The federal takeover of DC was just the beginning. National Guard troops are mobilizing to more Democratic cities while immigration raids create widespread terror. As protests become pretext for more troops, democracy continues to erode.
“We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” These were President Trump’s words during an unprecedented meeting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth convened of U.S. military leadership from around the world. Trump made his vision clear: U.S. cities should become “training grounds for our military.” The August 2025 federal takeover of Washington, DC was always meant to be a test case, and is now rapidly growing into a norm-breaking show of federal force against Democratic-led cities.
This unprecedented display of power by a U.S. president was one that residents in these cities never asked for and never consented to. And for neighbors and neighborhoods with at-risk populations, especially immigrants from Central and South America, it has resulted in an extraordinary level of terror, fear, and breakdown in community trust in law enforcement. As the past two months has shown, it is just the beginning.
A Nation-wide Threat
August was not the first instance of President Trump beginning to deploy unwanted military presence domestically. In a move that sparked nationwide outrage and was later ruled illegal, thousands of National Guard troops were sent to Los Angeles in response to immigration protests this spring. But the escalation in the president’s attacks on U.S. cities began in earnest on August 11, when citing a need to “restore law and order,” the administration took two extreme measures. First, it activated both the Washington, DC National Guard and requested additional National Guard troops from Republican-led states to come to DC. Unlike other states, DC's National Guard lies solely under presidential control. (Federal law generally prevents the National Guard from engaging in domestic law enforcement when under the President’s control, except in the most extreme circumstances.) And, second, it declared an emergency that, under U.S. law, allows the President to take command of DC’s police department for up to 30 days.
Despite the more than two thousand heavily armed soldiers that soon began patrolling the streets of DC, it was the extraordinary increase in immigration enforcement that took the even greater toll. DC’s government temporarily agreed to collaboration between its local police department and federal immigration officials in an attempt to stave off further federal aggression. Yet only days after the end of the emergency, Trump threatened, but then backtracked on, a new emergency over the Mayor’s refusal to continue cooperation between DC’s police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities. While DC also tried to fight the administration’s aggressive takeover, the city’s unique status means it has less recourse available.
It would all prove to just be the starting point. On September 7, in an alarming escalation after the DC takeover, Trump posted on social media with a reference to the movie Apocalypse Now, writing “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” and, in reference to his recent attempt to rename the Department of Defense, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” Illinois governor Pritzker had the correct response: “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal."
Trump made good on his promise. Returning to his LA pretext of immigration-related protests, Trump called the city of Portland, Oregon “war-ravaged” and in a state of “anarchy,” and by early October mobilized the National Guard in response to protest activity that federal law enforcement officers themselves referred to as “low energy.” When a Trump-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s action, he circumvented the decision by attempting to send troops from California instead. Chicago soon followed, with the administration describing it as “a killing field,” and “murder capital of the world.” Trump has similarly announced mobilization of Tennessee’s National Guard to Memphis, a move that the state’s Republican governor has agreed to despite the city’s mayor noting he never requested it. Soldiers arrived on October 10 in the majority-Black city.
The administration’s justifications in these cases has varied from emphasizing strongly inflated crime levels to specifically citing threats to federal law enforcement by people protesting the administration’s immigration policies and practices. The legal cases brought by states and cities, and appealed by the administration, will continue to work their way through the courts. In the meantime, it’s clear that the administration is working on a longer term campaign to normalize the presence of increased military and law enforcement in U.S. cities, and on a narrative campaign to paint more and more cities as places of “rebellion” to “domestic terrorism.”
The DC Blueprint
DC proved an ideal testing ground for federal overreach. While the National Guard received the most attention, the extraordinary increase in federal law enforcement has become a daily reality for many DC residents. Since August, there has been a torrent of reports among neighbors of violent arrests or pop-up checkpoints, including many in my own neighborhood.
The end of August marks the beginning of school for thousands of DC students. This year, these first weeks have been marred by fear for countless students - especially migrants and Black students. It took little time for at least seven federal law enforcement agencies - but particularly Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE agents - to embed themselves with DC’s police department. Agents are often masked and unidentifiable; those detained often have no idea who is arresting them or whether they are being kidnapped. The result has been utter terror for local communities. Delivery drivers are violently tackled. Parents are apprehended in front of their sobbing children. Checkpoints were set up in the early mornings,to apprehend people on their way to work. And many craftspeople - construction workers, plumbers, and more - are scared to even enter DC from neighboring Maryland and Virginia.
The changes in DC rendered it a microcosm for the immigration dragnet that the United States has become, and that is now spreading to places like Chicago and elsewhere. Across the country, people are arrested purely on the suspicion of being undocumented, with U.S. citizens targeted alongside others. Those in the process of applying for status like asylum often have their applications suspended when they show up for court, so that they can then be immediately detained and deported. While prior administrations have generally followed a directive to avoid immigration enforcement in “sensitive locations” like hospitals, religious institutions, or schools, the Trump administration has embraced detaining people anywhere they can. Even more alarming, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an extraordinary decision, recently condoned racial profiling, paving the way for the unprecedented levels of immigration enforcement across the United States. Countless people, including U.S. citizens, are now getting stopped, detained, and whisked away to detention centers where – thanks to the Trump administration’s dismantling of what few legal protections existed – they face an extraordinary uphill battle to be released and stay in the US.
