recently called a “hellhole,” and not for the first time.

Right now, the administration’s attention has turned to Chicago, likely the next target of his plan to interfere with law enforcement operations — and whatever else he can get away with — in cities led by Democrats.

Trump, always spoiling for a fight, is ready to take on a federal judge’s ruling of overreach in Los Angeles, not to mention Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (who fits the profile).

However, the president would never leave out his go-to for all things dysfunctional in a blue city led by a Black mayor, in Baltimore’s case Brandon Scott. That’s the same man some Republicans blamed when a cargo ship crashed into the city’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, casting Baltimore’s mayor and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore as both incompetent and all-powerful.

Then again, it’s easy to spew nonsensical contradictions, along with every inner-city and racist trope, when you don’t see citizens who live in certain parts of certain cities as human beings.

You only had to listen to Trump’s answer to an invitation by Moore to walk the city’s streets, to actually learn something about the places and the people he so glibly and destructively malign. He only sees teenage “thugs” to be put behind bars, charged as adults and thrown into prisons, places where you don’t have to attend school but where you learn plenty.

“I’m not walking in Baltimore right now. Baltimore is a hellhole,” Trump said. “This guy, I don’t even think he knows it.” Yes, “this guy,” not “Governor Moore,” the better to disrespect a state leader who happens to be Black.

To be fair to the president, he is not alone in the judgments he makes from afar.

As someone who grew up in West Baltimore, I am well aware of the city’s reputation.

Even people who should know better seem both surprised and disappointed when, instead of sharing tales of being a child lookout for drug dealers, in a scenario straight out of The Wire, I talk about my less dramatic reality of backyard birthday parties, trips to the library, and doing chores for neighbors.

That’s not to say the neighborhood of my youth was crime-free. And that was before a drug epidemic rendered too many familiar row houses vacant shells I see on visits to relatives.

Unfortunately, I have seen more than one childhood friend caught up in addiction or one mistake that landed them in the system instead of a counseling or treatment center the well-heeled on the other side of town always seemed to have access to.

But I never forgot the people they were or could be still if they had the support, programs, and, yes, luck that blessed me.

People get a lot wrong when judging inner cities across America.

Its residents crave attention from law enforcement and their government. They pay their salaries, and they are outraged when everything from medics to 911 seems to lack a sense of urgency when responding to their emergencies.

In my experience, they just want to be treated fairly and respectfully, to be on the other end of that mission “to protect and serve.” They would welcome after-school programs and community violence-prevention strategies more than troops, tanks, and National Guard members from Tennessee and Mississippi who may see them as perps rather than people trying to live safe and productive lives.

And they have learned to be very suspicious of politicians who say things they obviously don’t mean. Donald Trump isn’t serious about “law and order,” not when one of his first acts as president was pardoning criminals who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and injured more than 100 law enforcement officers.

If the Trump administration and its compliant allies in a GOP-controlled Congress really wanted to help rather than dominate the Americans in the cities he dismisses, they would just support the policies that have been proven to bring crime rates down.

But then they would have to admit they could learn a thing or two from those Democratic Black mayors.

Johnson does not downplay Chicago’s gun violence, which, while decreasing, still left 58 people shot over the holiday weekend. He said at a news conference that many of those guns on the city’s streets are trafficked to Illinois from nearby states, including GOP-led Indiana. “Chicago will continue to have a violence problem as long as red states continue to have a gun problem,” Johnson said.

“If the president was absolutely certain,” he said on NPR, that “driving violence down in the city of Chicago and cities across America was his actual goal, he would not have taken over $800 million away from violence prevention efforts.”

In an interview on NPR, Baltimore’s Scott talked about what has brought down violence in his city, one that as of July had seen 84 homicides, the fewest recorded in more than 50 years, one of many hopeful statistics Trump refuses to acknowledge or believe.

“We actually go to those who are most likely to be the victim or perpetrator of gun violence. They get a letter directly from me. We knock on their door and say, ‘We know who you are. We know what you do. Change your life. We’ll help you do it. But if you don’t, we’re going to remove you via law enforcement,” Scott said.

“Those who have taken us up on change in their life — over 90 percent of them have not reinjured, revictimized, or recidivated in crime.”

It makes perfect sense, to nurture people with hopes and dreams who need guidance and a pathway to success. But first you have to see those kids, and yes, many are kids like I once was, as human beings worth investing time and money in, as young people worth saving.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from RollCall.

