In recent decades, debates over gun violence have followed a predictable pattern. There’s a mass shooting or a spike in crime (either perceived or real). Progressives push for stricter gun laws, while conservatives invoke the right to bear arms as a protection against government overreach.
Now, with President Donald Trump preparing to send the National Guard into American cities under the flimsy guise of fighting crime, that overreach is no longer theoretical. Americans of all stripes must resist this illegal and dangerous action.
There is scant legal authority for Trump’s plan.
As controversy continued to swirl around the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Trump said he was considering following suit in other cities, starting with Chicago. Reports quickly surfaced that Pentagon officials were developing a plan to deploy guardsmen — or possibly active-duty military — to Illinois.
While the scope of the planned deployment remains uncertain, the president’s comments and social media posts have focused on claims of rampant crime in Chicago and (perhaps not coincidentally) other Democratic-led cities such as New York, Baltimore and Oakland. Those assertions mirror Trump’s Aug. 11 executive order regarding D.C., which alleged — contrary to official statistics — that crime there is “out of control.”
Trump’s push to deploy troops in other U.S. cities rests on a trifecta of flawed facts, dubious legality and obvious partisanship.
Crime data from the first half of 2025 shows gun violence in Chicago is down 25% compared with 2024, and it’s down 41% from the average reported between 2020 and 2024. The city has seen a significant reduction in homicides in 2025, as well. To put it into even clearer context, Chicago’s violent crime rates are below the 2019 levels that preceded the nationwide increase in 2020-2021 associated with the Covid pandemic.
Crime still exists, of course, but the trends are largely moving in the right direction.
Furthermore, the National Guard is not a suitable instrument for policing American societies. The National Guard is trained primarily for military operations and disaster relief, not for civilian policing. By contrast, Chicago police officers undergo six months of intensive training before gaining years of valuable experience walking the beat. Throwing guardsmen into law enforcement roles sets them up for failure by diverting them from the missions they are best equipped to achieve.
There is also scant legal authority for Trump’s plan. The National Guard has a dual mission, serving state and federal roles. While governors primarily command their state’s guard to address emergencies within their borders, federal law allows the president to activate them for federal missions. However, there is no authority to federalize a state’s guard to reduce violent crime, which is a state and local issue. As Elizabeth Goitein, a leading scholar on national security and presidential emergency powers at the Brennan Center for Justice, observed, in Chicago “Trump is on even thinner legal ice with this plan than he is in Los Angeles and D.C.”
In fact, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Federal law makes it a crime, punishable by two years of prison, for willfully using any part of the military as a “posse comitatus” — a group to enforce the law. The act has narrow exceptions, most notably the Insurrection Act of 1807, which permits the president to use the military or federalize the National Guard in limited circumstances. But interpreting the Insurrection Act to apply to local crime would pervert the law and violate state sovereignty principles that date to our nation’s founding.
The president’s plans are nakedly partisan. Trump has openly targeted so-called “Democratic” cities while assailing the leadership of blue states. Meanwhile, cities with some of the highest violent crime rates in the country, such as Memphis, St. Louis and Cleveland, have been conspicuously spared his threats of federal takeover, presumably because they are in states that voted for Trump in 2024.
Trump’s push to deploy troops in other U.S. cities rests on a trifecta of flawed facts, dubious legality and obvious partisanship. Predictably, Trump rushed to declare victory in D.C., boasting that he had made the city safe again in just four days. On Monday, as he signed an executive order that expands the use of the National Guard for law enforcement purposes, Trump bragged he could “solve Chicago within one week, maybe less. But within one week we’ll have no crime in Chicago, like no crime in D.C.” This cycle of fear, self-promotion and fiction is classic Trump: Invent a crisis, declare himself the savior, then take a victory lap for “fixing” a problem that never existed to the degree he claimed. In just seven months, the Trump administration has already dragged us to numerous constitutional crises: from ignoring laws passed by Congress to defying federal courts to trying to rewrite the Constitution’s definition of citizenship. But now he is using the military to encroach on states’ rights and individual liberty. That goes to the heart of the Founding Fathers’ concerns about tyranny. Indeed, this threat is precisely the original purpose of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms expressly for á “well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” In 1833, Justice Joseph Story described the right to bear arms as the most vital safeguard of liberty — “a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers.” More recently, in District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia explained how the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to bear arms as a critical “safeguard against tyranny.” Yet, the same voices that cry tyranny when Congress debates assault-rifle restrictions — as well as Covid vaccines, mask mandates or climate change policy — are silent as federal troops are sent into cities against the will of their states. The irony is inescapable. As was always going to be the case, we instead must rely on the real guardrails of our democracy: constitutional limits, checks and balances and civilian control of the military. This is not about Chicago or any single city. Nor is it about crime and how we can further the universal goal of increasing public safety. It is about whether the president can continue to trample on the Constitution and ignore the rule of law to enact his policy — and more often his political — objectives. Each time we normalize that overreach, the line between democracy and authoritarianism grows fainter. Until one day — perhaps when we see the military patrolling the streets of American cities — it disappears.
Andrew Warren
Andrew Warren is senior counsel at Democracy Defenders Action. He previously was a prosecutor with the U.S. Justice Department and the elected district attorney in Tampa, Florida. 
