Trump, in federalizing the
California Guard in June, invoked a statute,
Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, that allows him to call National Guard members into federal service under certain conditions, including a state of rebellion against the federal government.
Federal forces have been operating under the same
Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least five states — Arizona,
California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — in service of the Trump administration’s
anti-immigrant agenda.
Soldiers from the Ohio and Tennessee National Guard are deputized at the D.C. Armory as part of D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force in Washington on Aug. 21, 2025. Photo: Pfc. Nina Cortez/U.S. Army/Joint Task Force DC/DVIDS
Many more troops, like the state National Guard forces deployed to Washington, D.C., are operating under so-called Title 32 status, meaning they are under state, rather than federal, control, unlike deployments in
Los Angeles and across the
southern border. With no governor to report to, the D.C. National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general, to the secretary of the Army, to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, to the president.
Under the Constitution, the federal government doesn’t possess actual domestic police powers, Joseph Nunn, an attorney with the Brennan Center who focuses on the domestic role of the U.S. military, explained, noting that the absence of an insurrection or obstructions to the execution of federal law limits what troops are legally allowed to do in most U.S. cities.
“Most of what the administration has done in Washington, D.C., is not repeatable anywhere else.”
“In Chicago, there’s absolutely nothing that the administration can point to justify any kind of military deployment,” he told The Intercept. “Most of what the administration has done in Washington, D.C., is not repeatable anywhere else, because the federal government has a uniquely high level of authority over the district that it doesn’t have in the states. To the extent that Trump is talking about sending the National Guard into Chicago to take over local law enforcement, he can’t do that. The president cannot use the military or federal law enforcement or any other means to take over municipal policing or crime prevention in a state, or in a city within a state.”
Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and other Illinois Democrats have pushed back against Trump’s threats. “This is not about fighting crime,” Pritzker said. “This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.”
Trump repeatedly denigrated the nation’s third-largest city on Tuesday. “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!” he
posted on TruthSocial, also
calling it “the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far.” This is not true.
FBI data from 2024 shows that many U.S. cities have much higher murder rates than Chicago, including Birmingham, Alabama; St. Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Tennessee; Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio; Kansas City, Missouri; Shreveport, Louisiana; South Fulton, Georgia; and Little Rock, Arkansas, among others. Murder rates in some cities in Mexico, Ecuador, and South Africa in recent years have been much higher still, according to
one study, and those are dwarfed by the number of
civilian deaths in the cities of the Gaza Strip.
“It is not a coincidence that the MAGA coalition is targeting Democrat-run cities like D.C. and Chicago with Black leadership. ”
“Expanding the military domestically to occupy American cities and suppress internal dissent is textbook authoritarianism,” Homestead, of the National Priorities Project, told The Intercept. “It is not a coincidence that the MAGA coalition is targeting Democrat-run cities like D.C. and Chicago with Black leadership. We should not underestimate the racial component of this strategy — which is helping energize the Republican base while providing a distraction from the unpopular Medicaid cuts and unreleased Epstein files.”
Trump has
threatened military occupations of other cities led by Democratic mayors including Baltimore, Oakland, and New York City.
Dozens of Chicago pastors published an
open letter to Trump on Tuesday saying that instead of deploying troops, Trump should focus on socioeconomic inequality in the city. “The real violence in Chicago — like real violence across America — is not the violence of the streets but the violence of policy: underfunded schools, disappearing jobs, healthcare deserts, food apartheid, and a criminal justice system that treats poverty like a capital offense,”
wrote the faith leaders.
Housing all of Chicago’s homeless people would cost about $383,000 per day, Homestead told The Intercept, noting that the sum equaled roughly one-quarter of the expense of a deployment of 3,000 Guard members to Chicago.
The Pentagon
claims it does not know the costs of National Guard deployments nationwide, leaving taxpayers on the hook for inestimable costs. “We won’t know the cost until the mission concludes,” a defense official told The Intercept, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Another defense official expressed skepticism of this claim of total ignorance, intimating that the Pentagon does, or at least could, have an idea of the expense. “The concern is they don’t want anyone pinning them down, saying, ‘Oh, you said it’s going to cost this much, but actually it cost a lot more.’”
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Trump’s troop deployment in Washington is already estimated to have a price tag of more than
$1 million per day, based on the reported deployment of around 2,100 Guard members to D.C. On Tuesday, Washington’s Mayor Muriel Bowser
opened the door for federal forces to continue policing the district
indefinitely, which could push costs into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. National Guard troops have been seen doing custodial work, including picking up
500 bags’ worth of trash, removing graffiti, and raking leaves around the capital.
In June, the estimated cost of deploying the first 2,000 Guard members and 700 Marines to Los Angeles was
$134 million,
according to the Pentagon’s acting comptroller/CFO, Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell. The deployment eventually ballooned to around
5,500 troops but has since shrunk to around
300. The Pentagon refuses to update the estimate. “Nothing additional for you at this time,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told The Intercept when asked about the current costs.
More than 10,000
troops are deploying or have already deployed to the southern border this year, according to Northern Command, bolstering approximately 2,500 service members who were already supporting U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s border security mission. But the true number of troops deployed may be
markedly higher. U.S. Northern Command has no running tally of how many troops have been dispatched, according to a spokesperson.
The costs associated with these troops are being kept secret but are expected to skyrocket. Sec. 20011 of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act appropriates $1 billion, available through September 30, 2029, “for the deployment of military personnel in support of border operations, operations and maintenance activities in support of border operations, counter-narcotics and counter-transnational criminal organization mission support, the operation of national defense areas and construction in national defense areas, and the temporary detention of migrants on Department of Defense installations.”
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the potential cost of domestic troop deployments running into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
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