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Trump Deploying National Guard to Memphis Called 'Cruel Intimidation Tactic'
“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country,” said the head of the ACLU's National Security Project.
Sep 16, 2025
Leaders at the ACLU on Tuesday joined other rights advocates and elected Democrats in condemning US President Donald Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard to Memphis with a Monday order he signed beside Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.
“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, in a statement.
“President Trump may want to normalize armed forces in our cities, but no matter what uniform they wear, federal agents and military troops are bound by the Constitution and have to respect our rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, and due process," Shamsi continued. "State and local leaders must stay strong and take all lawful measures to protect residents against this cruel intimidation tactic.”
While Lee expressed his gratitude to Trump for the order, some other elected officials in Tennessee have spoken out since Trump previewed his plans for Memphis on "Fox & Friends" last Friday.
The Associated Press reported on local opposition Monday:
“I did not ask for the National Guard, and I don’t think it’s the way to drive down crime,” Memphis Mayor Paul Young told a news conference Friday while acknowledging the city remained high on too many “bad lists.”
Young has also said that now the decision is made, he wants to ensure he can help influence the Guard’s role. He mentioned possibilities such as traffic control for big events, monitoring cameras for police and undertaking beautification projects.
At a news conference Monday, some local Democrats urged officials to consider options to oppose the deployment. Tami Sawyer, Shelby County General Sessions Court Clerk, said the city or county could sue.
State Rep. Justin Pearson (D-86), whose district includes parts of the city, declared, “We need poverty eradication, not military occupation!”
Denouncing Trump's targeting of Memphis on MSNBC, Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said that "having the National Guard here is unnecessary and it is a stunt. It's just a Trump show, to show his power and his force."
"I think this may be the first representation of his changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War, because he likes to put the National Guard at his direction, as his being the great warrior, into cities and going to war," he added.
According to a White House fact sheet, Trump's memorandum tasks Secretary of War Pete Hegseth with requesting Lee "make Tennessee National Guard units available to support public safety and law enforcement operations in Memphis," and further directs Hegseth to "coordinate with state governors to mobilize National Guard personnel from those states to support this effort."
The order also "establishes a Memphis Safe Task Force tasked with ending street and violent crime in Memphis to the greatest possible extent, including by coordinating closely with state and local officials in Tennessee, Memphis, and neighboring jurisdictions to share information, develop joint priorities, and maximize resources to make Memphis safe and restore public order."
🪡Governor Bill Lee, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Rep. David Kustoff, and Sen. Brent Taylor have chosen fear-mongering and authoritarianism over real solutions. They voted to gut healthcare and food security from Memphians. Sending troops will not fix the failures they created.
— Indivisible Memphis (@indivisiblememphis.bsky.social) September 14, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Trump has already deployed the National Guard to Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, California, and threatened to do so in Chicago, Illinois, where his deadly "Operation Midway Blitz" targeting immigrants is already underway.
"Expanding military involvement into US civilian law enforcement is dangerous and unwarranted," Tanya Greene, US program director at Human Rights Watch, said Tuesday. "The Trump administration's continued deployment of military forces in cities with populations primarily comprised of people of color, like Memphis, risks exacerbating violence against immigrants, unhoused people, and poor people in general."
"While communities desperately need food, affordable housing, and healthcare," she added, "hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being squandered on these deployments."
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'We Won't Be Silent': 1,000+ Students Protest Trump's DC Takeover
"The students leading today's walkouts are showing the entire nation what it means to resist authoritarianism with strength and solidarity," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Sep 09, 2025
As US President Donald Trump expands his authoritarian takeovers of Democrat-led cities, more than 1,000 students from four universities in Washington, DC walked out to protest the Republican's recent actions in the nation's capital.
Students from American University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Howard University are protesting Trump's deployment of National Guard troops and federalization of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), which have also provoked a lawsuit from DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb and a congressional resolution that aims to stop his takeover.
"Students are showing the country that we won't be silent while Trump tries to strip DC residents of our rights," American University student organizer Asher Heisten said in a statement circulated Tuesday by the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
"When Trump sends federal forces into DC, he is trying to intimidate and silence us," Heisten continued. "But students are proving that we will fight back to reject Trump's dangerous authoritarianism."
The students were joined by a pair of progressive lawmakers, US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
"Trump's federal takeover is a direct attack on democracy and the people of Washington, DC," Jayapal said in a statement. "The students leading today's walkouts are showing the entire nation what it means to resist authoritarianism with strength and solidarity."
The congresswoman told a crowd at Georgetown, her alma mater, that "this is an unprecedented moment in our country, where we have an authoritarian leader who is deploying federal troops to Washington, DC—to cities across the country, militarizing our streets, kidnapping people on the streets."
"The only bulwark that we have is the people, and so what you are doing here today is so important, because, at the end of the day, the checks and balances that were supposed to be built into our Constitution so that we could protect our constitutional rights are not working right now," she stressed, calling out Republicans in Congress and US Supreme Court justices for refusing to hold Trump accountable.
Acknowledging the thousands of protesters who marched to the White House on Saturday, Jayapal declared that "we are not powerless," a line that drew loud cheers from the crowd.
Markey, in his remarks at Georgetown, noted that when the president's supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in hopes of stopping the certification of his 2020 electoral loss, "Trump refused to send in troops."
"He allowed for that assault," Markey said of the attempted insurrection. "But now, here in DC, the president is attempting to create an impression that the crime rate is going up rather than down, that there is in fact a crisis here in the District of Columbia."
"And what he is doing, not just here in DC, but in Chicago, in LA, in Boston, is to try to characterize communities that are majority minority, that are majority Black and brown, as being unsafe to live," Markey noted. "And it's not a coincidence... It is to scare America. You cannot make America great again by making America hate again."
