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The Guardian
17 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘We're anti-federal chaos': Democratic cities prepare for worst after Trump's tirades against DC and LA
As tanks rolled down Washington DC streets against the wishes of local leaders, mayors around the country planned for what they would do if the Trump administration comes for them next. Donald Trump's disdain for Democratic-run cities featured heavily in his 2024 campaign. The president vowed to take over DC – a promise he attempted to fulfill this week. Earlier this year, he sent national guard troops to Los Angeles amid protests despite California opposing the move, which led to a lawsuit from the state. City leaders say there are appropriate ways for the federal government to partner with them to address issues such as crime, but that Trump is using the pretext of crime and unrest to override their local authority, create chaos and distract from a bruising news cycle about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Many cities have worked to bring down violent crime rates – they are on the decline in most large cities, though mayors acknowledge they still have work to do to improve the lives of their residents. 'President Trump constantly creates a narrative that cities like Seattle are liberal hellholes and we are lawless, and that is just not the fact,' said Bruce Harrell, the mayor of Seattle. 'We are the home of great communities and great businesses. So his view of our city is not aligned with reality. It's to distract the American people from his failures as a president.' By sending in the military, some noted, Trump was probably escalating crime, contributing to distrust in the government and creating unsafe situations both for residents and service members. Even Republican mayors or mayors in red states have said they don't agree with Trump usurping local control for tenuous reasons. The US Conference of Mayors, currently led by the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, David Holt, pushed back against Trump's takeover of DC, saying 'local control is always best'. 'These mayors around the country, by the way, from multiple ideological backgrounds, they love their city more than they love their ideology,' said Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. Mayors told the Guardian they are ready to stand up for their cities, legally and otherwise, should Trump come knocking. They are working with their chiefs of police to ensure they agree on the chain of command and coordinating with governors in the event the national guard is deployed. Because Trump has so frequently brought up plans to crack down on cities, large Democratic cities have been strategizing with emergency planning departments and city attorneys. But Trump has shown he's willing to bend and break the law in his pursuits against cities. The Pentagon is reportedly planning to potentially put national guard troops at the ready, stationed in Alabama and Arizona, to deploy to cities experiencing unrest. He has indicated this is just the beginning of an assault on cities. His attorney general sent letters to a host of Democratic cities this week, threatening to arrest local leaders if they don't cooperate with federal authorities on immigration enforcement. The idea that troops could be on the ground for any number of reasons in cities around the US should alarm people, said Brett Smiley, the Democratic mayor of Providence, Rhode Island. 'This is not something that we should be used to, and we shouldn't let this administration break yet another norm or standard in our society, such that a couple years from now, we don't think twice about when we see troops in our cities,' Smiley said. The roots of Trump's battle with cities stretch back to his first administration, and they align with common narratives on the right about how cities today have fallen off because of liberal policies. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint, called for crackdowns on cities, including withholding federal funds to force compliance with deportation plans. His campaign promises included a commitment to 'deploying federal assets, including the National Guard, to restore law and order when local law enforcement refuses to act'. In a video from 2023, he explained: 'In cities where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order, where the fundamental rights of our citizens are being intolerably violated, I will not hesitate to send in federal assets including the national guard until safety is restored.' In 2020, he reportedly wished he cracked down much harder and faster on protesters and rioters during the demonstrations after George Floyd's murder. Now, he's using smaller problems – anti-immigration protests and crime against a government employee – to declare emergencies. Minneapolis, where the protests began after a police officer killed Floyd, has at times made Trump's list of rundown cities. Frey, a Democrat, said he didn't know whether 2020 protests played a role in Trump's current actions. 