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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
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Nebraska Medicine
Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
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The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Medicine
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
transcript
transcript
Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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