A federal judge in Washington temporarily blocked the Trump administration on Thursday from maintaining more than 2,000 members of the National Guard deployed to the city’s streets, finding the city was likely to succeed in arguing the deployment was illegal.
Judge Jia M. Cobb of Federal District Court, a Biden appointee, wrote in a 61-page opinion that the deployment, which began in August, appeared to be illegal for a variety of reasons, including limits on the president’s authority to assert total control over the local D.C. National Guard, as well as concerns over the city’s rights to self-governance.
Those concerns were compounded, she wrote, by the fact that more than 1,000 members of the force deployed to Washington are from other states, and that the Trump administration had taken steps to establish a semi-permanent command structure, with an eye to keeping troops in the city well into next year.
She paused her ruling for three weeks, to allow time for the administration to remove the troops, as well as to appeal her decision.
“At its core, Congress has given the District rights to govern itself,” Judge Cobb wrote. “Those rights are infringed upon when defendants approve, in excess of their statutory authority, the deployment of National Guard troops to the District.”
The ruling followed several others around the country in which federal judges have found that President Trump’s deployment of troops to Chicago, Memphis, Tenn., and Portland, Ore., also most likely violated the law.
But the lawsuit in Washington was legally unique because of the unusual status of the District of Columbia, where federal authorities including the president have expanded powers. Mr. Trump has used that authority to bring in a force of National Guard troops contributed by Republican states to serve as a semipermanent patrol in the city.
A White House spokeswoman said in an email that Mr. Trump reserved the right to command the National Guard as he saw fit.
“This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of D.C. residents — to undermine the president’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in D.C.,” said the spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson.
Brian Schwalb, Washington’s elected attorney general, whose office brought the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling as a major breakthrough for the city after months of daily patrols by armed troops spread out across much of the city.
“From the beginning, we made clear that the U.S. military should not be policing American citizens on American soil,” he said in a statement. “Normalizing the use of military troops for domestic law enforcement sets a dangerous precedent, where the president can disregard states’ independence and deploy troops wherever and whenever he wants — with no check on his military power.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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