Supreme Court Blocks Trump Effort To Deploy National Guard Troops To Illinois

The Supreme Court has rebuffed President Donald Trump’s attempt to deploy National Guard troops in Illinois to protect federal officials carrying out his mass-deportation policy.

In their ruling Tuesday, the justices noted that federal law generally bars use of the military for law enforcement, and they declared that the law Trump used to activate the Guard is likely to only apply when regular armed forces — the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines — are insufficient to maintain order.

“At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois,” the high court said in an unsigned order released more than two months after the administration asked the justices to weigh in.

Three conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — dissented, while another conservative, Brett Kavanaugh, declined to join the majority’s explanation of the ruling.

The Supreme Court’s decision turned down the administration’s bid to lift lower court orders that halted the president’s plan to use 500 National Guard soldiers from Illinois and Texas to respond to protests and unrest at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in suburban Chicago.

The ruling is a rare loss for the president following a string of wins he has racked up on the high court’s emergency docket in the first year of his second term. The justices cleared the way for him to fire leaders of federal agencies, dismiss tens of thousands of government employees and halt thousands of federal grants and contracts.

And while the decision is not a final one on the legal issues at stake in the National Guard deployments, it is a significant setback for the president in a battle with Democratic leaders who have taken legal action to resist his efforts to advance his immigration agenda by putting federalized troops on the streets in several major cities.

Trump’s attempt to deploy the National Guard to Illinois in September followed similar moves he made earlier this year in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.

Federal appeals judges initially sided with the president over the Southern California deployment, but later allowed a lower-court order blocking further use of the troops to remain in place. A district court judge’s order halting the use of Guard troops in Oregon also remains in effect.

District and appeals court judges have also sharply rejected Trump’s bid to borrow National Guard troops from cooperative red states and send them into Democratic-led cities and states over the objection of governors and mayors. But the Supreme Court didn’t weigh in on that question.