Chicago is “a war zone”

Trump-Fox Feedback Loop Is Prelude To Troops Occupying Chicago

Chicago has likely seen fewer shootings this year than in any other in nearly six decades, and was not even among the top 20 U.S. cities by homicide rate in 2024. But according to President Donald Trump, the city is “THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”

Trump’s false Tuesday morning declaration after watching overheating commentary from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, which cited shootings over the weekend as evidence Chicago is a “war zone” and its elected leaders are sending the message that they “like the violence."

The president’s favorite TV show is helping to ease the country onto a glide path toward Trump’s authoritarian goal of putting troops on the ground in more U.S. cities.

Shooting and murders in Chicago have plummeted to near-record lows

Crime data analyst Jeff Asher reported Tuesday that while the scale of shootings and murders in Chicago represents a terrible toll inflicted on far too many city residents, “the available evidence suggests that Chicago has seen fewer shootings so far this year than any year since the mid-1960s.”

“The 1,264 people shot in Chicago through August 30 this year signifies far, far too many lives impacted by gun violence, but that figure is down 37 percent through this point last year and down nearly 60 percent from this point in 2021,” he wrote.

"Chicago is on pace for just over 400 murders in 2025 which could be the fewest murders there since 1965,” he continued. “Obviously, there’s a lot of time left in the year, but Chicago will almost certainly have way fewer murders in 2025 than it did in any year between 1966 and the early 2000s.”

Murders and shootings rend the fabric of communities, and the fact that they seem to have fallen to the lowest level in Chicago since the president was in college does not mean that the work of reducing crime is done. The data does, however, provide context for whether the state is facing an emergency that requires federal intervention.

But Trump’s worldview isn’t shaped by the thoughtful analysis of statistics — he cares about what he sees on his television.

Trump is responding to Fox & Friends lie that Chicago is “a war zone”

On Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends’ co-hosts were telling viewers that Chicago is in crisis and denouncing its elected leaders for saying that they oppose Trump surging federal forces into the city against their will.

“VIOLENCE GRIPS CHICAGO AS DEMS REJECT TRUMP’S HELP” was the chyron Fox & Friends aired at the top of the 7 a.m. segment.

“We’ve talked a lot about the crime in Chicago,” Ainsley Earhart said. “Fifty-six were shot over the Labor Day weekend. Eight people died in Chicago as a result of those shootings.” Fox & Friends aired a graphic displaying those figures while she spoke.

Earhardt contrasted those numbers with a video of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson saying at a rally on Monday, “No federal troops in the city of Chicago.”

“These leaders spend more time targeting the president of the United States than caring about the issues that matter to their community,” Lawrence Jones replied. He claimed that the weekend’s level of violence is “happening almost every other week in Chicago,” adding, “I think it is a war zone there.”

Co-host Griff Jenkins claimed that Johnson’s comments “have got to be offensive to the families and loved ones” of victims, adding that Democrats were “defending, essentially, the criminals by trying to resist federal assistance to bring it under control.”

Jenkins then aired a clip of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker saying in an interview that “no one in the administration” had reached out to him about federal intervention, which he said suggested they were planning “an invasion with U.S. troops."

“It's not an invasion,” Earhardt responded. “The reason that Donald Trump has to get involved is because the leaders of these blue states can't keep crime off their streets. They can't do anything about it. They are not trying to do anything about it. The message we hear is: We like the violence.”

Again, this is how the president’s favorite program is responding to crime in Chicago at a time when the city is seeing the lowest levels of shootings and murders in decades.

Trump often responds in real time to the shows he is watching from the White House and elsewhere — a phenomenon I’ve described as the Fox-Trump feedback loop — and that’s exactly what he did on Tuesday morning.

Roughly 40 minutes after the Fox & Friends segment, Trump posted to Truth Social:

At least 54 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, 8 people were killed. The last two weekends were similar. Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far. Pritzker needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC. Chicago will be safe again, and soon. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Trump is trying to justify an authoritarian invasion of Chicago

Trump’s claim that Chicago is the “most dangerous city in the World, by far” is absurd. In fact, the city isn’t even among the top 20 cities with the highest reported homicide rates in the United States, according to an Axios analysis of 2024 FBI crime figures, while “eight of the top 10 cities with the highest murder rates and populations of at least 100,000 were in red states."

But Trump, according to many of his former top aides, is a fascist, and the president has repeatedly displayed his eagerness to put National Guard and even active-duty military on the streets of blue cities in blue states.

