A member of the National Guard arrives at the Guard’s headquarters at the D.C. Armory on Tuesday,  Aug. 12, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump announced he is placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under federal control, and will deploy the National Guard to the District to assist in crime prevention in the nation’s capital. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s move to deploy 800 National Guard members in the District of Columbia over claims that crime is plaguing the city – despite historic lows –  follows his use of the military in his administration’s growing immigration crackdown.

“(D.C.’s) out of control, but we’re going to put it in control very quickly, like we did on the southern border,” Trump said at a Monday press conference where he was flanked by members of his Cabinet, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He vowed to do the same in more cities governed by Democrats.

Trump’s return to the White House was led by a campaign promise of mass deportations, tying newly arrived immigrants at the southern border with high crime rates and the need to use troops to detain and remove those migrants.

Since Inauguration Day, the president has sent thousands of National Guard members to be stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border and has militarized strips of land along the border, putting migrants into contact with military personnel.

Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard in June in response to unrest over immigration raids was seen as a test case for use of the state-based military forces. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California wrote on X on Monday that Trump “was just getting warmed up in Los Angeles” with that order.

“He will gaslight his way into militarizing any city he wants in America,” Newsom said. “This is what dictators do.”

‘Quick Reaction Force’

Now the Trump administration is evaluating plans to establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of 600 National Guard members to remain on stand-by in order to be quickly deployed to any U.S. city undergoing a protest or other civil unrest within an hour, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The groups, who would be armed with riot gear and other weapons, would be split evenly between Alabama and Arizona, according to the Post.

The DOD proposal also calls for a rotation of service members from Army and Air Force National Guard units based in Alabama, Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee, according to the Post.

National Guard members are typically in reserve and are some of the first responders to natural disasters.

The Department of Defense and the National Guard did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment about the “Quick Reaction Force” plans. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Which cities are next?

At the Monday press conference, Trump specifically cited four cities that could see similar National Guard movements: Baltimore, Chicago, New York City and Oakland – all heavily Democratic cities led by Black mayors. Violent crime in all those cities has continued to trend downward, according to each city’s police database.

Baltimore County, Maryland, Cook County, Illinois, New York City and the entire state of California also all are on a new “sanctuary jurisdiction” list issued by the Department of Justice on Aug. 5. They are identified as “having policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

But, unlike the district, where the president has control over the National Guard, state governors, under the law, have had control over their National Guard members.

Additionally, while Trump has seized control of the 3,400 officers in the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department for 29 days due to the district’s Home Rule Act, experts don’t see how that can legally be done with other local police departments.

“What they are doing in D.C. cannot be replicated outside of D.C. All of this is only possible because D.C. is not a state,” said Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “There’s no playbook for them to do what they seem to want to do outside of D.C.”

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified Trump’s statements about sending in National Guard members into cities.

“The president is speaking about what he’d like to see take place in other cities across the country,” she said. “When the time comes we’ll talk about that. Starting with our nation’s capital is a great place to begin and it should serve as a model.”

Trump said he hoped other cities were “watching.”

“Maybe they’ll self clean up and maybe they’ll self do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all of the things that caused the problem,” the president said.

Nunn said that even if the president were to federalize a state’s National Guard, those members would be subject to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which generally bars the use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.

“There is no statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act that allows the military to participate in local law enforcement,” Nunn said.

Los Angeles

A trial is underway this week challenging the president’s move to federalize California National Guard members, in a suit filed by Newsom, after an appeals court temporarily upheld Trump’s move.

The president deployed 4,000 members of the National Guard and 700 Marines to Los Angeles after protests erupted against aggressive immigration actions by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducting raids in Home Depot parking lots.

But the legal issue before a San Francisco court is not if the president’s actions were unlawful, but on the political question of who has authority over the National Guard.

Other governors in the states Trump mentioned as candidates for National Guard activation pushed back on the notion.

Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, who served in the U.S. Army, said in a statement that the president’s decision to call in the National Guard to the District of Columbia “lacks seriousness and is deeply dangerous.”

Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the president could not send in the National Guard to Chicago.

“Let’s not lie to the public, you and I both know you have no authority to take over Chicago,” he said.

The conflict between Trump and the Democrats comes at the same time Newsom has threatened to launch a redistricting of California’s congressional districts in order to nullify Texas’ attempt to redraw maps to add more Republican seats to the U.S. House.

And Pritzker is hosting in Illinois the Texas Democrats who left the state to prevent the state legislature from having a quorum after Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session for redistricting.

Military forces

Since taking office for his second term, the president has signed five executive orders that lay out the use of military forces within the U.S. borders and extend other executive powers to speed up Trump’s immigration crackdown.

