** 12/23/25 - Supreme Court Finally Reins In Trump’s Use of National Guard
Buzz Sawyer
Supreme Court Finally Reins In Trump’s Use of National Guard
More often than not in 2025, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued one of its highly procedural “shadow docket” emergency orders involving Donald Trump’s executive prerogatives, the conservative majority delivered for the president. But not today: In a final order before the Court shuts down for Christmas, six justices (the order itself was unsigned, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch signed dissents) agreed to uphold a lower-court ban on Trump’s deployment of Illinois and Texas National Guard troops in Chicago for purposes of aiding federal immigration agents and cracking down on protesters.
The majority disagreed with the administra CAtion’s argument that a statute permitting Guard deployments when “regular units” at the disposal of the federal government aren’t sufficient to enforce laws also refers to federal agents like ICE, whom Trump claimed to be protecting from protesters. Instead, the Court ruled, the “regular units” referred to in the relevant law are “U.S. military” assets who are tightly restricted from domestic law-enforcement duties by a separate statute. Since the administration hadn’t justified the deployment within the powers of these “regular units,” it couldn’t deploy Guard units to perform such duties, either, as the Washington Post explained:
Under the Posse Comitatus Act, the circumstances in which the military can be employed for law enforcement purposes are very strictly limited, the court noted, suggesting that the same would be true for Guard troops.
Trump has sent or threatened to dispatch troops to cities including Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., Washington, San Francisco and Baltimore, sparking several legal challenges. Many local and state officials across the country have denounced Trump’s attempted deployments, saying the move inflames tensions, breaks the law and intrudes on their sovereignty.
Kavanaugh argued the administration should be given an opportunity to make the required case for a deployment but agreed that it hadn’t done so earlier. And the dissenters (all very close to the administration these days) fretted over the courts’ alleged interference with inherent presidential law-enforcement powers.
While this temporary order could theoretically be unwound in further litigation, it’s pretty clear at least five justices object to Trump’s loose use of either regular military or Guard units to help ICE and the Border Patrol with its immigration-enforcement measures. This could be a problem for Trump’s planned expansion of such deployments into a series of Democratic-run cities. He may even have to leave federal immigration agents to their own devices in their highly aggressive raids on immigrant communities or tell Stephen Miller he may not be able to make his deportation quotas every month.