He lied about conditions in Los Angeles to justify a deployment there (which a federal judge on Tuesday said violated the law) and lied about crime in Washington, D.C., to do the same thing in the nation’s capital.

With Trump’s propagandists at Fox and elsewhere chomping at the bit for the president to order “full military occupation” of other “problematic cities,” Chicago may be next.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Judge Blasts Troop Deployment As Trump Rants About 'Murder Capital'  Chicago

Judge Blasts Troop Deployment As Trump Rants About 'Murder Capital'  Chicago

President Donald Trump escalated efforts to broaden his “emergency” crime takeover of Washington, D.C. by threatening to send federal troops to Chicago, falsely branding the city the “Murder Capital of the World” in a Tuesday morning tirade. The remarks came just before a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles was illegal and violated the Posse Comitatus Act, by effectively turning the military into a “national police force with the president as its chief.”

Decrying that eight people were killed in Chicago over the weekend, Trump falsely claimed, “Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far.”

He insisted that Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker “needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC. Chicago will be safe again, and soon.”

The president followed up those remarks by falsely declaring, in all-caps, “Chicago is the murder capital of the world!”

Other cities in the U.S. have a higher murder rate than Chicago’s 24 per 100,000 people, including Memphis, St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Birmingham, and Philadelphia. Worldwide, currently, Colima, Mexico has been dubbed the “murder capital of the world,” with a rate nearly eight times higher than Chicago’s.

Just after Trump’s apparent bid to pave the way for a possible D.C.-style deployment into Chicago, a federal judge blasted the President.

“A federal judge ruled Tuesday that President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated federal law by using the US military to help carry out law enforcement activities in and around Los Angeles this summer,” CNN reported. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer “concluded that Trump’s use of thousands of federalized California National Guard members and US Marines to provide protection to federal agents during an aggressive immigration crackdown in the Los Angeles area ran afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th Century law that generally prohibits the use of troops for domestic law enforcement purposes.”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney, one of the first to report on Judge Breyer’s ruling, wrote that “Trump billed his deployment of troops to Los Angeles, starting in early June, as a way of bolstering immigration enforcement efforts amid protests in the city against the president’s deportation agenda. Though Trump has now withdrawn all but 300 of those troops, he is mulling sending troops to other major cities, such as Chicago.”

Responding to the Judge’s ruling, Fox News co-host Jessica Tarlov noted, “Get ready for this to happen when Trump deploys the Guard to Chicago.”

CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere observed, “this is a court win for Newsom that could have a wider effect as Trump looks at more National Guard deployments.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

The Summer Of Invasion: Trump Deploys Our Military As A Political Weapon

The Summer Of Invasion: Trump Deploys Our Military As A Political Weapon

This season is shaping up to be the summer of invasion in the U.S. But the invader is not a foreign power—it’s the President of the United States. Since June, when Trump purported to federalize several thousand California National Guard troops and deploy 700 Marines to Los Angeles for immigration enforcement, he has pushed to put U.S. military personnel on American streets. He’s testing limits, probing for weak seams in the law, and laying the groundwork to blow them wide open.

In California, a 3-day bench trial wraps today before Judge Charles Breyer to determine whether the Administration’s actions—over the objection of state officials—were lawful. Earlier this week, Trump announced with fanfare a military presence in Washington, D.C., and floated plans to “branch out” to other cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Oakland—all Democratic strongholds with large African-American populations. Now comes the latest: a 600-person “rapid response” unit the Pentagon has billed as a nationwide quick-reaction force—functionally, a standing crowd-control team in camouflage.

In Washington, Trump startled local officials by declaring that federal offices from a dozen agencies will moonlight as cops on the beat. FBI agents will be doing night patrols—an unglamorous and wearisome assignment that carries the added bonus, for Trump, of humiliating them.

He painted the capital as a hellscape “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” with historically high murder rates. This brazenly false litany went straight into the Trump Hall of Fame for lies. In reality, violent crime in the District is at its low point this century and still falling.

And just this morning, Trump announced that he will ask Congress — as required under the terms of the D.C. Home Rule Act — for an “indefinite extension” of his federal takeover of D.C.

If this sounds like the plot of a bad dystopian novel, that’s because deploying the military as domestic police is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. From Tiananmen Square to Budapest in 1956, images of soldiers confronting civilians—armed not just with rifles but with the machinery of the state—are the stuff of governments bent on keeping citizens afraid and in line.

The Law: Posse Comitatus

The Anglo-American legal tradition has long held that the military should not serve as domestic police—a principle born of centuries of bitter experience with standing armies turned inward.

