Trump’s Military Occupations of U.S. Cities Cost $473 Million and Rising

President Donald Trump s military occupations of U S cities have cost nearly half a billion dollars according to an expert estimate provided exclusively to The Intercept The current million price tag now includes million spent in Los Angeles where troops arrived in June almost million for the occupation of Washington D C which began in August nearly million for Portland Oregon which was declared in September and more than million for Memphis Tennessee and almost million for Chicago which both began last month The National Priorities Project a nonpartisan research group tallied these totals from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen Dick Durbin D-Ill The skyrocketing price of Trump s occupations come as the president threatens to deploy additional troops to more American cities to quell dissent and turn America into a full-blown police state Trump just now stated he could send the Army Navy Air Force Marines I could send anybody I desired into urban America while threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act one of the executive branch s the bulk potent oldest and rarely used crisis powers He has specifically threatened to surge troops into Baltimore New York City Oakland St Louis San Francisco and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local executives Troops are also expected to be deployed to New Orleans later this month Despite the Trump administration s unprecedented use of the military within the U S it has kept even basic details about domestic troop deployments including the costs secret Our National Guard troops did not sign up to police their own neighbors If Donald Trump is burning through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on his authoritarian campaign of intimidation the American people deserve to know about it Federal judges across the country including a Trump appointee have ruled that these deployments are not justified and thus not only wasteful but also illegal and unconstitutional and our National Guard troops did not sign up to police their own neighbors or be used as political pawns Sen Tammy Duckworth D-Ill informed The Intercept Trump s continued abuse of our military to intimidate Americans in their own neighborhoods the very same Americans he expects to foot the bill for these deployments must end forthwith Duckworth was one of senators who petitioned the Congressional Budget Office late last month to provide an independent assessment of the projected expense of deploying federalized National Guard units for domestic measure operations including the activation deployment compensation and sustainment costs The CBO did not say whether it will provide the requested assessment telling The Intercept that it is unable to respond to external inquiries due to a lapse in appropriated funds Related Documenting ICE Agents Brutal Use of Force in LA Immigration Raids Over the last six months a Trump administration urban occupation playbook has emerged In city after city armed federal agents storm into neighborhoods violating people s rights When American citizens exercise their First Amendment right to protest the authoritarian measures federal agents respond with violence While such protests have remained overwhelmingly peaceful and have never overwhelmed the quota of local law enforcement Trump has repeatedly proclaimed himself unable to enforce the law and seized command of National Guard members over the objections of state governors to quash dissent A federal judge in Oregon on Friday evening ruled that Trump illegally ordered state National Guard units to Portland issuing a sweeping injunction that restrains the president s claimed authority to deploy Guard members over a governor s objection In a -page opinion District Judge Karin Immergut ruled that Trump s federalization of Oregon National Guard members and deployments of federalized California and Texas Guard troops to an ICE facility in Portland exceeded his statutory authority and violated the th Amendment s protections for state sovereignty T here was neither a rebellion or danger of a rebellion nor was the President unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States in Oregon when he ordered the federalization and deployment of the National Guard she wrote A federal district court and the U S Court of Appeals for the th Circuit have so far blocked Trump s attempt to federalize National Guard troops and deploy them into Chicago and surrounding counties The Trump administration filed an emergency stay request last month with the Supreme Court and on Monday implored the justices to show extraordinary deference to the president as commander-in-chief claiming Trump could have already deployed active-duty troops The standing military was undoubtedly an available option to quash the violent resistance to federal immigration enforcement Solicitor General D John Sauer notified the court In September District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the Trump administration s ongoing Los Angeles occupation is illegal noting that while troops were deployed ostensibly to quell a rebellion there was no rebellion nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law Members of the National Guard have been activated or deployed under Title authority or federal control in at least seven states Arizona California Florida Illinois New Mexico Oregon and Texas as occupation forces or to conduct anti-immigrant dividing line operations The occupation of D C is technically a Title deployment a federal-state hybrid but since the capital has no governor the D C National Guard s chain of command runs from its commanding general to the secretary of the Army to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to Trump At Trump s urging military leaders have in recent days ordered the National Guard in every state to develop a quick reaction force trained to combat civil disturbances and riots that can be ready to deploy with just hours notice The units in total will reportedly number around troops It s extremely concerning on so a large number of levels that in less than six months since Trump first activated troops in LA domestic military occupations are escalating despite their dubious legality and expenses are already approaching half a billion dollars stated Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project who provided the estimates on the deployment costs Especially given all the GOP s massive social spending cuts that are stripping soundness care and food benefits from millions of families and the fact that the Pentagon is reportedly planning to ramp up use of National Guard troops for an impending nationwide crackdown Durbin s office provided The Intercept with details from the Senate Armed Services Committee that placed the price tag for the Los Angeles deployment at million as of mid-October as well as an estimate for the typical deployment cost for National Guard member for a period of days approximately per day or per soldier per day The National Priorities Project used these figures and open-source information about the size and length of deployments to provide cost estimates through November For months the Pentagon has refused to provide figures on the mounting expense of federal troop deployments We won t know the total cost until the mission concludes a Pentagon spokesperson notified The