'I don't think anybody can pretend to know what's in Donald Trump's head,' Frey told the Guardian. 'It's an utter mess of idiocy. I don't know what he's thinking. I don't know what he's thinking or what the rhyme or reason is. I mean, clearly there's a focus on Democratically run cities.' When Trump called out other cities on his radar, he named blue cities run by Black mayors – Baltimore, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago. 'The fact that my city and all the others called out by the president on Sunday, led by Black mayors, are all making historic progress on crime, but they're the ones getting called up – it tells you everything that you need to know,' Baltimore's mayor, Brandon Scott, said in a press call this week. The federal government can often partner with cities to address crime – several Democratic mayors noted that they worked with the Biden administration on this front successfully. But those partnerships are mutually agreed upon collaborations, not overrides of local policing. 'We're not anti-federal help. We're anti-federal chaos,' Frey said. Detroit's mayor, Mike Duggan, said in a statement that his city is seeing its lowest homicides, shootings and carjackings in more than 50 years, crediting a partnership with federal agencies and the US attorney as a major part of that success. 'This partnership is simple and effective: DPD does the policing and the feds have strongly increased support for federal prosecution,' Duggan said. 'We appreciate the partnership we have today and are aware of no reason either side would want to change it.' Mayors are not saying they have solved the issue of violent crime, Scott said, though they are acknowledging they have reduced it and will continue to work toward further reductions. 'We need folks that want to actually help us do that, versus try to take and show force and make us into something other than a representative democracy that we all are proud to call home,' he said. Mayors throughout the US made a clear distinction between Trump's authority in Washington DC compared to other cities. Washington has a legal provision in the Home Rule Act of 1973 that allows for a president to take over its police department during an emergency on a temporary basis, though Trump is the first to use this power. Other cities have no similar concept in law. Even with the Home Rule Act, Washington officials sued Trump after his attempt to replace the city's police chief, saying the president was mounting a 'hostile takeover' of DC police. Trump and the city agreed to scale back the federal takeover on Friday, keeping DC's police chief in place. 'We know when people want to say they're going to be a dictator on day one, they never voluntarily give up that aspiration on day two,' Norm Eisen, an attorney who frequently sues the Trump administration, said in a press call this week. 'That is what you are seeing in the streets of the District of Columbia.' In Minneapolis, Frey said the city has prepared operational plans with police, fire and emergency management and readied itself legally. 'Our chief of police and I are lockstep, and he reports up to the commissioner of safety, who reports up to me,' Frey said. 'There's no lack of clarity as to how this reporting structure works, and it certainly does not go to Donald Trump. Doing something like that in Minneapolis, it would be just a blatantly illegal usurpation of local control were this to happen here. Of course, we would take immediate action to get injunctive relief.' Trump's decision to send in national guard troops to Los Angeles is also legally questionable. Governors typically direct guard troops. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, sued Trump for using the military for domestic law enforcement in defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act. The case was heard by a judge this week. Harrell, of Seattle, said he is confident he will be able to protect his police department and the city's residents if Trump sends troops. 'What I have to do is make sure that the people under my jurisdiction as mayor feel confident in an ability to fight his overreach, and that our law department is well geared to advance our legal arguments,' he said. Scott, of Baltimore, said he was prepared to take every action 'legally and otherwise'. Still, there is some uncertaintyand unsteadiness about how cities can respond if Trump calls up the national guard. 'It's very difficult to know what our options are, because we're in unchartered territory here,' Smiley, of Providence, said. 'It's unprecedented and I don't know what my options are with respect to preventing troops from coming in, which is one of the reasons that I'm trying to be so proactive about making it clear that it's not necessary, it's not wanted.'
