News
Trump’s National Guard deployments aren’t random. They were planned years ago
Members of the National Guard patrol near the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 1 in Washington, D.C.
Al Drago/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Al Drago/Getty Images
President Trump’s deployments of National Guard troops to U.S. cities have outraged his political rivals, tested legal precedents and led to nationwide protests.
The courts are weighing in on their legality. But — if successful — they could also fulfill a long-running administration goal of employing America’s military to aid in the mass deportation of immigrants without legal status, according to an NPR review of past comments from Trump and his allies. It’s a move that would stray significantly from past federal use of the Guard, challenging laws that dictate how the U.S. military can be used domestically. And with the 2026 midterms looming, some experts worry Guard troops could even be used as a tool of systemic voter suppression and intimidation.
Trump has sent troops into four Democratic-led cities and threatened to send them to several more, claiming they are needed to crack down on crime and protect federal immigration facilities and officers. Those deployments, and the White House’s rhetoric around them, have regularly conflated violent crime and illegal immigration into a single crisis, blurring the lines around the role of the Guard and federal agents.
Taken one at a time, the deployments can seem random or fickle — Trump will often muse about sending troops into a city, only to back track his comments and focus on a different city days later.
But the president and several others in his inner circle — most notably Stephen Miller, a senior aide to Trump in his first term, and now Trump’s right hand man on immigration — have long talked about using the National Guard to help with mass deportations and immigration raids, despite U.S. laws broadly preventing the military from being used for domestic policing. To get around those laws, both Trump and Miller have talked about invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy the military within the U.S. in certain situations.
Legal experts, activists and watchdog groups worry the Trump administration could fundamentally change the way the military is used on U.S. soil, specifically raising concerns about the upcoming 2026 midterm elections and what armed troops on the streets could mean as voters cast ballots.
Laying the groundwork
Much of Trump’s campaign ahead of the 2024 election was focused on drumming up anti-immigrant sentiment and pushing his plan for mass deportations. He vowed several times on the campaign trail that he would launch the largest deportation operation in American history.
In his first term, Trump and his administration had similar ambitions, but struggled to scale up infrastructure and manpower needed to carry out the goal.
In a TIME Magazine interview in April of 2024, then-candidate Trump was asked specifically if his plan included the use of the U.S. military.
“I can see myself using the National Guard and, if necessary, I’d have to go a step further. We have to do whatever we have to do to stop the problem we have,” Trump responded.
Using the National Guard for immigration enforcement is an idea that Miller had talked about publicly in the years before.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for policy and U.S. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller speaks after President Trump signed an order sending National Guard to Memphis, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on September 15, 2025.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
In 2023, Miller appeared on the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s podcast to talk about how mass deportations under Trump’s hopeful second term could work.
“In terms of personnel, you go to the red state governors, and you say, give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers,” Miller explained. “The Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama, and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia.”
Miller doesn’t specify how that would be legal — under U.S. law, the military can’t be used for domestic policing unless authorized by the Constitution or Congress. For Democratic-run states that don’t comply, Miller said, the federal government would simply send the National Guard from a nearby Republican-run state.
The deployments
In recent months, the Trump administration has deployed Guard troops to states against the wishes of their Democratic governors — including sending troops from Texas into Illinois. The administration said their purpose was to protect federal immigration facilities and officers. Those deployments are tied up in court challenges.
Members of the Texas National Guard stand guard at an army reserve training facility on October 07, 2025 in Elwood, Illinois.
Scott Olson/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Scott Olson/Getty Images North America
Miles Taylor, former chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, worked closely with Miller. He’s since become a vocal critic of the president and his policies.
Taylor says he’s not surprised to see Miller’s plan coming to fruition.
“Trump was deeply deferential to Stephen and I think you’ve seen that with a vastly more empowered Stephen Miller in a second term,” says Taylor, an author and commentator.
Taylor says that during Trump’s first term, the president wasn’t talking publicly about using the U.S. military for immigration enforcement, but it was something that was discussed behind closed doors.
Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during President Trump’s first term, holds up his phone outside of the U.S. courthouse in Alexandria, Va., ahead of the arraignment hearing for former FBI director James Comey on Oct. 8
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
“I can remember in meetings with him in the Oval Office, or on Air Force One, or at the border, him starting to bring up this idea of using the United States military to solve the problem,” he says.
It wasn’t something that Trump just talked about. In 2017, The Associated Press reported on a memo it obtained from DHS, outlining a draft proposal to use the National Guard to round up unauthorized immigrants throughout the U.S. At the time, the White House denied it, saying there was no such plan.
Taylor says there very much was — but it was also more than that.
