Trump Sent In The National Guard To Fight Crime In 2025 Results Were

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 30, 2025, 10:39 PM

trump sent in the national guard to fight crime in 2025 results were

We look at the use of the National Guard by President Trump — as well as the Democratic governor of New Mexico — in cities with higher-than-average crime. How effective can we say the Guard have been? 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. 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? WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump deployed 800 National Guard troops to the streets of Washington, DC, a rare flex of his presidential authority over the military while a court mulls the legality of his... Speaking at the White House on Aug. 11, Trump said he had mobilized District of Columbia National Guard troops to respond to what he has claimed are rampant crime rates in the nation's capital.

He also seized control of the Washington's local Metropolitan Police Force. "You will see them flowing into the streets of Washington in the coming weeks," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the news conference. "They will be strong. They will be tough." The deployment of hundreds of soldiers onto Washington's streets takes Trump's unprecedented use of the military – which he has already ordered to crack down on protests and help deportations – in a new... The mission of 800 DC guard members will resemble how troops are helping immigration agents swarm the southern border, the Army said.

President Donald Trump has threatened to dispatch the National Guard to Chicago and other big cities. But data shows most U.S. violent crime has been in a steady decline in recent years (AP video: Mike Householder) Members of the Louisiana National Guard patrol at Union Station, Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

National Guard troops patrol the grounds of the Washington Monument with the Capitol seen in the distance as part of President Donald Trump’s order to impose federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital, in... 28, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Members of the West Virginia National Guard near the Washington Monument in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025.

(AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib) President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years. President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years. Homicides through the first six months of 2025 were down significantly compared to the same period in 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend across the U.S.

Trump, who has already taken federal control of police in Washington, D.C., has maligned the six Democratic-run cities that all are in states that opposed him in 2024. But he hasn't threatened sending in the Guard to any major cities in Republican-leaning states. John Roman, a data expert who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago, acknowledged violence in some urban neighborhoods has persisted for generations. But he said there's no U.S. city where there “is really a crisis.” “We’re at a remarkable moment in crime in the United States,” he said.

In 2025, during Donald Trump's second presidency, federal government forces, primarily National Guard troops, have been deployed in select U.S. cities. Trump has given multiple explanations for the deployments, saying they are officially part of crackdowns on protests, civil unrest, crime, homelessness, and illegal immigration. The actions targeted Democratic Party-led cities and sparked significant controversy, with critics labeling them as abuses of power and potential violations of laws like the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits military involvement in domestic... Deployments began in Los Angeles in June 2025 and expanded to Washington, D.C., in August 2025, before presidential authorizations were issued to expand to Memphis, Tennessee, and Portland, Oregon, in September 2025. Federal forces arrived in Memphis in October 2025.[7] Plans were underway for Chicago and potentially other cities like New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Oakland, California.[8][9][10][11] In September 2025, Trump told military leaders to...

On September 2, federal courts ruled that the administration had illegally sent troops into Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a development described as potentially complicating Trump's threats for further military... I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would use the military to end protests without consent from state governors, actions which his aides had talked him out of during his first term.[5] He... President Donald Trump has claimed that his deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to Washington, D.C., has wiped out crime in the nation’s capital.

“We’ve got no crime,” he told reporters on October 5. Shootings in the capital are down by two-thirds year-over-year, according to a Trace analysis of the Gun Violence Archive, which collects data on shootings from sources like media and police reports. But a closer look with modeling from The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub shows the steep downward trend predates Trump’s deployment by several months. Shootings started plummeting in mid-April, suggesting the military presence is probably not responsible for the decline. Over the 11 weeks since troops arrived, the Data Hub model estimates fewer than one shooting victim difference citywide, compared with what would have been expected had the deployment never happened. Even if the troops remained through year’s end, the projected difference would still be less than one.

From August 11 to October 11 — the first two months of Trump’s takeover — 41 people were shot in Washington, 10 of them fatally. That’s a 62 percent drop in the number of shootings over the same period last year, when 110 people were shot, and 34 of them died. It’s the biggest year-over-year reduction for that two-month period on record. Anecdotally, the presence of troops does seem to have suppressed shootings, at least temporarily, violence interrupters on the ground told us. In recent weeks, federal agents have pulled back from patrolling neighborhoods, and shootings have ramped up again. There were at least six shootings — one of them a mass shooting — last Friday alone.

President Donald Trump said he was deploying the National Guard to Washington DC and taking control of the city's police force as he pledged to crack down on crime and homelessness in the city. Trump declared a "public safety emergency" on Monday, deploying 800 National Guard troops to bolster hundreds of federal law enforcement officers who were deployed over the weekend. "It's becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness," he told reporters at the White House. The city's Mayor Muriel Bowser has rejected the president's claims about crime, and while there was a spike in 2023, statistics show it has fallen since then. Violent crime in the city is also at a 30-year low. "I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse," Trump said during a news conference in which he was flanked by US Attorney General Pam...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday tasking his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, with establishing “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public... Under the newly signed order, Hegseth is charged with “ensuring that each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement... It also orders Hegseth to “designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes” and establish a standing “quick reaction force that... Questions remain, however, about how the order will work in practice. The National Guard already has reaction forces, designed to rapidly respond to incidents requiring law enforcement or security support in each state, territory, and the District of Columbia. These forces primarily perform their mission under the command and control of governors, and Trump’s executive order on Monday does not specify what authority the units outside of DC would report to if a...

“It seems very performative,” Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force judge advocate and current law professor at Southwestern Law School, told CNN on Monday. “But again, the devil is in the details of how they plan on using them,” she added.

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