Ever since members of the National Guard have been deployed for President Donald Trump’s domestic law enforcement priorities around the country, they have faced “deeply uncomfortable” positions of explaining it to their family, friends, and coworkers, Slate reported on Monday.
This comes as, according to Slate, guardsmen have been “asking questions” more broadly about how they are being used and why.
The missions have so far taken place in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Memphis, and litigation is ongoing to block Trump’s efforts to deploy similar operations to Chicago and Portland, Oregon. These missions are broadly voluntary, one person said in the interview captured by Slate, but many are afraid if they take the plunge, there’s no going back.
“It’s a legitimate thing that they’re thinking through, and the voluntary directive has come to their unit. They just haven’t taken it,” said National Public Radio’s Kat Lonsdorf. “But those deployments are voluntary until they’re not. If they don’t get enough people to voluntarily sign up to take one of these deployments, then they will start compelling people to take them.”
Those who go through with it, she added, have to face judgment of their peers back home — and many have opened up about their own stories.
“One of them told me that he doesn’t talk about his service anymore,” said Lonsdorf. “He basically, like, if he meets someone new, he will not share that he is part of the National Guard. He will not share that he’s part of the military. He feels deeply uncomfortable about it. Another one told me that in her civilian job, her coworkers were acting really differently toward her because they knew about her National Guard service and status, and they figured she must agree with what’s going on. And so they were kind of tiptoeing around her until she kind of confronted them a little bit and said, like, hey, I’m a singular person, and I’ll talk about it with you if you want.”
In a recent Supreme Court filing, Trump administration officials claimed they had the power to send “active duty” military rather than the National Guard to keep order in American cities — a seemingly blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act — and simply chose not to do so.
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