“It was the invocation of the Insurrection Act to deputize the military to enforce domestic law to basically become a domestic police force,” he says, noting that this particular idea was something that troubled him and several other staffers.
“It rocked us to our core,” he says.
Trump invoking the Insurrection Act would legally allow for the military to act as police on U.S. soil — to carry out immigration enforcement, but possibly other enforcement too, according to legal experts.
NPR asked the White House about potential plans to deputize the Guard for law enforcement and to use the Insurrection Act, but it did not directly respond to those questions, instead criticizing Taylor and NPR. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson also referenced Trump’s “highly successful operations to drive down violent crime in American cities.”
Project 2025
The broader themes of these National Guard deployments are also embedded in Project 2025, a conservative action plan written by the Heritage Foundation after Trump’s first term that’s more than 900 pages long.
Trump has incorporated many of its policies, and authors into his second administration. So much so that the report’s architect, Russell Vought, is the head of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, in September.
Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty
hide caption
toggle caption
Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty
Matt Dallek, a professor at The George Washington University who studies the American conservative movement, says that Project 2025 essentially opens the door for Trump’s National Guard deployments — particularly to Democratic-led cities — without explicitly calling for them.
“The subtext of Project 2025 is to take any and all steps at the executive level to go into cities and states to enact the priority — which is to root out illegal immigration,” Dallek says.
The idea of bullying states and cities into following orders from the president is a key part of the text, says David Graham, a journalist for The Atlantic who also wrote a book on the project. So is the use of the military.
“There is this idea in Project 2025, and among the authors, that the military is just an underused resource for policing immigration,” Graham says, noting that often illegal immigration is presented as a national security problem. He says the report’s authors believe that the U.S. has “this huge, huge resource of armed people, and we’re not doing anything with it, and we need to use it to secure the border.”
Beyond mass deportation
In recent weeks, Trump has talked about invoking the Insurrection Act often, especially in regard to deploying the National Guard. Earlier this month, he said that he was “allowed” to invoke it if the courts deny his deployments in places like Portland, Ore., or Chicago, where prosecutors and federal judges have questioned the need for troops on the ground.
Trump invoking the Insurrection Act to allow troops to help with immigration enforcement is also something that Stephen Miller has talked about.
He told the New York Times back in 2023: “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”
That possibility has both legal experts and immigration advocates worried, especially about the implications it could have for Americans at large.
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigration rights advocacy group, says it has her worried about the upcoming 2026 midterm elections and what the presence of troops might mean for voters as they cast ballots.
“What I have said repeatedly is that the path to authoritarianism in this country is being built on the backs of immigrants. They will begin with immigrants. They will not end with immigrants,” she says.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks as FBI Director Kash Patel listens during a news conference at the Justice Department on Tuesday in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.
The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.
The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.
SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
Blanche said the money was passed from the center through two different bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups, which also included the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The group never disclosed to donors details of the informant program, he said.
“They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing,” he said.
The indictment includes details on at least nine unnamed informants were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s. Within the SPLC, they were known as field sources or “the Fs,” according to the indictment. One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the indictment said. Another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.
The SPLC said the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
The center has been targeted by Republicans
The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.
The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.
The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.
The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The center included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the center, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the center had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
new video loaded: Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
transcript
transcript
Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
The musician D4vd was charged with murder on Monday, seven months after the police said that the body of a teenage girl, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, had been found in the trunk of his Tesla. D4vd, whose real name is David Burke, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
-
“On April 23, 2025, as has been alleged by the complaint, Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again.” “These charges include the most serious charges that a D.A.‘s office can bring. That is first-degree murder with special circumstances. The special circumstances being lying in wait, committing this crime for financial gain or murdering a witness in an investigation. These special circumstances carry with it, along with the first-degree murder charge, a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.” “We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Revis Hernandez nor was he the cause of her death.”
By Jackeline Luna
April 20, 2026
-
Culture11 minutes agoPoetry Challenge Day 3: W.H. Auden, The Poet and His Technique
-
Lifestyle17 minutes agoArmani Goes Back to the Archive
-
Education23 minutes agoVideo: Which Instant Coffee Is Best?
-
Technology29 minutes agoSpaceX cuts a deal to maybe buy Cursor for $60 billion
-
World35 minutes agoPope Leo urges Africans to stay and ‘serve your country’ instead of migrating as displacement climbs
-
Politics41 minutes agoDemocrats win Virginia redistricting fight, threatening Republican House majority
-
Health47 minutes agoCommon eating habit may trigger premature immune system aging, study finds
-
Sports53 minutes agoEli Manning fires back amid debate comparing ex-Giants star to Falcons great Matt Ryan