The chief U.S. embodiment of that principle is the Posse Comitatus Act (“PCA”), which makes it a crime to use the Army or Air Force to execute domestic laws unless the Constitution or Congress expressly allows it (18 U.S.C. § 1385). Parallel restrictions limit the Navy and Marine Corps by Defense Department policy, and other provisions bar military personnel from direct participation in searches, seizures, and arrests.

The political origins of the PCA are telling. During Reconstruction, federal troops protected freed Black Americans and enforced civil rights in the face of violent resistance. By the mid-1870s, Southern Democrats pushed fiercely to end military oversight. After the contested 1876 election and the “Compromise of 1877,” the last troops left the South. Posse Comitatus followed soon after as a legislative lock on that bargain: no domestic policing by the Army unless Congress clearly says so.

“A law meant to stop the Army from protecting freed slaves may now be the last defense against a president using the Army to erode everyone’s rights.”

The irony is stark: the Act sprang from backlash that entrenched Jim Crow, but its core safeguard—keeping the military out of routine civilian law enforcement—has endured precisely because Americans understand the danger of blurring soldier and policeman.

Emergencies and the “Prerogative”

The premise of the PCA is straightforward: civilian policing belongs to civilians, bound by constitutional limits. Soldiers answer to a different chain of command and are trained for war, not neighborhood order.

Yet democracies can’t operate on absolutes. Genuine emergencies—moments when the political community’s survival is at stake—can require bending legal guardrails, briefly and transparently. Stable democracies recognize a narrow safety valve for extraordinary powers to quell existential threats.

In his Second Treatise on Government, John Locke called this the “prerogative”: acting outside the law to preserve society itself. The corollary is crucial—it must be narrowly justified by immediate necessity, and the leader bears full accountability. Political theorist Michael Walzer adds that a leader invoking extreme powers should expect sanction afterward, so the exception never becomes precedent.

Lincoln’s point and Locke’s warning converge: emergencies may require extraordinary action—but never a standing license to rule outside the law.

The Narrow Legal Avenues

U.S. law contains only a few functional exceptions to the PCA, allowing the President to call in federal troops or federalize the National Guard when the chips are truly down. Trump has repeatedly invoked these in an effort to extend military control over some 15 million Americans in major Democratic strongholds—pointedly ignoring cities in red states with the nation’s highest homicide rates.

For example, in California, he relied on 10 U.S.C. § 12406, which permits such action only in cases of invasion, rebellion, or inability to enforce federal law in the courts. The trial before Judge Breyer will likely hinge on whether the Administration can prove any of those triggers.

Trump’s method is to take these narrow seams and drive a tank through them—recasting ordinary unrest as “national emergencies” and stretching statutory language past recognition. It’s the classic strongman playbook: declare a threat, suspend normal rules, and normalize the suspension until it becomes the rule. The political justifications often defy basic facts, as with his D.C. crime claims.

In the legal challenges ahead, the central question will be how much deference the courts will grant. In California, Judge Breyer initially stayed Trump’s order, finding the situation in L.A. did not meet the statutory definition of a “rebellion”—a determination for the court to make. The Ninth Circuit reversed, saying he should have been more deferential to Trump’s reading of events.

That gap will be the battleground for Trump’s martial ambitions. The courts, particularly the Supreme Court, traditionally give presidents wide leeway. But in Trump’s case, that risks enabling lies to greenlight a constitutional collapse.

The danger in giving him broad license—which he doubtless will abuse—is that it would create a standing power to send in troops whenever and wherever he chooses. That is a giant step toward dictatorship.

It’s not hard to see the endgame: a contested election Trump calls “fraudulent” becomes an “emergency” justifying troops to “restore order.” That way lies totalitarian rule.

We are at a hinge moment. The PCA, the Insurrection Act, and related laws assumed presidents would use emergency powers in good faith. That assumption no longer holds.

Trump has made clear he will misrepresent facts and exploit every procedural crack to consolidate power. If Congress and the courts don’t rise to the challenge, we could follow Hungary’s path, where a once-democracy now exists in a near-permanent state of emergency under Viktor Orbán.

The judges in these cases face a stark choice: one path leads back to the constitutional balance that has kept troops out of domestic policing for nearly 150 years. The other leads, step by calibrated step, to a system in which the president governs with soldiers at his side and citizens under their watch.

And we, in turn, face a call to action: to push back with everything we have against the day when tanks—not laws—decide our political fate.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

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