More funding also soon will be at hand for Trump’s mass deportations. The massive tax and spending cut bill enacted in July has as its centerpiece $170 billion for the administration’s immigration crackdown. It bolsters border security, increases immigration detention capacity and adds fees to legal pathways for immigration, among other things. Thousands more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are slated to be hired.

Some Republican governors have agreed to deploy their own National Guard members to aid the Trump administration in immigration enforcement, such as in Iowa and Tennessee. The secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, sent National Guard to the southern border in Texas when she was governor of South Dakota.

Nunn said that while it’s not typically normal for states to use National Guard members for local policing there is some precedent, such as when New York had members stationed in the New York City subway.

“What is unprecedented is the federal government using military personnel for sort of crime prevention, for regular policing,” Nunn said.

A woman cries after her husband is detained by federal agents during a mandatory immigration check-in in June in New York City. The Trump administration’s arrests have been catching a smaller share of criminals overall, and a smaller share of people convicted of violent and drug crimes, than the Biden administration did in the same time frame last year. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Despite Trump administration rhetoric accusing Democrats of protecting violent criminals and drug-dealing immigrants, the administration’s arrests have been catching a smaller share of criminals overall, and a smaller share of people convicted of violent and drug crimes, than the Biden administration did in the same time frame.

While the Trump administration has caught more immigrants with convictions for drugs and violence, their share of the rising arrest numbers is smaller, as more people get swept up for minor traffic violations or strictly immigration crimes, according to a Stateline analysis.

Forty percent of the nearly 112,000 arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from Jan. 20 through late June were of convicted criminals. That’s compared with 53% of the nearly 51,000 arrests for same time period in 2024 under the Biden administration.

Worksite immigration raids are supposed to free up jobs for citizens. Here’s what really happens

The share of people convicted of violent crime fell from 10% to 7% and drug crimes from 9% to 5%, according to a Stateline analysis of data from the Deportation Data Project.

The project, led by attorneys and professors in California, Maryland and New York, collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Some Democratic states are among those with the highest share of violent criminals in this year’s ICE arrests: Hawaii (15%), Vermont (13%), and California and Nebraska (12%) — while some of the lowest shares were in more Republican states: Maine (2%), and Alabama, Montana and Wyoming (3%).

Immigration attorneys see an increased push to arrest and detain immigrants for any type of violation or pending charge as President Donald Trump pushes for higher arrest and detention numbers to meet his campaign promise for mass deportation. Trump officials have called for 3,000 arrests a day, far more than the current average of 711 as of June and 321 a day during the same time period under Biden.

Arrests have accelerated since about mid-May, when government attorneys began asking to revoke bail and arrest people who show up for court hearings after being released at the border, said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which represents more than 16,000 immigration attorneys.

“We’re not completely sure what the reasoning or the goal is behind some of these policies, other than they want detention numbers up,” Dojaquez-Torres said.

“They seem to have really been struggling to get their deportation numbers up, and so I think that’s one of the reasons why we see a lot of these policies going into effect that are meant to kind of circumvent the immigration court process and due process.”

Arrests of people convicted of violent crimes increased by 45% from about 5,300 to 7,700 compared with last year. For drug crimes, the increase was 21% — and they fell as a share of total arrests, from 9% under the Biden administration to 5% this year.

If Trump wants more deportations, he’ll need to target the construction industry

 

Arrests for those not convicted of any crime nearly tripled to about 67,000, and increased from 47% to 60% of arrests.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security defended ICE arrests Wednesday. Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the agency was “targeting dangerous criminal illegal aliens and taking them off American streets. Violent thugs ICE arrested include child pedophiles, drug traffickers, and burglars.”

In Oregon, arrests during the first part of last year increased from 51 under the Biden administration to 227 under the Trump administration, with those not convicted of any crime increasing from 34 to 137. Those with convictions for violent crime increased from 3 to 16. Even some Republicans are concerned with the new emphasis on non-criminals.

“The majority of recent ICE detentions involve people with no convictions. That’s a pattern I find troubling, especially when it risks sweeping up people for things like expired tags or missed court dates,” said Oregon state Rep. Cyrus Javadi, a moderate Republican representing Tillamook and Clatsop counties.

Nationally, nonviolent crimes have risen as a share of immigration arrests. The most common crime conviction for those arrested this year is driving while intoxicated, which was also the top offense last year under Biden.

But this year it’s closely followed by general traffic offenses, which rose to second place from sixth place, surpassing such crimes as assault and drug trafficking.

‘Sanctuary city’ governors object to Trump deployment of troops into Los Angeles

 

Traffic offenses, outside of driving while intoxicated and hit and run, rose almost fourfold as the most serious conviction on record for those arrested, the largest increase in the top 10. Those offenses were followed by increases in the immigration crime of illegal entry, meaning crossing the border in secret, which tripled.