By contrast, the National Guard, who typically are more likely to engage in disaster response or national military support, were assigned to DC locations for high profile photo shoots in what can only be described as government propaganda. These citizen-soldiers have been pulled away from their daily lives for what turned out to be park beautification and a potentially indefinite and fear-inducing show of force. The price tag? $1 million USD per day.
Throughout it all, privileged and white US citizens could live in DC and barely notice the takeover. It was ludicrous when White House official Stephen Miller claimed that people in DC could finally walk on the streets with jewelry, watches, and purses, which I have done every day in DC for nearly 20 years. DC residents overwhelmingly reject the occupation and do not believe that it has made DC any safer.
A Growing Authoritarian Infrastructure and Playbook
The Trump administration’s data on arrests since DC’s takeover has been murky, even as the Justice Department launched what appears to be a politically motivated investigation into the city’s crime reporting. But recent analysis makes the real goal clear: over 40% of arrests during the takeover have been immigration-related. Chicago, too, has seen a soaring increase in immigration arrests; federal agents claim as many as 900 people have been detained in recent weeks.
What is documented: encounters have turned tragically fatal on more than one occasion, and DHS’s brutal tactics against bystanders, public officials, and journalists have only continued. The U.S. immigration enforcement apparatus is about to grow to unprecedented levels with more funding than any national military save the United States and China. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have lowered hiring standards and invested $40 million into a hiring frenzy. Private prison companies and companies like Palantir that engage in surveillance are thriving as an infrastructure is built that will be hard to dismantle.
And yet, the U.S. Congress attached zero dollars for oversight and accountability to those extraordinary sums, an incredible move given that U.S. immigration enforcement agencies have long been plagued by abysmal oversight. The military-style raid on an apartment building that took place in a predominantly black Chicago neighborhood shows the breathtaking consequences: nearly 300 armed federal agents rappelled from helicopters onto the building’s roof in the middle of the night, rounded up families including children and zip-tied them, deploying grenades. Those who were eventually released returned to ravaged apartments.
The stated justifications for these unprecedented acts are a red herring from the Trump administration's actual agenda. Experts have long warned that manufactured crises and declarations of emergency are a favorite in the authoritarian playbook. The federal takeover of Washington, DC was a first step in Trump's consolidation of power and control over the armed forces -- and a clear precursor to ever more extreme actions in other, Democratic-led cities and states.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s longtime senior aide and the architect of the most ruthless and cruel anti-immigration policies in both the first and current administration, played a key role in directing the DC takeover. He has since described the Oregon judge’s decision to stop the National Guard a “Legal Insurrection,” and the situation in Portland in existential terms: “This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.”
The Trump administration entered power with an explicit goal to deport historic numbers of immigrants, no matter the cost to community or country. But recent events point to a far broader threat. When the Administration deploys military-style immigration enforcement and the communities who see the horrific consequences respond with protests, it provides the perfect pretext to deploy even more troops into those cities and to paint them as lawless parts of America that must be controlled. Case in point: responding to the early October ruling in the Illinois case, Trump announced he would consider invoking the 1792 Insurrection Act, allowing U.S. troops to engage directly in domestic law enforcement.
What comes next?
On a local level, what community trust in local law enforcement existed is quickly eroding. On a national level, what pieces of democracy are left in the United States are quickly eroding. As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently noted, we are now not far from the scenario in which U.S. soldiers – whether for a misunderstanding or worse - fire on their own citizens. In DC, both the National Guard and immigration enforcement remain actively present. Congressional Republicans have already introduced more than a dozen bills trying to wrest even more control from local DC government, while Democrats’ engaged in only a muted effort to denounce the takeover. The stories in Portland, Chicago, and Memphis, on the other hand, are just starting to be written.
If there is a single bright spot in all of this, it is to see the ways in which – at the most local levels – communities have found ways to resist. Washington, DC neighborhoods have organized to support the families in their midst who most need help. Witnesses document arrests and coordinate legal assistance for those who need it. Judges and even grand juries made up of local citizens have rejected the Trump administration’s inflated federal charges in several DC cases. On September 6, thousands of people marched peacefully down one of Washington’s main arteries, arriving at the White House demanding to Free DC. Another national No Kings Rally is being organized October 18.
It is a surreal thing to witness the breakdown of democracy when it comes not just to your own country, but to your own city. It is surreal to experience both the normalcy of ongoing life and the terror felt so strongly in communities. The stories of DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Memphis are just the beginning. The question is when, and how, they will end.
This article first appeared here: us.boell.org