CNN
20 hours ago
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: The common thread in Trump's latest moves: squeezing big blue cities
Donald Trump Immigration Federal agencies US militaryFacebookTweetLink Follow President Donald Trump is moving systematically to tighten his grip on Democratic-leaning big cities — the geographic center of resistance to his agenda — by undermining their autonomy and eroding their political strength. Those militant goals are the common thread that links the high-profile initiatives Trump has launched in recent days to seize control of law enforcement in Washington, DC; pressure red states to draw new congressional district lines; and potentially pursue an unprecedented 'redo' of the 2020 census. These new efforts compound the pressure Trump is already placing on major cities with an agenda that includes aggressive immigration enforcement; cuts in federal research funding to universities central to the economy of many large metros; and threats to rescind federal funding for jurisdictions that resist his demands to impose conservative policies on immigration, education, homelessness and policing. Trump is pursuing this confrontational approach at a time when major metropolitan areas have become the undisputed engines of the nation's economic growth — and the nexus of research breakthroughs in technologies such as artificial intelligence, which Trump has identified as key to the nation's competitiveness. The 100 largest metropolitan areas now account for about three-fourths of the nation's economic output, according to research by Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Yet Trump is treating the largest cities less as an economic asset to be nourished than as a political threat to be subdued. Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, said Trump's approach to the nation's largest cities is 'colonial' in that he wants to benefit from their prodigious economic output while suppressing their independence and political clout. This administration is 'treating America's great economic engines as weak and problematic colonial outposts,' Muro said. 'They view them as the problem, when (in reality) they are the absolute base of American competitiveness in the battle against China or whoever (else).' Antagonism toward major cities has long been central to Trump's message. Several times he has described American cities with mayors who are Democrats, members of racial minorities, or both, as dystopian 'rodent-infested' 'hellholes.' Trump in 2024 nonetheless ran better in most large cities than in his earlier races, amid widespread disenchantment about then-President Joe Biden's record on inflation, immigration and crime. Still, as Trump himself has noted, large cities, and often their inner suburbs, remain the foundation of Democratic political strength and the cornerstone of opposition to his agenda. A series of dramatic actions just in the past few days shows how systematically Trump is moving to debilitate those cities' ability to oppose him. The most visible way Trump is pressuring big cities is by deploying federal law enforcement and military personnel into them over the objections of local officials. In his first term, Trump sent federal law enforcement personnel into Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC, in the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder. But after he left office, Trump, who does not often publicly second-guess himself, frequently said that one of his greatest regrets was that he did not dispatch more federal forces into cities. In his 2024 campaign, he explicitly pledged to deploy the National Guard, and potentially active-duty military, into major cities for multiple purposes: combating crime, clearing homeless encampments and supporting his mass deportation program. In office, Trump has steadily fulfilled those promises. When protests erupted in Los Angeles in June over an intense Immigration and Custom Enforcement deportation push, Trump deployed not only the National Guard (which he federalized over the objection of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom), but also active-duty Marines. Then, the administration used those forces not only to guard federal buildings, but also to accompany ICE (and other agencies) on enforcement missions — including a striking deployment of armored vehicles and soldiers in tactical gear to a public park in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood. The underlying immigration enforcement that precipitated the LA protests constituted a different show of force. As a recent CNN investigation showed, ICE is relying much more on street apprehensions in cities in blue states than in red states, where it is removing more people from jails and prisons. The administration says that imbalance is a result of 'sanctuary' policies in blue states and cities limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But civil rights groups see the administration's confrontational blue-state approach as an attempt to intimidate both local officials and immigrant communities. (The fact that ICE last week conducted an immigration sweep directly outside a Newsom press conference bolstered the latter interpretation.) Whatever the rationale, research by the University of California at Merced suggests the administration's enforcement approach is hurting blue cities. Using census data, the school's Community and Labor Center recently found that from May to July the number of California workers holding a private-sector job fell by