President Trump on Wednesday floated the possibility of deploying National Guard troops to New Orleans, adding it to a list of Democratic-led cities he has threatened to send troops to despite recent reductions in crime.
Unlike the other cities Mr. Trump has mentioned — which include Chicago, New York and Baltimore — New Orleans is in a state run by a Republican, Gov. Jeff Landry, who said he welcomed federal law enforcement support.
“We’re making a determination now,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, speaking to reporters at the White House. “Do we go to Chicago,” where city and state leaders warned the president not to send troops, “or do we go to a place like New Orleans where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite tough?”
Mr. Landry shared a news clip of the exchange on social media and said Louisiana would accept the president’s help “from New Orleans to Shreveport!”
He is among the Republican governors who sent National Guard troops last month to Washington after Mr. Trump began a federal law enforcement takeover of the nation’s capital. Mr. Landry has also taken an aggressive stance against crime in the state and in New Orleans, including by establishing a special unit of state police last year to focus solely on the city.
According to preliminary data from the New Orleans Police Department, the city has experienced a drop in all kinds of violent crime this year, including a 22 percent decrease in murders. That comes even after a New Year’s Day terrorist attack on Bourbon Street, where a man from Texas drove a truck into a crowd of revelers and killed 14 people.
In 2024, the agency had also reported a decrease in crime, which had spiked around the time of the coronavirus pandemic, to below prepandemic levels.
But Mr. Trump has fixated on perceived lawlessness in cities with Democratic mayors and berated their elected leaders, at times obfuscating how crime has decreased in those cities. His decisions to send troops to Washington and Los Angeles were met with outcry from leaders and some residents. The Los Angeles deployment in June, a response to protests against an immigration crackdown, prompted a lawsuit and a ruling from a federal judge on Tuesday that sending federal troops there was illegal.
In a joint statement Wednesday afternoon, the city of New Orleans and the Police Department did not directly address the president’s remarks about the National Guard.
Instead, the statement noted the city’s reduction in crime and previous work with federal and state law enforcement, including during major events like Mardi Gras. And it pledged a commitment “to sustaining this momentum, ensuring that every neighborhood continues to feel the impact of these combined efforts.”
But some Democrats, including those vying to replace New Orleans’s term-limited mayor, LaToya Cantrell, criticized the president. Helena N. Moreno, the New Orleans City Council vice president and a candidate for mayor, said Mr. Trump’s words were about “scare tactics and politicizing public safety,” while State Senator Royce Duplessis, another Democratic mayoral candidate, said residents “deserve safety and stability, not to be used as pawns in partisan theater.”
Erica L. Green and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
The post Trump Floats Sending National Guard to New Orleans Despite Drop in Crime appeared first on New York Times.
