For months, President Donald Trump has described, with dubious evidence, some of the nation’s major cities as unsafe — ones largely run by Democrats with Black mayors at the helm. As Trump continues to forcefully expand his federal military deployments, Black and Brown New Yorkers and legislators can’t help but wonder if their city is in the crosshairs.
They also wonder what position New York City Mayor Eric Adams is taking.
The thought of soldiers taking over city streets has occurred to Adams. So far, he has said he is opposed, but wouldn’t mind federal assistance in other areas.
“Collaboration with state and federal law enforcement has always been a key part of our public safety strategy,” said Adams in a statement. “We do not need a deployment of the National Guard to our city. Instead, we hope to continue to work with the federal government to stop the flow of illegal guns to our city from other cities and states. We remain committed to keeping New Yorkers safe through smart, precision-driven policing.”
In June, Trump federalized the National Guard in Los Angeles to squash immigration protests. By August, he moved to take control of Washington, D.C., ordering troops onto the residential streets around Capitol Hill, which was allowed because it is designated as a federal district.
Other cities Trump has either raided, tried to move on, or spoken about sending troops to are also all Black-led, including Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore, Oakland, New Orleans, and St. Louis.
Trump’s rhetoric about “manufactured emergencies” has long echoed conservatives who have denounced cities, especially those that are majority Black, as “lawless or crime-ridden and in need of outside intervention.”
Statistically speaking, major crimes have trended down for decades and there are fewer instances of gun violence this year citywide compared to last year, according to NYPD stats. The issue of shootings and other violent crimes is by no means eradicated, and even warranted New York State Governor Kathy Hochul to order members of the National Guard into the city’s subway system to help the NYPD with patrols in March 2024. However, Hochul has denounced Trump’s sending troops to the city very vocally.
“New York City is the safest big city in America and home to the best police force in the world, and our results speak for themselves: Crime is plummeting across the five boroughs, with major violent crimes reaching record lows,” said Adams.
This year, Adams’s office rolled out NYPD Quality of Life Teams, or “Q-Teams,” an initiative to police issues like noise, parking, homeless encampments, and public drug use citywide.
Despite Adams’s brand as the candidate cracking down on crime, and his at times amicable relationship with the Trump administration and Republicans due to his immigration agenda, or with law enforcement because of his background as an NYPD officer, there’s no real guarantee that the city will be safeguarded against the whims of the president.
On September 10, Adams quietly announced that the city filed an amicus brief to show support for California Governor Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit, Newsom v. Trump, against the federal government’s unlawful deployment of the National Guard in LA. The brief asserts that there was no rebellion toward the federal government that justified a military takeover or any “lawless mob violence” under the Constitution’s First Amendment right to protest and free speech, and that soldiers actually impeded the LAPD’s ability to do their jobs.
“President Trump’s unprecedented deployment of the combination of military troops and federal agents, so federal forces, to our cities is unnecessary,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Security Project, in a press briefing. “It’s inflammatory and it is a dangerous abuse of power.”
Shamsi said the escalating threats and use of troops to police everyday citizens are profoundly un-American, and are creating an atmosphere of fear and hostility. “There’s tremendously strong resistance from Americans about intrusion — military intrusion into civilian affairs — and that has a very deep root in our history,” said Shamsi.
This also comes days after a Supreme Court ruling allows the Department of Homeland Security to use racial profiling practices against Latinos and Spanish-speakers in LA and surrounding counties. The wanton use of “unlawful and violent measures,” stop-and-frisk methods, raids, and “snatchings” by federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in D.C. and LA has had a “demonstrably devastating impact on immigrant communities,” said Chandra S. Bhatnagar, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California.
The mayor’s office said that they don’t want to be “alarmist,” but are taking every threat of deployment seriously and have “contingency plans.” They would prefer not to publicize these plans at this time, said the mayor’s office.
The Mayor’s office said they have considered how a military presence could affect the city’s Black and Brown communities that already have fraught relationships with the NYPD, due to historic over-policing and the killings of unarmed Black men.
Trymaine Lee, a veteran reporter who wrote “A Thousand Ways to Die,” explained that Trump’s claims about urban gun violence and crime are history repeating itself in Black communities.
“This is, as they say, more of the same,” said Lee in an interview with the Amsterdam News. “We’ve been used, abused; our pain has been weaponized and politicized from the very beginning. The fear-mongering. There is no more dangerous figure in American history than the Black man in the white imagination. It’s no shock that Trump is trying to use Black people to stoke fear, and also feed these kinds of fascist impulses that this administration has. It’s sad that we should not be shocked. The playbook has already been drawn, but what’s concerning is that it’s going to beget more violence.”
Alaizah Koorji, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), also spoke recently about their organization’s amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Trump, which emphasizes the harms of militarized policing for Black people in the U.S.
“History is clear. Militarized policing does not improve community safety and, in fact, can significantly harm Black people and other people of color, who already experience rampant police abuse. The deployment of National Guard troops is no different, and no amount of fabricated crime emergencies will change that,” said Koorji in a statement. “Allowing a military occupation to continue in our nation’s capital is counterproductive to public safety and contrary to the rule of law.”
New York City is a differently run municipality than D.C., in that legally, there’s no precedent to send troops unless they are invited in, but the mayor’s office said they do plan to take more legal action against a deployment if necessary.
“New York city and state leaders have been clear that the forced deployment of National Guard and other federal law enforcement is unwelcome and unnecessary in our city,” said Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the City Council’s committee on criminal justice. “These continued threats from the Trump administration to send military and federal agents are about making a political statement, not improving public safety. The Council is preparing with our partners to respond to any attempt to attack working-class communities.”
However, a tense mayoral campaign to replace Adams has stymied some people’s belief that the city is prepared should troops arrive at the gates.
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said the fear mongering around police and crime issues in the city goes back to Adams’s first run for mayor in 2021. Reynoso has backed Adams’s opponent in the race, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.
“For me, it’s a larger conversation. We’ve had middle-of-the-road centrist Democrats [who] have made policing and fear the central component to their campaigns,” Reynoso said. “Eric Adams spent millions of dollars in his campaign originally to scare us, to show us, or to tell us, that this city is out of control on crime. He then spent the next three years telling people that it’s not as bad as they think it is, so he inserted fear into their hearts, and then he’s trying to pull back and change the message to say that New York City is safe. He already did his damage, and that work that he did during that campaign to sow fear of something that wasn’t necessarily happening is being used as fodder by Donald Trump.”
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