about 750,000 — proportionally an even greater decline than during the 2008 Great Recession. Hispanic people and Asian Americans accounted for almost all the falloff. Sociology professor Ed Flores, the center's faculty director, said he believes the decline is 'absolutely' tied to economic disruption flowing from 'the presence of ICE and the way that (people) are being apprehended' on the street. New York City, too, has seen a notable drop in the labor force participation rate among Hispanic men. Now, with the military (if not ICE) presence in LA winding down, Trump has sent hundreds of National Guard troops into Washington, DC, while also utilizing a section of federal law that allows him to temporarily seize control of the city's police department. In his news conference last week announcing the DC moves, Trump repeatedly said he would supplement the National Guard forces, as he did in LA, with active-duty troops if he deems it necessary. And he repeatedly signaled that he is considering deploying military forces into other cities that he described as overrun by crime, including Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland, California — all jurisdictions with Black mayors. 'We're not going to lose our cities over this, and this will go further,' Trump declared. Most experts agree that Trump will confront substantial legal hurdles if he tries to replicate the DC deployment in other places. 'What they are doing in DC is not repeatable elsewhere for a number of reasons,' said Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Nunn said Trump can order this mission because of the DC National Guard's unique legal status. On the one hand, Nunn noted, the DC Guard is under the president's direct control, rather than the jurisdiction of a state governor. On the other, he said, the Justice Department has ruled that even when the president utilizes the DC Guard, its actions qualify as a state, not federal, deployment. That's critical because state guard deployments are not subject to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act's ban on federal military forces engaging in domestic law enforcement. If Trump tries to deploy the National Guard to address crime in the big cities of blue states, such as Chicago or New York, Nunn argued, he would face a catch-22. Since there's virtually no chance Democratic governors would agree to participate, Trump could only put troops on those streets by federalizing their states' National Guard or using active-duty military, Nunn said. But, he added, 'once they are working with federalized National Guard or active-duty military forces, the Posse Comitatus Act applies' — barring the use of those forces for domestic law enforcement. Trump could seek to override the Posse Comitatus Act's ban on military involvement by invoking the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act has not been used to combat street crime, but the statute allows the president to domestically deploy the military against 'any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.' Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in the relationships among different levels of government, agreed that invoking the Insurrection Act to justify sending the National Guard into cities over mayors' objections would shatter the generally understood limits on the law's application. But he also believes that precedent provides no firm assurance that this Supreme Court, which has proved extremely receptive to Trump's expansive claims of presidential authority, would stop him. Trump 'could try' to win court approval of military deployments to fight crime by citing the Insurrection Act's language about ''domestic violence' and 'unlawful combinations'' and then claiming that is 'depriving the people of their right to security,' Briffault said. Whatever the legal hurdles, more widely deploying the military on domestic missions would bring substantial consequences. Mayor Jerry Dyer of Fresno, California, who spent 18 years as the city's police commissioner, says that putting military forces onto the streets of more cities would create problems of coordination with local officials and trust with local communities. 'Whenever you start sending federal resources into local jurisdictions and actually take over the policing of that jurisdiction, it can become very disturbing to that community and quite frankly can create some neighborhood issues and ultimately a lack of trust,' said Dyer, who co-chairs the Mayors and Police Chiefs Task Force for the US Conference of Mayors. Even more profound may be the implications of numbing Americans to the sight of heavily armored military forces routinely patrolling the streets of domestic cities — an image that historically has been common only in authoritarian countries. New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading scholar of authoritarian regimes, wrote last week that the ultimate aim of Trump's domestic deployments 'is to habituate Americans to see militarized cities and crackdowns against public dissent in cities as normal and justified.' Step by step, she argued, Trump is seeking 'to disempower and delegitimize all Democratic municipal and state authorities.' In less obvious ways, the battle that has erupted over redistricting — and the likely fight approaching over the census — constitutes another Trump-backed effort to 'disempower' large metropolitan areas. The unusual mid-decade congressional redistricting that Texas Republicans are pursuing at Trump's behest would increase the number of Republican-leaning US House seats largely by reducing the number of districts representing the state's biggest metropolitan areas, including Dallas, Houston and Austin, which all lean Democratic. The new map would further dilute the political influence of Texas' major metro areas, even as they have accounted for about four-fifths of the state's population and economic growth over recent years, said Steven Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. 