Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump overreached in his attempts to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.
What happened? In an unsigned opinion with noted dissents from three Republican-appointed justices, the Court said that Trump could not deploy federalized National Guard troops to Chicago to support his immigration crackdown. The ruling is only preliminary, for now, but it could have implications for Trump’s attempts to deploy National Guard troops elsewhere as well.
Why did Trump want to deploy troops? As my colleague Ian Millhiser writes, Trump’s justification for his attempted deployment was flimsy at best: An ICE detention facility near Chicago, in Broadview, Illinois, has been the site of (small) protests against the administration’s crackdown, and Trump wanted to use troops to quash them.
Why does this matter? This Supreme Court has been incredibly permissive of Trump’s attempts to stretch the outer limits of presidential power, which means any ruling rebuffing him is noteworthy. In this case, the stakes were particularly high — guardrails against the president deploying troops into an American city are a big deal, and it’s significant that the Court is keeping them in place.
What’s the context? Trump has attempted to expand the National Guard’s domestic role in unprecedented ways in his second term, including deploying troops to Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, and attempting to do so in Chicago and in Portland, Oregon. Often, they’ve had little to do — in DC, some troops have helped landscape federal properties — but that could change: In October, a Pentagon memo ordered state National Guard units to create “quick reaction forces” for potential crowd control use around the country.
