SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
One of the major stories of 2025 was President Trump's repeated attempts to send National Guard troops into cities run by Democrats. In peacetime, the National Guard is usually called in by governors to help with things like natural disasters. But this year, Trump sent in troops in several places across the country, sometimes over governors' objections. The president claimed the purpose was to deter violence and crime. NPR's law enforcement correspondent Martin Kaste followed this phenomenon this year and joins us now, Hi, Martin.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: Can you remind us how this use of the National Guard started?
KASTE: Yeah, well, you'll remember in June in Los Angeles there were those huge protests against the administration's stepping up of immigration enforcement and raids. President Trump federalized the guard there, overriding the Democratic governor who said they weren't necessary, and the guard ended up sort of lined up outside the immigration court building downtown. And that seems to have launched this idea for the administration. In the next few weeks, we saw deployment orders for Washington, D.C., Memphis and the Chicago area. And in those cases, he said that they were being sent in to fight crime. So overall, he's been giving the guard these two tasks this year - protect immigration enforcement and deter crime.
DETROW: How effective have guardsmen and women been on those two missions?
KASTE: Well, immigration enforcement, after LA, it's been sort of tied up in legal challenges. The administration argues that the guard is needed to protect ICE in democratic-run sort of sanctuary cities, as he calls them, or states like Oregon and Illinois. But the courts have blocked that. Just last week, the Supreme Court ruled, you know, on an emergency basis that the administration was not justified in federalizing the guard in Illinois around Chicago. But President Trump has been able to deploy the guard on that anti-crime mission more successfully, and the big example, of course, is Washington, D.C., where the president does have more legal power directly over the guard.
DETROW: How well has that worked when it goes to the objectives that he set?
KASTE: Well, what you have to keep in mind with the guard is that they are not police. They don't have arrest powers and that sort of thing. But criminologists say that there is a chance that the sight of them just there in uniform could reduce crime. There's some research about similar situations. Adam Gelb runs the Council on Criminal Justice. It's sort of a nonpartisan think tank on public safety. And he says years of research have shown that more visible policing of some sort can work.
ADAM GELB: In theory, more certainty equals more deterrence. The certainty of being detected and caught is the most powerful element of deterrence, much more important than the severity of punishment after the fact. But in practice, what we don't know yet is whether there's been an appreciable impact of the guard deployment in D.C., and it's going to be very hard for researchers to disentangle.
KASTE: I mean, the stats do show that there was a big drop off in homicides in D.C. when the guard arrived. But it's really hard to parse that out from the fact that D.C. also got a lot of sort of federal law enforcement help during that time. And, of course, you know, crime is going down already. And of course, you also have to remember that the guard's visibility, unfortunately, can make it a target for violence. And we saw that in November when those two West Virginia guard members were shot near the White House and one was killed.
DETROW: What about the visuals and the symbolism of all of this?
KASTE: Yeah, I really think we shouldn't underestimate how important that is. I mean, we're talking about the military patrolling cities here, and that's not something Americans are used to seeing. I talked about this with Tennessee state Representative Jesse Chism. He's a Democrat representing Memphis. That's a city where the Republican governor sent in the guard with the Trump administration's support. And he says he's gotten some real mixed reviews from his constituents about that.
JESSE CHISM: Some people are glad they're here, and other people see it as over policing. But I do have more people to say they're a little uncomfortable with them being here, you know, because there's a lot of distrust. Even I have the same distrust with the current administration.
DETROW: What's your sense of how much of this we're going to see next year?
KASTE: Well, I think it's tempting for cities where crime remains sort of stubbornly higher than other places. We saw it in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, a Democratic governor sent the guard into a Democratic-run city. But I think, you know, is this really sustainable long term? I don't know. A couple of weeks ago, Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, said during a meeting in the Senate Armed Services Committee that the deployments to cities so far have cost $340 million. Whether that can be kept up long term is anyone's guess.
DETROW: That's NPR's Martin Kaste. Thank you.
KASTE: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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