Markey argued that "this is not about policing, this is about political theater," and denounced Trump's DC takeover as a "charade."
Like the lawmakers, Georgetown student Scout Cardillo suggested that the DC takeover isn't just about the district. Cardillo told The Washington Post that "the effects of the occupation of DC and federalization of MPD is going to be felt throughout the country imminently, and it is on us to take a stand and fight back."
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ICE Operation 'Midway Blitz' Underway as Authoritarian Trump Targets Chicago
"Donald Trump and his departments of alphabet boys and National Guard troops aren't welcome and aren't needed in Chicago," said the head of the city's teachers union.
Sep 08, 2025
After several days of US President Donald Trump threatening a militarized invasion of Chicago, his administration on Monday announced "Operation Midway Blitz," claiming it is "in honor of" a young woman allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant accused of drunk driving about 140 miles south of the Illinois city.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiled the immigration operation with a nearly five-minute video featuring Michelle and Joe Abraham, whose 20-year-old daughter Katie was killed in a hit-and-run crash in Urbana in January. The alleged driver, a Guatemalan national, was arrested in Texas a few days later.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation "will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago," even though the libertarian CATO Institute revealed in June that 65% of immigrants booked by the agency under Trump had no criminal convictions and over 93% were never convicted of violent offenses.
Like Trump has in recent days, McLaughlin took aim at Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, saying that he "and his fellow sanctuary politicians released Tren de Aragua gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers on Chicago's streets—putting American lives at risk and making Chicago a magnet for criminals."
While Chicagoans have made their thoughts on a federal invasion clear, carrying signs that said "No Trump! No Troops!" and "No Nazis—No Kings" during a weekend protest, McLaughlin said that Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem "have a clear message: No city is a safe haven for criminal illegal aliens. If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will hunt you down, arrest you, deport you, and you will never return."
Pritzker and Chicago's Democratic mayor, Brandon Johnson, have forcefully pushed back against Trump's threats to launch a major anti-migrant operation in the city and possibly deploy the National Guard, as he has done in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, California.
In a New York Times opinion piece published hours before the widely anticipated DHS announcement, Johnson argued that "lowering crime rates here does not require an occupation of our city by armed members of the National Guard, as the White House continues to threaten us with. Chicagoans, including survivors of violence, have spoken out against such an extreme measure."
"If President Trump had listened to the city's leaders, he would recognize that Chicago just experienced record-low homicide numbers, making this the safest summer since the 1960s, a result of effective collaboration between communities and law enforcement," wrote the mayor, who signed an executive order ahead of the federal operation and is raising a family in Austin on the West Side, "one of the parts of our city where gun violence is most pervasive."
"My administration has managed to make progress in crime reduction with three interconnected strategies: effective and law-abiding policing, violence prevention, and addressing the root causes of crime," Johnson explained. "Our violence prevention work includes programs that employ former gang members to de-escalate conflicts as well as initiatives that connect people to jobs and resources."
"We have directed funding to neighborhoods that have suffered from chronic disinvestment to create jobs, provide mental health services, and more. We are on track to build, rehab, or preserve over 10,000 units of affordable housing," he continued. "We don't need the National Guard; we just need to invest in what works."
In a Monday statement, Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates acknowledged "the successful efforts of our mayor in reducing crime and investing in our community," and similarly stressed that whatever Trump is "spending on his raids is better spent on building affordable housing, reopening school libraries, and funding social workers to support children through the trauma this administration is inflicting on an entire generation who are worried every day if they will ever see their parents again."
"As a history teacher, I can tell you that history will not look kindly on Donald Trump or the individuals who are acting as his personal army," Davis Gates also said. "For weeks, the people of Chicago have made it clear that we do not need federal agents in our city, whether that is to separate immigrant families or racially profile in our Black neighborhoods."
"Chicago might have been built to keep our communities divided, but we are coming together now, like working people do against any bad boss, in radical solidarity to keep each other safe," the union leader added. "Donald Trump and his departments of alphabet boys and National Guard troops aren't welcome and aren't needed in Chicago."
Congressional Democrats who represent Illinois have also denounced the president's targeting of the country's third-largest city—including Sen. Dick Durbin, who took to the chamber's floor on Monday following the DHS announcement. Durbin accused Trump of attacking Chicago for "political theater."
While the Trump administration hasn't yet provided any update on the involvement of the National Guard, after the president moved to rename the US Department of Defense, he took to his Truth Social platform on Saturday morning with an image referencing the 1979 film Apocalypse Now and said, "Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR."
Appearing on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), said that "we don't have any indications of them getting ready to send troops into Chicago," but also that "the president of the United States essentially just declared war on a major city in his own nation. This is not normal... This is not acceptable behavior."
Responding to the recent developments in a Monday statement, Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the national advocacy group America's Voice, said that "we have gone from a supposed war on immigrants to a war on Americans."
"America's Voice has long said that immigration was merely the 'tip of the spear' for this administration to justify and lead an attack on all of us—including violating due process, constitutional rights, and core democratic norms and pillars, such as deploying the military against American communities," she noted. "Sadly, all are coming to pass."
Cárdenas continued: "Why is the American president openly threatening an American city, as he readies the deployment of American troops against those residents? It's not about immigration, just as the Washington, DC deployment wasn't about crime. Instead, it's for purposes of retribution; sowing fear and dissent; provoking violence and dividing us as a nation."
"Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court just sided with the president and his plans to target indiscriminately and racially profile with impunity, effectively making racial profiling now the law of the land," she added, citing a Monday decision from the chief justice. "Whether calling it 'authoritarianism' or something else, it's clear we are fighting not just for immigrants, but also for a different vision of America that's now imperiled."
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