'The growth in Texas has been driven by urban communities, but those communities are not going to be represented in these additional maps,' Pedigo said. In that way, the new Texas map extends the strategy that Republicans there, and in other growing Sun Belt states, used in the maps they drew after the 2020 census, said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. States such as Texas and Florida that added the most House seats and electoral votes after the 2020 census — and are poised to gain the most again after 2030 — are adding population primarily among non-White people and in Democratic-leaning metro areas, Bisognano noted in a recent memo. Yet both of those groups will be denied the additional House representation generated by that population growth if the Republicans controlling Sun Belt state governments continue to draw district lines that splinter metro populations and favor rural ones. 'They are subjugating (metro voters) to produce a partisan outcome that is not reflective of the people of those cities,' Bisognano said. The calls from Trump and Vice President JD Vance to 'redo' the 2020 census, partly to exclude undocumented immigrants, could marginalize cities even more. Even if Trump could surmount the many legal and logistical obstacles to conducting a mid-decade census, a reapportionment of House seats and electoral votes that excluded undocumented immigrants would not result in the shift of influence from blue to red states that many conservatives envision. John Robert Warren, a University of Minnesota sociologist, concluded in a 2025 paper that if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the 2020 census, California and Texas would each lose a House seat and New York and Ohio would each gain one. 'It would make literally zero difference,' Warren said. 'If you assume Texas and Ohio go red and California and New York go blue, then it's just a wash.' Excluding undocumented immigrants from the count, though, could offer Trump another way to squeeze urban centers. Many agricultural communities have substantial undocumented immigrant populations, but half of all undocumented immigrants live in just 37 large counties, according to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. 'Within a state that Republicans control, by not including (undocumented people), it would be much easier to draw Republican districts because you would have a smaller minority population base to work with,' said Jeffrey Wice, a redistricting expert at New York University's law school. Not only congressional representation but also the many federal funding sources tied to population would shift toward rural areas if the census undercounts the urban population, he noted. Wice, who formerly consulted for Democrats on redistricting, says blue states and cities can't assume Trump won't pursue any of these possibilities, no matter how far-fetched they now seem. The same is surely true on the deployment of federal force into blue places. The New Republic's Greg Sargent recently published an internal Department of Homeland Security memo that described the joint ICE-National Guard mission in Los Angeles as 'the type of operations (and resistance) we're going to be working through for years to come.' (Emphasis added.) During World War II, the German siege of Leningrad famously lasted nearly 900 days. Big blue American cities may be counting down the hours as anxiously for the 1252 days remaining in Trump's second term.
Irish Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
Zohran Mamdani has turned the politics of richest city in US on its head
In June Donald Trump , having manufactured a crisis over alleged obstruction in California of round-ups by his immigration police (ICE), flexed his authoritarian muscles, federalising the state national guard and deploying marines to back them up. Critics warned of the militarisation of the repression of dissent. This week the LA dress rehearsal was followed up – federal troops sent in to Washington, DC on the spurious pretext that it is awash with violent crime. In fact violent crime is at a 30-year low. And the president, determined to warn Democratic cities that he will not be defied and has the power effectively to take them over, threatened similar treatment to three other Democratic strongholds – Chicago, Baltimore and Oakland. He spoke to his real agenda: 'If a communist gets elected,' he said, 'we have tremendous power … to run places when we have to'. As The New York Times points out , the contrast between Trump's enthusiastic deployment of force against a mythical crime wave, and his refusal to intervene against mobs storming Congress speaks volumes. READ MORE A communist in America? Some chance. Except that, horror of horrors for Trump and the city's billionaire class, there is a very real chance that in November the New York mayoralty election will see a charismatic 33-year-old state assemblyman, self-confessed 'socialist' Zohran Mamdani, top the poll. A 'communist', complains Trump, who has spoken of depriving him of his citizenship and of jailing him for interfering