Developing: As many as 1,700 National Guardsmen from 19 states are expected to mobilize for President Trump’s immigration crackdown, Fox reported this weekend, citing defense and White House officials.
Guard units are expected from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Their assistance with Homeland Security officials is currently expected to run through mid-November.
The soldiers are expected to assist with “personal data collection, fingerprinting, DNA swabbing and photographing of personnel in ICE custody,” an official told Fox.
The president is threatening to widen his military deployments to more U.S. cities in the coming weeks, including New York as well as Baltimore, and Chicago, whose states’ governors, Wes Moore and JB Pritzker, are rising leaders in the Democratic party.
A Chicago deployment is already being planned inside the Pentagon, where the Washington Post reports military strategists have spent the last several weeks mapping out how to help Trump’s “crack down on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration, in a model that could later be used in other major cities.” Indeed, “I think Chicago will be our next. And then we’ll help with New York,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
Illinois Gov. Pritzker objected to the development Sunday evening, writing on social media, “There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the [Illinois National Guard], deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”
“Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he’s causing families,” Pritzker wrote. “We’ll continue to follow the law, stand up for the sovereignty of our state, and protect Illinoisans.”
Earlier that day, Trump threatened to “send in the ‘troops’” to Baltimore “and quickly clean up the Crime.” He also alleged on social media Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s “record on Crime” is “a very bad one, unless he fudges his figures on crime like many of the other ‘Blue States’ are doing.”
So Moore invited Trump to join him in a walk through Baltimore in September “at a date of your choosing,” according to a letter sent Thursday (PDF). Moore also touted improved annual crime statistics for the city since taking office in 2023. But as illustrated by the federal takeover of the D.C. police on Aug. 11 despite crime at a 30-year low, the Trump White House does not recognize statistics that don’t fit its framing of Democrat-run cities.
“As President, I would much prefer that he clean up this crime disaster before I go there for a walk,” Trump replied to Gov. Moore’s invitation on social media.
In case you missed it: Trump vowed to patrol Washington by foot last Thursday alongside troops and police. But “after addressing officers and military personnel who delivered hamburgers and pizza, no patrol was carried out and he returned to the White House,” Politico reminds readers.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott didn’t close the door to federal assistance; but he did say “additional resources” could be helpful for the city’s ATF, DEA and FBI field offices. However, he cautioned on social media Friday, “if Trump wants to roll into Baltimore purely to stage a photo op and spew racist narratives about Black-led cities, I speak for the vast majority of our residents when I say: ‘We are not interested,’ as part of a list of ‘commitments’ the city wants to see from the Trump administration.”
Trump’s son, Donald Jr., said he wants to expand the federal takeover of cities “to Portland, [and] Seattle, [and] the other craphole cities of the country,” he said Thursday in an interview with Newsmax.
Second opinion: Trump is using the military to “intimidate Americans in our own communities,” said Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
Update: National Guard troops in Washington will now be armed with either M17 pistols or M4 rifles, defense officials said over the weekend. Reuters has a bit more.
“Phony emergency,” is how the American Civil Liberties Union describes Trump’s Guard deployments and federal takeover of Washington. “The president relied on a phony emergency as an excuse to overstep his power, and now we have a real emergency—the threat of an unnecessary and disorienting flood of armed military forces on D.C. streets,” Monica Hopkins of the ACLU said in a statement.
“No matter what uniform they wear, federal agents and military troops are bound by the Constitution, including our rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, due process, and safeguards against unlawful searches and seizures,” she said, and stressed, “If troops or federal agents violate our rights, they must be held accountable.”
Related: New research shows white Republicans found accusations of voter fraud against a fictional Black city considerably more believable than accusations against a fictional white city, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. And as other studies have shown, “white Americans with higher existing racial bias were much more likely to believe fraud accusations than others,” Kevin Morris and Chelsea Jones write.
Why it matters: “[T]hese lies are grounded in, and reinforce racist attitudes and tie into white America’s long-standing fears of real multiracial democracy,” they write and warn, “As Trump and other influential voices seek to push untrue narratives about Americans of color, we should be vigilant to how this work might seed the next Big Lie and further erode democratic values.”
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1950, President Truman ordered Army Secretary Frank Pace to seize control of the nation’s railroads to avert a labor strike during the Korean War.
Around the Defense Department
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth fired Defense Intelligence Agency chief, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, whose “initial intelligence assessment of U.S. damage to Iranian nuclear sites angered President Donald Trump,” the Washington Post and Associated Press reported this weekend. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told the New York Times that Kruse’s firing was linked to that Iranian strike assessment. “The firing of yet another senior national security official underscores the Trump administration’s dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country,” Warner said.
Hegseth also fired Navy Reserve chief Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore and Rear Adm. Milton Sands, the head of Naval Special Warfare Command. “No reasons were given for their firings, the latest in a series of steps targeting military leaders, intelligence officials and other perceived critics of Trump, who has demanded loyalty across the government,” AP notes.
Additional reading:
Around the world
Ukrainian sharpshooters in prop-driven training aircraft are downing Russian drones. With Western interceptor missiles so scarce and costly, the country’s defenders have found success going after Orlan and Zala reconnaissance drones, and Shahed explosive drones, with riflemen firing from the back seats of Soviet-era Yak-52s. The two members of one particular aircrew “have flown around 300 combat missions as part of the 11th Army Aviation Brigade and downed almost half the unit’s total of 120 drones eliminated” in the past year, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
Factoid: “Last month, around 11% of all long-range drones launched by Russia got through Ukraine’s air defenses, according to data analyzed by the Center for Information Resilience, a U.K.-based open-source investigations organization.” That’s in part because of unceasing innovation by the Russians, who have begun equipping drones with rear-facing cameras to detect pursuing aircraft and missiles. Read on at the Journal, which has pictures of the planes and crews, here.
P.S. Russia’s doing it too. In May, The War Zone reported on Russia’s efforts to equip its own Yaks with small arms and sensor pods for the counter-drone mission.
S. Korean president to meet Trump at White House today. Lee Jae-myung told reporters on the way to his first summit of the new administration that he is pushing back against U.S. efforts to enlist Seoul’s help in focusing on China. “This is not an issue we can easily agree with,” Lee said, as reported by NPR.
Background: “The U.S. has some 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea. For about two decades, it has called for “strategic flexibility” to deploy them to meet security challenges away from the Korean Peninsula. And it wants South Korea’s support, including potentially sending troops to other countries and regions. South Korea has previously sent soldiers to assist the U.S. in Vietnam and Iraq. But it considers North Korea, not China, its main threat, and does not want to get dragged into a conflict with China over, for example, Taiwan,” writes NPR, here.
CSIS: North Korea has a secret missile base near China. A base in Sinpung, 17 miles from the Chinese border, likely houses a brigade-sized unit equipped with six to nine nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles and their mobile launchers, according to a report issued last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“These missiles pose a potential nuclear threat to East Asia and the continental United States,” the report said. “Current assessments are that during times of crisis or war, these launchers and missiles will exit the base, meet special warhead storage, transportation units, and conduct launch operations from dispersed pre-surveyed sites.”
The report cites informed sources, as well as declassified documents, satellite images and open-source information, according to the WSJ.
And lastly: Taiwan plans a big defense-spending hike under U.S. pressure. Reuters: “Taiwan plans to boost defence spending by a fifth next year, surpassing 3% of gross domestic product, as it invests billions more in new equipment to better face down China and convince the United States it takes seriously calls to bolster its military.”
Read the full article here