The increase in traffic violations as a source of immigration arrests is a reason for cities to consider limiting traffic stops, said Daniela Gilbert, director of the Redefining Public Safety Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit devoted to ending mass incarceration.

“It’s an important point to consider intervening in so that there can be less interaction, and so ICE has less opportunity to continue its indiscriminate dragnet of enforcement,” Gilbert said.

The institute argues in general that traffic stops should be limited to safety issues rather than low-level infractions such as expired registrations or single burned-out taillights, both because they do not improve public safety and because they disproportionately affect drivers of color.

Such policies limiting stops under some conditions are in place in 10 states and in cities in six other states, according to the institute.

The most recent state polices took effect last year in California and Illinois, while a policy is set to take effect in October in Connecticut. The most recent city policies were in Denver and in East Lansing and Ypsilanti, Michigan. Six other states have considered legislation recently.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Federal immigration authorities face off against protesters during an ICE raid at Ambiance Apparel in Downtown Los Angeles on June 6, 2025. (Photo by J.W. Hendricks for CalMatters)

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Carlos was pulled out of a deep sleep by a series of frantic phone calls one Friday morning in June. By the time he arrived at a downtown Los Angeles garment factory sometime after 10 a.m., his brother was in chains.

Agents from a constellation of federal agencies descended on the Ambiance Apparel factory and storefront on June 6, detaining dozens of people. It was the first salvo of the Trump administration’s prolonged engagement in Southern California, where masked federal agents are filmed daily pulling people off the street as part of what the president has promised will be the largest deportation program in American history.

Carlos’ brother, Jose, 35, was shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles. Carlos watched as agents in Immigration and Customs Enforcement vests led Jose and 13 other garment workers into a waiting white Sprinter van. Carlos hasn’t seen his brother since, though he did confirm that Jose is being held at an immigration detention center in Adelanto.

“We had just lost our other brother, he died,” said Carlos, whom CalMatters is only identifying by his first name because of his own fears of deportation. “Then, for our family, losing Jose, it was like someone died again.”

Worksite raids like the one at Ambiance are an attention-grabbing component of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, one that it remains committed to despite a brief reversal in mid-June. They’re unfolding across California, from Los Angeles’s Fashion District to farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley and a restaurant in San Diego.

While one stated purpose of worksite raids is to remove illegal competition from the labor marketplace, the reality is far messier: Studies have found that immigration raids don’t do much to raise wages — and actually deflate them. Even after a raid, employers are no more likely to use federal immigration verification tools like E-Verify during hiring.

Nevertheless, on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump focused on the threat of illegal competition as the political and emotional lynchpin of his deportation plans.

“They’re taking your jobs, they’re taking your jobs,” Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 21. “ Every job produced in this country over the last two years has gone to illegal aliens, every job, think of it.

“We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you.”

Every new job between 2022-2024 was not, in fact, filled by undocumented immigrants. Studies show actually deporting workers en masse from industries that rely on undocumented labor does little for U.S. workers. Giovanni Peri, a UC Davis economist who has studied the economic impacts of deportations in the 1930s and during the Obama administration, has found doing so actually reduces job opportunities for American-born workers.

That’s in part because many American workers, even those outside of immigrant-heavy industries, rely on the services generated by low-wage, undocumented labor — the costs of which would rise with mass deportations.

“Losing some of these workers and jobs that Americans are moving out of, it shrinks the local economy and there’s a reduction in jobs for Americans,” he said.

There is no evidence, Peri said, that in the face of mass deportations, immigrant-heavy industries would raise their wages to hire American workers instead.

“If there is such a world, it has not been the reality in the U.S. in a long time,” he said.

What does tend to happen, according to a study last year by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is that raids lead to more job turnover while showing little net change in the employment rate.

“Actions that target employers — audits, investigations, fines, and criminal charges — have larger effects than raids, which target workers,” the study authors wrote.

The impact to the families can be long-term and devastating. Absences, suspensions, expulsions and rates of substance abuse and self-harm increased among Latino students in a Tennessee town that was raided, even among students whose families were not directly impacted. Property crime dropped but violent crime increased in a small northeast Iowa meatpacking town after a massive 2008 raid. Infants born to Hispanic mothers in that same Iowa town had a 24% risk of low birth weight compared to the same population one year before the raid.

“Our mom is devastated, and she’s scared for herself, too,” Carlos said. “A lot of us are from the same (Zapotec Indigenous) community in Mexico, a lot of people kidnapped in the raid, so it’s like a whole bunch of families had a death.”

