President Donald Trump said that he will send the National Guard to address crime concerns in Memphis, Tennessee, his latest test of the limits of presidential power by using military force in American cities.
Speaking on Fox News, Trump proclaimed that “the mayor is happy” and “the governor is happy” about the pending deployment. Deeming the city “deeply troubled,” he says, “we’re going to fix that just like we did in Washington,” where he’s sent the National Guard and increased the federal law enforcement.
Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, embraced the troop deployment as part of a broader law enforcement surge in Memphis; however, Trump’s assertion drew pushback from the Democratic leader of Memphis, which is majority Black.
“I did not ask for the National Guard, and I don’t think it’s the way to drive down crime,” Mayor Paul Young tells a news conference Friday, while acknowledging that Memphis has remained high on too many “bad lists.”
Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, Hina Shamsi, says in a news conference on September 10 that she could not speak directly to the legality of sending National Guard troops to Memphis because she doesn’t know whether the forces would be deployed under state or federal authority and what the legal justification would be.
“There quite simply is no factual emergency to legitimate calling out troops to perform any kind of policing function,” she says.
Since he deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Trump has openly discussed sending troops to some of the nation’s most Democratic cities—including Chicago and Portland, Oregon — even though data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.
The President’s announcement came days after Memphis police reported decreases across every major crime category in the first eight months of 2025, compared to the same period in previous years. Overall crime hit a 25-year low, while murder hit a six-year low, police say.
When asked whether city and state officials had requested the National Guard, or had even actually signed off on it, the White House didn’t provide an answer.
