DC mayor warns Trump’s National Guard use threatens American democracy

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, said she is skeptical that the federal deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country is legal, as President Trump has moved to send troops to respond to crime.

Speaking Wednesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference in Washington, the mayor was asked about not supporting the use of the National Guard to crackdown on crime.

“I don’t think it’s legal, let me start there, for the National Guard to police Americans on American soil,” Bowser said.

The mayor went on to explain how the National Guard in D.C. is under the authority of the president, while a state’s National Guard is typically controlled by the governor.

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“The mission and the way we use the National Guard — unlike most states where a governor can call up the chief of his National Guard or her National Guard — in D.C., our D.C. National Guard reports to the president,” Bowser said.

“While I can request the National Guard, they are completely federally operated. And so D.C. is a little different than in other places for the D.C. National Guard,” she continued.

The mayor added: “We use the Guard to respond to emergencies. We use the Guard for large scale events. We do not use the Guard or to police our local laws.”

In recent months, Trump has boosted the presence of federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to cut down on crime. Hundreds of federal agents and National Guard troops have been deployed to the streets of D.C. as part of the federal takeover of the district.

Trump has also deployed troops to several other Democratic-led cities, including Chicago. The city, as well as its home of Illinois, took the federal government to court over the deployment.

A federal appeals court partially returned control of the National Guard in Illinois to the federal government, but it blocked Trump from deploying troops to the streets of Chicago or across Illinois.

Trump had also deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles over the summer to respond to anti-ICE protests sparked by federal immigration raids targeting migrant workers at local businesses. California officials sued over the federal deployment.

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Bowser said in her remarks on Wednesday that Americans in Washington and across the country should be concerned by what the deployments mean for the nation’s democracy.

“We should all be concerned about the military being used because it’s a slippery slope,” she said.

“You use it for crowd control one day, or presence the next day — it’s not a long jump to using it in other ways that could interfere with the very nature of American democracy,” Bowser said.