The ruling comes amid legal battles over Trump’s moves to deploy the National Guard in other US cities.
A federal judge ruled Thursday that President Donald Trump’s deployment of more than 2,000 National Guard troops to police Washington, DC, is illegal and must come to an end.
Over objections from city officials, Trump ordered the troops to flood the nation’s capital in August to deter what he claimed was an unstoppable crime wave, even though crime was falling precipitously and was at a 30-year low.
Federal District Judge Jia Cobb, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote that the Trump administration “exceeded the bounds of their authority” and “acted contrary to law” by deploying the National Guard “for nonmilitary, crime-deterrence missions in the absence of a request from the city’s civil authorities.”
She wrote that while Trump is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Trump’s legal authority to deploy troops around the country is subject to limits by Congress, especially in DC, where it has the ultimate authority under the Constitution.
