Members of the Texas National Guard arrive on Oct. 7, 2025, at the Army Reserve Training Center in Elwood, Ill. (Brian Cassella, Chicago Tribune/TNS)
National Guard troops will be leaving Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Ore., President Donald Trump announced Wednesday in a post on Truth Social.
The deployments will end — for now, anyway — “despite the fact that CRIME has greatly reduced by having these great Patriots in those cities, and ONLY by that fact,” Trump said.
“We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again — Only a question of time!” he said.
The president has made fighting crime a centerpiece of his second term, but the administration’s push to deploy the troops in Democrat-led cities has been met with legal challenges at nearly every turn.
Troops had already left Los Angeles after the deployment earlier this year as part of a broader crackdown on not only crime but also immigration. National Guard troops had been sent to Chicago and Portland, but they were never on the streets as legal challenges played out.
The Trump administration has portrayed the cities as war-ravaged and lawless amid its crackdown on illegal immigration. Officials in the affected cities and states have said military intervention was not needed and that federal involvement is inflaming the situation.
In September, the president suggested to a collection of senior military officers that American cities should be used as “training grounds” to combat an “invasion from within.” Trump spoke of fighting foreign enemies alongside domestic ones that are “more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms” and doubled down on sending the Guard into U.S. cities.
But legal challenges, including many losses in court, had complicated the administration’s plans.
The Supreme Court in December refused to allow the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area. The order was not a final ruling but was a significant and rare setback by the high court for the president’s efforts.
Hundreds of troops from California and Oregon were deployed to Portland, but a federal judge barred them from going on the streets. A judge permanently blocked the deployment of National Guard troops there in November after a three-day trial.
California National Guard troops had been removed from the streets of Los Angeles by Dec. 15 after a court ruling. But an appeals court had paused a separate part of the order that required control of the Guard to return to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In a Tuesday court filing, the Trump administration said it was no longer seeking a pause in that part of the order. That paves the way for the California National Guard troops to fully return to state control after Trump federalized the Guard in June.
Trump also ordered the deployment of the Tennessee National Guard to Memphis in September, a move supported by the state’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee and senators. A Tennessee judge blocked the use of the Guard, siding with Democratic state and local officials who sued.
Contributing: The Associated Press; Tribune News Service