National guard troops sent to the nation’s capital will reportedly remain there through at least February.
The order was set to lapse at the end of November but was extended by Pete Hegseth, who leads the US Department of Defense. As of Wednesday, there are nearly 2,400 national guard troops in Washington DC, according to CNN. The network also notes that their presence costs about $1m daily.
This extension comes just a month after Washington DC officials sued the Trump administration over the deployments, which Brian Schwalb, the District of Columbia attorney general, described as “involuntary military occupation” and an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
A federal judge in California ruled in September that Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles after days of protests over immigration raids in June had been illegal. That ruling, however, does not directly apply to Washington, where the president has more control over the guard than in states.
Such an extension of the national guard’s presence is the latest chapter in Donald Trump’s use of national law enforcement to ostensibly prevent crime. After sending troops to Washington DC, he has since sent others to Chicago and threatened to send more to other Democratic-run cities such as San Francisco, Portland and New York. These moves mark an escalation in the federal government’s rare intervention into policing US cities and have been met with outrage from Democratic officials and local organizers.
Earlier this month, a top US military official ordered the national guards of all 50 US states, the District of Columbia and US territories to form “quick reaction forces” trained in “riot control”, including the use of batons, body shields, Tasers and pepper spray, according to an internal Pentagon directive reviewed by the Guardian.
The memo, signed on 8 October by Maj Gen Ronald Burkett, the director of operations for the Pentagon’s national guard bureau, sets thresholds for the size of the quick reaction force to be trained in each state, with most states required to train 500 national guard members, for a total of 23,500 troops nationwide. Each state is to report monthly on its progress.
