National guard deployment in Washington DC extended until February | US military
It is reported that the national guard troops sent to the country’s capital will remain there at least until February.
The order was scheduled to expire at the end of November, but was extended by Pete Hegseth, head of the U.S. Department of Defense. As of Wednesday, there are approximately 2,400 national guard troops in Washington, D.C. According to CNN. The network also states that the daily cost of its assets is approximately $1 million.
The extension comes just a month after Washington D.C. officials sued the Trump administration over deployments that Brian Schwalb, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, described as an “involuntary military occupation” and the illegal use of the military to enforce domestic laws.
A federal judge in California ruled in September that it was illegal for Trump to send national guard troops to Los Angeles after days of protests over immigration raids in June. But that decision doesn’t directly apply to Washington, where the president has more control over the guard than in the states.
This expansion of the national guard’s presence is the latest chapter in Donald Trump’s use of national law enforcement to ostensibly prevent crime. After sending troops to Washington, D.C., he sent others to Chicago and threatened to send more to other Democrat-run cities like San Francisco, Portland and New York. The moves mark an escalation of the federal government’s rare involvement in the security of U.S. cities and have been met with outrage from Democratic officials and local organizers.
Earlier this month, a senior US military official ordered national guardsmen in all 50 US states, the District of Columbia and US territories to create “quick reaction forces” trained in “riot control”, including the use of batons, body shields, stun guns and pepper spray, according to an internal Pentagon directive reviewed by the Guardian.
The memorandum, signed Oct. 8 by Maj. Gen. Ronald Burkett, director of operations for the Pentagon’s National Guard bureau, sets thresholds for the size of the rapid reaction force to be trained in each state; most states are required to train 500 national guard members, for a total of 23,500 soldiers nationwide. Each state will report its progress monthly.
