President Trump warned on Tuesday military officers for the best classification of the country who could go to “war” with US citizens, indicating a great escalation in the current legal battle on their authority to deploy soldiers in the US police streets.
“What they have done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles: they are very insecure places, and we are going to straighten them one by one,” Trump said in one direction to Top Brass in Quantico, Va. “That is a war too. It is a war from the inside.”
The commanders must use US cities as “training gardens,” said the president.
Trump's words caused an instant setback. Oregon has already presented a legal challenge, and the experts expressed concern that what the president described is against the law.
“He is suggesting that they learn how to become warriors in American cities,” said Daniel C. Schwartz, former general advisor of the National Security Agency, who directs the legal team of national security leaders for the United States. “That should scare everyone. It is also boldly illegal.”
The use of soldiers to help with federal immigration raids and the control of crowds in the protests and in another way to enforce civil laws has been an argument point with the mayors of the big cities and the blue state governors for months, beginning with the deployment of thousands of federalized National Guard troops and hundreds of marines to Los Angeles in early June.
That deployment was illegal, a federal judge ruled last month. In an abrasing decision of 52 pages, the judge of the United States District Court, Charles R. Breyer, prohibited the soldiers under Trump's command to carry out tasks of application of the law in California, warning of a “force of the National Police with the president as his boss.”
However, hundreds of troops remained in the streets of Los Angeles, while the matter was under litigation. With the case that it still moves through the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, hundreds more will now arrive at Portland, Oregon, and, according to the reports, they are in Chicago, in all the objections of state and local leaders.
“The isolated threats to federal property should not be enough to guarantee this type of response,” said Eric J. Segall, professor at the Faculty of Law at Georgia State University. “The threat has to be really serious, and I don't think the Trump administration has presented that case.”
Others agreed.
“I am tremendously worried,” said Erwin Chemendnsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law Faculty. “Using the army for the application of domestic law is something characteristic of authoritarian regimes.”
The Oregon Attorney General filed a lawsuit on Monday claiming that the president had applied an “pretext without foundation and hyperbolic” to send to the troops. The officials in Illinois, where the Trump administration has turned Chicago into a focal point of application of immigration, are also ready to present a challenge.
Although the facts in the field are legally different, Oregon's demand is a close copy pela of the Battle of California that makes its way through the courts, experts said.
“That is exactly the model they are following,” said Carl Tobias, professor at the Richmond University Faculty.
Unlike the controversial decision to send National Guard troops to Washington, DC, in August, the deployments of Los Angeles and Portland have been based on an esoteric subsection of the law, which allows the president to federalize the troops on the objection of state governments in certain limited cases.
California's challenge to these justifications so far has been carved in the Court, with the 9th circuit finding in June that the judges must be “highly deferens” for the interpretation of the president's facts in the field. That case is in revision for a larger panel of judges.
In a memorandum presented on Monday, the attached attorney general of California Christopher D. Hu warned that the decision had emboldened the administration of deploying troops in other places, citing Portland as an example.
“The defendants apparently believe that the June 7 memorandum, issued in response to events in Los Angeles, indefinitely authorizes the deployment of National Guard troops anywhere in the country, for virtually any reason,” Hu wrote. “It is time to put an end to this unprecedented experiment in the application of militarized law and the recruitment of the National Guard troops outside the close conditions allowed by Congress.”
Experts warn that the dark law of the nineteenth century in the heart of the debate is vague and “full of lagoons”, worrying some who see the deployment repeated as a slope slippery to generalized military occupations and long term.
“That has not been our experience at least since the civil war,” Schwartz said. “If we get used to seeing the uniformed service personnel in our cities, we run the risk of not objecting, and when we stop objecting it, it becomes a norm.”
The joint speech to military leaders in Virginia on Tuesday fueled these fears.
“We are under invasion from the inside,” the president admonished the generals and admirals gathered in the auditorium. “It is not different from a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don't use uniforms.”
He averaged the move in August to create a “fast reaction force” to “calm civil disturbances”, a folded decree in its executive order expanding the deployment of DC troops.
“George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, George Bush and others used the armed forces to maintain domestic order and peace,” Trump said. “Now they like to say, oh, you can't use the army.”
These historical cases have some important differences with 2025, experts say.
When President Cleveland sent troops to break a railway strike and reduce the violence of the mafia against Chinese immigrants, he invoked the insurrection law. So did another 15 presidents, including Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and George Hw Bush.
Experts emphasize that Trump has not used the act, despite mostly verifying it in his first mandate.
The Secretary of Defense, Pete Heghseth, greatly avoided the issue of “enemies inside”, instead of extolling the “warrior spirit” in the heart of his military reform project. He criticized what he saw as the corrupt culture of the modern army, as well as his aesthetic deficiencies.
“It's exhausting to look at the combat formations and see fat troops,” Hegseth said. “It is completely unacceptable to see general and fat admirals in the pentagon halls. It is a bad appearance.”
As the deployments multiply throughout the country, experts said they were observing what the Appeals Division will decide and, ultimately, the Supreme Court.
“It will be a evidence for the Supreme Court,” said Schwartz. “Whether they are willing to continue allowing this president to do what he wants to do with clear violation of constitutional principles or if they will restrict it.”
