WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump to end the deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital. But the ruling is unlikely to be the final word by the courts, the president or local leaders in the contentious duel over the federal district.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb put her order on hold for 21 days to allow the Trump administration time to either remove the troops or appeal the decision. The ruling marks another flashpoint in the months-long legal battle between local leaders and the president over longstanding norms about whether troops can support law enforcement activities on American streets.
Trump issued an emergency order in the capital in August, federalizing the local police force and sending in National Guard troops from eight states and the District of Columbia. The order expired a month later but the troops remained.
The soldiers have patrolled Washington’s neighborhoods, monuments, train stations, and high-traffic streets. They have set up checkpoints on highways and supported federal agents in raids that have arrested hundreds of people, often for immigration-related infractions. They’ve also been assigned to pick up trash, guard sports events, conventions and concerts and have been seen taking selfies with tourists and residents alike.
The White House has said Trump’s deployment was legal and vowed to appeal the ruling.
Here’s what to know about the National Guard deployment in the nation’s capital.
The judge ruled the deployment was unlawful
District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed the lawsuit against the administration that led to Cobb’s ruling.
Cobb ruled that Trump’s troop deployment violated the governance of the capital for a variety of reasons, including that the president had taken powers that officially resided in Congress; that the federal district’s autonomy from other states had been violated; and that Trump had moved to make the troop deployment a possibly permanent fixture of the city.
“At its core, Congress has given the District rights to govern itself. Those rights are infringed upon when defendants approve, in excess of their statutory authority, the deployment of National Guard troops to the District,” Cobb wrote.
The judge also added that D.C. “suffers a distinct injury from the presence of out-of-state National Guard units” because “the Constitution placed the District exclusively under Congress’s authority to prevent individual states from exerting any influence over the nation’s capital.”
Cobb added that repeated extensions of the troop deployment by the National Guard into next year “could be read to suggest that the use of the (D.C. National Guard) for crime deterrence and public safety missions in the District may become longstanding, if not permanent.”
Troops won’t necessarily leave the capital following the ruling
The Trump administration has three weeks to appeal the decision and White House officials have already vowed to oppose it. Troops remained stationed around the city on Friday after the ruling came down.
Before the ruling, states with contingents in the capital had indicated their missions would wrap up around the end of November unless ordered otherwise by the administration. According to formal orders reviewed by The Associated Press, the Washington D.C. National Guard will be deployed to the nation’s capital through the end of February. One court document indicated that the contingent could stay into next summer.
Deployments in Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon and Chicago have each faced court challenges with divergent rulings. The administration has had to scale back its operations in Chicago and Portland while it appeals in both cases.
The White House stands by the deployment
The White House says the Guard’s presence in the capital is a central part of what it calls successful crime-fighting efforts. It dismissed the ruling as wrongly decided.
“President Trump is well within his lawful authority to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., to protect federal assets and assist law enforcement with specific tasks,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson. “This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of DC residents — to undermine the President’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in DC.”
That stands in contrast to what local D.C. leaders say.
Schwalb, the District’s attorney general, praised the judge’s decision and argued that the arrangement the president had sought for the city would weaken democratic principles.
“From the beginning, we made clear that the U.S. military should not be policing American citizens on American soil,” Schwalb said in a statement. “Normalizing the use of military troops for domestic law enforcement sets a dangerous precedent, where the President can disregard states’ independence and deploy troops wherever and whenever he wants, with no check on his military power.”
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has tried to strike a balance between working with some federal authorities and the opposition of some of her voters, has not publicly commented about the ruling.
States across the country have watched D.C.’s legal case play out
The case could have legal implications for Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to other cities across the country. Dozens of states had joined the case, with their support for each side split along party lines.
The District of Columbia has always had a unique relationship with the federal government. But the legal dispute in D.C. raises some similar questions over the president’s power to deploy troops to aid in domestic law enforcement activities and whether the National Guard can be mobilized indefinitely without the consent of local leaders.
Prior to the D.C. deployment, Trump in June mobilized National Guard troops in Los Angeles as some in the city protested against immigration enforcement activities. Since deploying troops to Washington, Trump has also dispatched National Guard troops to Chicago, Portland and Charlotte, with more cities expected to see deployments in the future.
The mostly Democratic governors and mayors who lead the cities and states in the administration’s crosshairs broadly oppose the deployments. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, in a November interview with the AP, warned of the “militarization of our American cities.” Pritzker and other Democratic governors have been among the most intense legal opponents to Trump’s troop deployments and federal agent surges nationwide.
Some Republican leaders have welcomed federal law enforcement intervention into their states and lent state resources and agents.
Yet some of Trump’s allies have expressed concern. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, chair of the Republican Governors Association, warned that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops without a state’s consent “sets a very dangerous precedent.”