In his first term, Trump’s worksite raids focused on the South and the Midwest, when more than 1,800 people were detained, mostly at manufacturing plants and meat and poultry processing facilities. That’s a tiny segment of the estimated 1.5 million people deported under Trump from 2017 to 2021, but it played a significant role in another of the administration’s goals: To create enough fear and mistrust among undocumented immigrants that they self-deport.

But this time, Trump’s focus is on California.

‘There’s no money’ after raid

Employees at Ambiance Apparel told each other that immigration enforcement was likely coming to their garment factory. Employees who did not want to be identified told CalMatters that people in Department of Homeland Security jackets were on site at least twice this year, most recently in April. Those workers say they were told by the company not to worry about a raid.

Ambiance Apparel, through an attorney, denied that the company had any advance warning or involvement with the raid and the company declined to comment further.

The garment industry is a logical target for immigration enforcement because so much of the workforce is undocumented. The same is true of agriculture. Estimates vary, but anywhere from one third to more than one half of California farmworkers are undocumented immigrants.

William Lopez, a University of Michigan public health professor who has written a book on the impact of immigration raids on mixed-status families, said he learned in interviews of people present at six immigration raids in the Midwest and South in 2018 that people “haven’t developed the language” to capture the impact of large-scale immigration raids on a community.

After a raid, “people don’t drive, there’s no money because everyone’s paying bond, no one’s going to school anymore,” Lopez said.

He continued, “the comparisons were, there was hurricanes, there was tornadoes, there was war, some people compared it to a public execution. Some people described it like the death of a grandchild.”

Congress made it illegal to knowingly hire workers who don’t have authorization in 1986, as part of an overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. The overhaul also legalized about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants.

Still, false Social Security numbers have been fairly easy to obtain, and employers are largely able to duck liability with only a cursory review of the documents workers present when they’re hired.

Employers have had little incentive to get stricter, even after the high-profile raids of meat and food processing plants during the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Demand for labor has remained high, fines for those caught have been lax and the use of contractors and subcontractors has proliferated, spreading out the risks of hiring..

“The number of employers who have been fined or imprisoned under the statute is very low compared to the number of employees who have been rounded up as a result of these (workplace) raids,” said Leticia Saucedo, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law. “The idea behind all of these was, yes, to target the employers, but employees were collateral damage.”

Saucedo said workplace raids and the deportation of workers highlight tensions between two wings of the Republican Party. Nativist groups want to curb immigration because they believe it displaces American workers, while business interests want access to a stable, legal pool of immigrant workers.

California farmer ready to demand a warrant

California farmers are especially sensitive to potential immigration raids. The Border Patrol conducted a sweep in Kern County just before Trump took office in January that previewed its approach in the new administration. In June, agents swept through farms in Ventura County, conducting immigration raids. iIndustry groups implored the administration to reconsider such tactics.

“To ensure stability for our farm families and their communities, we must act with both common sense and compassion,” Bryan Little, policy director at the California Farm Bureau, said in a statement. “The focus of immigration enforcement should be on the removal of bad actors or lawbreakers, not our valuable and essential farm employees.”

In an interview, Little said he hasn’t seen evidence of widespread enforcement at farms. But reports of any ICE sightings or arrests in agricultural areas have spread on social media, spreading fear among the workforce.

“The way this is all being handled, it’s interfering with food production,” he said.

In Ventura County, federal agents ultimately arrested more than 30 immigrants in June, said Hazel Davalos, director of the local farmworker advocacy group CAUSE.

Lisa Tate manages three of her family’s eight ranches in the county, where they grow citrus, avocados and coffee. Depending on the day, anywhere from five to 100 directly hired and contracted workers plant, trim or harvest on the land.

They were not among the farms visited by immigration agents, but Tate said she held a meeting with her workers to communicate a longstanding company policy: if agents ever show up, “nobody’s to be on our farm without proper authorization.”

Tate said the raids have put employers like her in a tough position. She said she has never knowingly hired any undocumented workers. She said she reviews the employment documents her workers present, fills out the I-9 form and follows the rules.

Still, she called it a “well-known secret” that many in the industry don’t have valid work permits.

She’s tried to use the guest worker visa program before, but it comes with costly requirements to provide housing and transportation, and to guarantee the guest workers have enough paid hours for the months they’re here. That was hard to budget for on a smaller farm like hers, she said, so she prefers hiring contracted workers locally as needed.

“We need an immigration program that allows for longer-term workers,” she said. “Until we have a solution in place, we shouldn’t take action because the whole system is built on what it is. And if you start picking it apart, there’s all kinds of fallout.”

This story was updated to clarify that President Trump has promised in his campaign to carry out the largest deportation program in American history. The largest mass deportation event took place during the Eisenhower administration in 1954 and 1955.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. To republish, go to the original and consult the CalMatters republishing guidelines.

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