Intercept in July when forces were only deployed to Los Angeles Latest follow-up requests for further information have gone unanswered People don t need troops in their backyard they need medical care housing and cheaper groceries Why is the Trump administration refusing to be transparent about how much money it s spending on this political stunt appealed Sen Elizabeth Warren D-Mass another of the lawmakers who requested the CBO analysis People don t need troops in their backyard they need wellbeing care housing and cheaper groceries Trump has teased using urban occupations to hone the skills of the armed forces We should use chosen of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military he informed a gathering of hundreds of generals and admirals Trump has also justified his push to militarize urban America through hyperbole dog-whistle politics and the peddling of baseless lies Trump stated protesters in Los Angeles were animals and a foreign enemy calling the city a trash heap with entire neighborhoods under control of criminals Trump described Chicago as a war zone He similarly maintains that Portland is war-ravaged and in a state of rebellion Portland has been on fire for years I really think that s really criminal insurrection Trump reported reporters He disclosed D C s homicide rate is higher than the worst places on Earth Not only did Trump use older misleading statistics but even cherry-picking the statistics at least other cities across the world had higher homicide rates He even fabricated a story of hand-to-hand combat between troops and child gangsters from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on the streets of the capital For weeks the White House has failed to respond to questions about this fictional affair Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act which allows the president to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act a bedrock th-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement Posse Comitatus is seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in the United States The Insurrection Act has been used routinely by presidents I haven t chosen to use it but if I needed it I could do it And if I needed it that would mean I could bring in the Army the Marines I could bring in whoever I want Trump described Minutes lately Related The Sinister Reason Trump Is Itching to Invoke the Insurrection Act Trump seems to believe that the Insurrection Act affords him almost unlimited power to wield the military against Americans and has repeatedly made wild and erroneous proposes about the law Trump claimed for example that an unnamed president used the Insurrection Act times during the module of a presidency but no president has invoked the Act on more occasions than Ulysses S Grant s six times according to research by New York University s Brennan Center for Justice The act and the similar prior laws have been invoked on only occasions in U S history Trump also proposes that percent of the presidents have invoked the act when only of presidents less than percent have invoked the act or its precursor laws according to the Brennan Center The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the president s confusion about the act The Insurrection Act is an extremely powerful tool but it s not a blank check The president can deploy active-duty troops or federalized National Guard forces under the law only if its criteria are met And while those criteria appear quite broad the Department of Justice has long taken the position that they are limited by the Constitution and tradition Elizabeth Goitein senior director of the Brennan Center s liberty and national defense activity reported The Intercept Properly interpreted the law can only be used in extreme circumstances that merely aren t present in Los Angeles Portland Chicago or anywhere else in the United States The president isn t the only one peddling misinformation about federal troop deployments U S Northern Command which oversees federal troop deployments provides a link to an official National Guard document on Federalizations of the Guard for Domestic Missions through which details deployments of state militia and National Guardsmen from the s to the present Although an attached chart shows that in six of instances troops were deployed without the consent of a state s governor the document nonetheless asserts In each of these instances the governor requested federal forces to assist in maintaining order Goitein scoffed at the claim That s just not true she announced pointing to Little Rock Arkansas The document cites President Dwight Eisenhower s deployment of National Guard and active-duty troops to enforce desegregation in the schools as an example of an instance in which a governor requested and received help from federal forces Far from requesting this deployment the governor had deployed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent desegregation she explained Eisenhower literally federalized the National Guard for the purposes of ordering them to stand down To portray this famous standoff as an episode in which the governor appealed for federal help is laughable The document even notes that Gov Orval Faubus is famously quoted as having called his own National Guard occupation troops after they were federalized Protest plays an essential role in our democracy and President Trump is hellbent on suppressing it Trump s pricey urban occupations come amid a welter of authoritarian acts including a crackdown on domestic enemies and an undeclared war in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean in which the president declares the right to summarily execute persons he deems to be narco-terrorists Trump unilaterally decreed that designated terrorist organizations or DTOs are in a state of non-international armed conflict with the United States In addition to this secret list of foreign groups Trump has also ordered his administration to compile a domestic terrorist organization list made up of his political foes despite the fact there is no legal mechanism for labeling exclusively domestic organizations as terrorist groups Under Trump s National Safeguard Presidential Memorandum or NSPM- he instructed his administration to target U S progressive groups and their donors as well as political activists who profess undefined anti-American anti-fascist or anti-Christian sentiments The White House has not responded to repeated requests for more than a week to clarify whether those who belong to groups on the administration s secret domestic terrorist organization list are subject to summary execution as are members of groups on the administration s secret designated terrorist organizations list Trump s authoritarian measures have been bolstered by his half-billion-dollar effort to employ troops to chill dissent in America s cities Protest plays an essential role in our democracy and President Trump is hellbent on suppressing it stated Hina Shamsi director of the ACLU s National Defense Project The president is attempting to normalize military policing of protest but as the founders of this country made abundantly clear turning troops on civilians is an intolerable threat to our liberties President Trump is imperiling our First Amendment rights and we urge the court to deny his application The post Trump s Military Occupations of U S Cities Cost Million and Rising appeared first on The Intercept