President Trump’s National Guard deployments across the country have already cost $589 million, and could rise to more than $1 billion by the end of the year if staffing trends and mission scope do not change, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office.
Current deployments are costing about $93 million a month, and the price for 1,000 Guard troops deployed to any American city costs between $18 and $21 million per month.
Rewind: Trump has sent or tried to send troops to six U.S. cities so far. “The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape,” he claimed during a speech at a virtually unprecedented gathering of military leaders at a Marine base in Quantico, Va., this fall. “What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles—they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.”
“It’s a war from within,” the president told his generals. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard.”
Trump ordered Guard troops to Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland last year, but judges eventually blocked those deployments after state officials filed suits in court. The matter eventually rose to the Supreme Court, which stepped in to block the Chicago deployment in late December. That decision prompted the president to pull out-of-state soldiers he’d sent to Oregon and Illinois, as well as other soldiers and active-duty Marines in California.
Guard troops remain deployed in Memphis, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. Some state lawmakers have requested Guard troops for Charlotte, but no troops have been sent there yet. Those in New Orleans have been tasked through February; those in Memphis are expected to remain through September; and those in Washington were recently extended through the end of the year.
Trump offered false and exaggerated crime statistics to justify his Guard mobilization for D.C. and a takeover of the local police in August. He’s claimed the troop mobilizations will reduce crime in some of the cities where they deployed.
But he also “federalized” Guard troops to provide logistical support during deportation operations in Los Angeles. That tasking triggered a lawsuit in California after troops protected federal agents carrying out arrests and, on at least two occasions, detained civilians. A judge later found those actions violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a statute against using the military for civilian policing.
Background: The idea of sending out-of-state Guard troops to help enforce deportation was first floated by a top Trump advisor. In 2023, Stephen Miller told Charlie Kirk, “In terms of personnel, you go to the red-state governors and you say, give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers. The Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia. And if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland right, very close, very nearby.”
The Republican governors of Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana sent hundreds of their Guard troops to D.C. after Trump’s announcement in August.
- Notable: 64 cities in those five GOP-led states have higher rates of violent crime than D.C., according to FBI data, as Philip Bump pointed out in August.
The two statutes Trump has relied upon to deploy Guard troops have been 10 U.S.C. 12406 (Title 10) and 32 U.S.C. 502(f) (Title 32). Title 10 authorizes federalization during a foreign invasion, a rebellion or when laws can’t be carried out with ordinary law-enforcement resources. Title 32 allows the president or defense secretary to ask governors to activate state Guard forces for federally funded missions. Under Title 32, these troops are controlled by the state governor, but their operations are federally funded and regulated.
At least four cities have made it clear they do not want Guard troops sent by the White House. That includes Boston; Detroit; New Haven, Conn.; and Seattle. Relatedly, the state of Washington passed a new law in April blocking out-of-state military troops that might be sent by other governors to enforce Trump’s immigration policies after Republican governors said in December 2024 they would use “every tool at our disposal,” including using their Guard forces, to help advance that goal beyond their state borders. (Montana, Texas, and Idaho have similar laws on the books.)
Related reading:
- “ICE expansion has outpaced accountability. What are the remedies?” Rashawn Ray and Gabriel Sanchez of the Brookings Institution wrote in a commentary published Monday;
- “Republicans are worried about Trump’s deportation campaign, and our new poll shows why,” Politico reported Saturday;
- “Fox News said Tom Homan should be sent to Minnesota—20 minutes later, Trump did exactly that,” CNN reported Monday; relatedly, “TV is the President,” argued journalist Gabe Fleisher the following day in his “Wake Up to Politics” newsletter;
- The two links immediately above remind us of this development from September, “Trump, apparently misled by [Fox News] video of 2020 protests, threatens to send troops to Portland,” via the Guardian;
- And ICYMI, “Trump’s National Guard deployments aren’t random. They were planned years ago,” NPR reported in November.
Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1947, six RD4 Skytrain cargo planes launched from the carrier Philippine Sea for a two-month mission to map some 150,000 square miles of Antarctica.
Venezuela
Will Venezuela’s Delcy Rodriguez obey the White House? One day after Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened the Venezuelan leader in Senate testimony, Reuters says U.S. intelligence reports have indicated that she may not be disposed to cooperate with Trump-administration officials’ public statements that “they want the interim president to sever relations with close international allies like Iran, China and Russia, including expelling their diplomats and advisers from Venezuela.” More, here.
The U.S. has so far sold Venezuelan oil for $500 million, and pocketed $200 million of that money, Rubio told lawmakers Wednesday. According to Rubio, “They have pledged to use a substantial amount of those funds to purchase medicine and equipment directly from the United States.” As for the other $200 million, Rubio claimed it would eventually be transferred to a U.S. Treasury account. When asked what U.S. law authorized that deal, Rubio replied that Venezuela had agreed to it. “We haven’t finalized what that audit process would be. We’ve only made one payment and that payment we did, and retrospectively will be audited,” Rubio said, and described the idea as “simply a way to divide revenue so that there isn’t systemic collapse while we work through this recovery and transition.”
Some lawmakers were particularly skeptical of that plan. “You are taking their oil at gunpoint, you are holding and selling that oil,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Rubio. “You’re deciding how and for what purposes that money is going to be used in a country of 30 million people…I think a lot of us believe that that is destined for failure.”
“I think it’s funky. I think it may not even be permissible,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.
How long will it continue? “I can’t give you a timeline of how long it takes,” Rubio said. “It can’t take forever. I get it. We all want something immediately. But this is not a frozen dinner you put in a microwave and in two and a half minutes it comes out ready to eat.”
Democrats weren’t the only ones pressuring Rubio on Wednesday. “I do think the administration could get Congress to be a better partner by informing us better,” Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, said. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, also confronted Rubio about whether or not the Maduro abduction constituted an act of war. “Would it be an act of war if someone did it to us? Nobody dies, few casualties, they’re in and out, boom, it’s a perfect military operation. Would that be an act of war?” Paul asked. “Of course it would be an act of war,” he told Rubio.
ICYMI: A new “non-kinetic” cell helped with the Venezuela mission, reports Nextgov’s David DiMolfetta. Developed in the past few months, it’s a new U.S. military unit that helps integrate cyber, electronic-warfare, influence, and other such effects into missions, especially specialized ones. Read more, here.
Across the Defense Department
Update: The U.S. military is still carrying out a flurry of airstrikes against militants throughout Somalia, David Sterman of the New America think tank pointed out Wednesday in his counterterrorism tracker. “Quite possible that January ends with more strikes in Somalia in a single month than conducted by any non-Trump president in any single year,” he wrote on social media. He added, “Not there yet but four days to go. Plus possible multiple strikes by clarifications to come. Plus press releases often lag by a few days.”
Golden Dome alert: The technology for the satellites being developed to detect and track enemy missiles isn’t as ready as Space Force’s Space Development Agency says it is, which has already led to extra work and delays, the Government Accountability Office reports. GAO also says SDA isn’t keep the broader military informed about its progress. “Consequently, SDA is at risk of delivering satellites that do not meet warfighter needs,” its report says. Read that, here.
Additional reading:
And lastly: Reax to Trump’s “We have never really asked anything” of our allies. “On the contrary, our allies fought alongside us in Afghanistan precisely because we asked them to,” wrote former Army infantryman and Afghanistan veteran Micah Ables in Defense One. “After we were attacked on 9/11, we invoked Article 5, becoming the first—and so far, still the only—nation to ever ask for military assistance under the auspices of NATO’s collective defense commitment.”
More:
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