SCOTUSblog By Kelsey Dallas 10/28/2025
Since June, President Donald Trump has ordered several National Guard deployments within the United States, often against the wishes of the Democratic governors of the states where troops are being sent. The resulting legal battles have put a spotlight on the president’s authority to federalize troops and use them domestically. How far, exactly, does this power extend?
Here’s an overview of the legal backing behind Trump’s recent deployment orders.
Where has Trump sent the National Guard?In the past five months, Trump has sent or attempted to send National Guard troops to five cities led by Democrats: Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Portland, Oregon; Chicago; and Memphis, Tennessee. To justify the deployments, the president has pointed to the crime rates in those cities and the need to protect federal officials involved in immigration enforcement. For example, Trump’s Aug. 11 memorandum on mobilizing the District of Columbia National Guard said the city is “under siege from violent crime,” and that “
t is a point of national disgrace that Washington, D.C., has a violent crime rate that is higher than some of the most dangerous places in the world.”
Trump’s deployment orders have led to multiple legal battles. In L.A., Portland, and Chicago, the disputes primarily center on the president’s authority to federalize National Guard troops – which are traditionally under state control – and send them to U.S. cities, even after governors declined the president’s request to order such deployments. In Memphis, the conflict is between the Tennessee officials who support the deployment and those who do not, with members of the latter group challenging Gov. Bill Lee’s decision to carry out Trump’s deployment plans. In D.C., Trump has direct command over the city’s National Guard, so the key question in a lawsuit brought by the D.C. attorney general is not whether the president can deploy any troops there, but under what circumstances Trump can bring in troops from other states to supplement the local force.
What authority has Trump invoked?
The Constitution does not grant the president the authority to call military troops into domestic federal service. Article I, § 8 instead gives this power to Congress, which is tasked with “calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” Once Congress has issued the call, the president has the authority to command the troops under Article 2.
Just four years after the Constitution was ratified, Congress enacted the Militia Act of 1792, which gave the president the power to independently call troops into federal service to quell a foreign invasion or domestic insurrection or to stop the obstruction of the laws of the United States. This act allowed President George Washington to call up and lead state militia forces during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, and it is a precursor to the laws at issue in the ongoing legal battles over Trump’s deployment plans.
In a June 7 memorandum, Trump cited one such statute when he laid out his case for his authority to deploy the National Guard to U.S. cities. In that memo, he pointed to 10 U.S.C. § 12406, originally passed in 1903, which allows the president to “call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary” to stop an “invasion by a foreign nation,” combat a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion” within the U.S., or “execute the laws of the United States” with regular forces.
In considering the challenges to the deployments in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, federal judges have considered whether conditions in these cities met one of the latter two criteria – that is, whether they constituted a rebellion or something near a rebellion and whether officials were able to uphold U.S. laws without National Guard troops present. The Trump administration has pointed to protests, including violent confrontations with federal immigration officials, to justify the president’s invocation of Section 12406, while challengers have either said that the administration is using past conflict to justify new deployments or is generally overstating the size and violence of current protests.
The Chicago deployment is on hold since a U.S. district judge there held that it wasn’t “called for” because the situation on the ground didn’t meet either of those thresholds (though there is little case law on what constitutes such a threshold), and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit agreed with that assessment.
More: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/10/the-presidents-power-to-deploy-troops-domestically-an-explainer/
