Donald Trump could expand the use of national guard troops in US cities even further, if a plan from the Pentagon comes to fruition.
The Washington Post, reporting on internal documents on Tuesday, says Pentagon officials are “evaluating plans” to create a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” that would deploy to crack down on cities in events of unrest or during protests.
The newly revealed plans come as Trump has used the national guard in ways beyond the norm. He deployed troops to Los Angeles against the state and city’s wishes to tamp down protests against immigration enforcement, and sent troops to Washington DC and took over the local police citing allegedly increased crime.
The Department of Defense would not weigh in directly on the idea of a “reaction force”.
“The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” a defense official said in a statement to the Guardian. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”
In the documents, the Post reports, it calls for 600 troops to be placed at the ready at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, able to deploy quickly if called. This force could cost “hundreds of millions of dollars”. The documents have timestamps from late July and early August, though they are marked as “pre-decisional”.
The plan, if implemented, would be an expansion of the use of troops in US cities and is legally questionable. National guard troops are frequently deployed in their states to respond to disasters and, particularly in 2020, to civil unrest, when many states called on their units to deploy amid protests over police brutality.
Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a statement that the move would be a “breathtakingly dangerous power grab”.
“Sending armed troops into cities to suppress protest should be a non-starter in any healthy democracy, but especially in a country founded on a strong presumption against the military policing civilians,” Shamsi said. “The right to protest is core to the constitution and who we are as a nation, yet the Trump administration seems ready to betray our basic values in order to muzzle political expression across the country.”
In 2020, around the time of the election, the Associated Press reported then, the guard designated military police units in Alabama and Arizona to rapidly respond “if requested by a governor in another state”. In that instance, reporting at the time said, governors would need to request the help – it would not be deployed just by the administration, as has happened in recent months.