with immigrant arrests. The administration is also suing the city for its refusal to co-operate with ICE. [ This man could be just what the American left needs Opens in new window ] Mamdani, born in Uganda to ethnic Indian parents, became a US citizen in 2018 and has attracted widespread controversy over his vocal support for Palestinian rights. He has brought a new dynamism to the left, stunning the political establishment with a sweeping victory, 'the biggest political upset in the city's history', in the city's Democratic primary in June . He took 56 per cent of the vote, 12 per cent more than next-placed, party leadership favourite, discredited former governor Andrew Cuomo. Controversy over Mamdani's immigration status follows a chorus of Islamophobic attacks on his Muslim faith, not to mention his unapologetic membership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organisational backbone of his campaign. Remarkably, however, polls show him galvanising significant Jewish support. Young people have flocked to him. The DSA traces its dramatic growth to the mid-2010s in the wake of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders' run for president and Trump's 2016 presidential victory. It now boasts some 80,000 members, 10,000 of them in New York, the core of the 60,000 well-drilled door-to-door canvassers who mobilised in the primary. Mamdani's success will offer it a huge national platform, reigniting a rich but largely eclipsed socialist tradition in American politics. Until recently 'socialist' remained largely a term of political insult. Now, according to a recent poll by the conservative Cato Institute, more Democrats have positive views of socialism (67 per cent) than capitalism (50 per cent), while among Americans under 30, 62 per cent feel favourable towards socialism. The lacklustre, traditional Democratic leadership, unable to capitalise on Trump's return or reverse his capture of significant parts of its working-class base, or to break with post-911 Islamophobia, is openly hostile to the upstart candidate. But the DSA and Mamdani have turned the politics of the country's richest city, with its vastly unequal living conditions, on its head. [ Why Donald Trump is only beginning his pursuit of the 'enemy within' Opens in new window ] Billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg, now an anti-Mamdani megadonor, boasted of gentrifying the city, transforming once grimy and rundown New York into what he called 'a luxury product'. But its cash-strapped residents have turned, attracted by the DSA's radical campaign focused on New York's affordability crisis – its programme: a rent freeze, free child care and free buses, a doubling of the minimum wage, 200,000 new units of affordable housing, and expanded public services, paid for in large part by higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. The crisis created by mass deportation has also prompted Mamdani to adopt a more militant anti-ICE posture than that of almost any other US politician, enabling the party to dig deep into the city's huge ethnic populations, most notably the Hispanics. And without becoming drawn into the divisive identity politics that have so long riven New York. The political climate, The Nation columnist Spencer Ackerman writes, has been transformed by 'the detentions and renditions of restaurant cooks, delivery drivers, day labourers, and other members of New York's working class. Mamdani, without necessarily meaning to, has illuminated the way that the tools of the war on terror are the tools of class war.' [ These five factors are how Zohran Mamdani took New York by storm Opens in new window ] The campaign is on and fierce, and all rather old-fashioned. When Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was reproached for supporting Mamdani's plans to tax the rich she retorted simply: 'Oh dear, are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?' Touché. Roll on November.
The Independent
23-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
ICE is now detaining fewer criminals than ever in the US
The Trump administration's immigration enforcement has led to an 800 percent increase in the number of people without a criminal record being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since January. This surge has resulted in over 50,000 individuals being held in ICE detention centers, the first time this figure has been reached. Less than one-third of current ICE detainees are convicted criminals, with the majority arrested for non-criminal immigration offenses or having pending charges. Internal documents indicate that only about one in ten ICE detainees from October to May were convicted of serious crimes like murder or rape. Enforcement officials are reportedly facing pressure to meet daily arrest targets and expand efforts to detain and deport individuals in Democratic-run cities.
Bloomberg
17-06-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
The White House Wants to Numb Voters to This
Trump portrays Democratic-led states and cities as un-American, aiming to normalize treating them like the enemy. Save One major American city in turmoil was apparently insufficient for President Donald Trump. Under pressure from allies, he is retreating from immigration enforcement in some key economic sectors. But simultaneously, in a post to his social media platform on Sunday night, he made clear he intends to apply the coercive immigration enforcement tactics he is using in Los Angeles against other big Democratic-run cities.
