In December 2025, the Supreme Court refused to let the Trump administration proceed with its National Guard deployment in the Chicago area while litigation continued. Eight days later, Trump ended the Los Angeles deployment and abandoned attempted deployments in Chicago and Portland, Oregon. The separately authorized mission in Washington, D.C., remains in place and is scheduled to continue until January 20, 2029, unless terminated earlier, at an additional projected cost of roughly $1.4 billion for fiscal years 2027 through 2029. Roughly 4,600 National Guard members were stationed in the District as of late July 2026, as the mission passed its one-year mark. The reason Washington’s deployment survived while the others ended is structural: Washington, D.C., is not a state, and the legal protections the Supreme Court applied in the Illinois case do not operate the same way in the District.
What Happened in Chicago
On October 4, 2025, President Trump called 300 members of the Illinois National Guard into federal service, a process known as federalizing, in which a president takes command of a state’s National Guard from its governor. The stated purpose was to protect federal personnel and property in and around Chicago during an immigration enforcement operation conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency known as ICE that carries out interior immigration arrests and deportations. The following day, Trump federalized members of the Texas National Guard for the same purpose. Illinois sued. The case, Trump v. Illinois, reached the Supreme Court on an emergency application, and on December 23, 2025, the Court declined to lift the lower-court order blocking the deployment while the litigation continued. This was a preliminary emergency ruling, not a final decision on the merits. The Court’s unsigned three-page opinion — accompanied by a concurrence from Justice Kavanaugh and dissents from Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch, bringing the full release to roughly 25 pages — found that at that preliminary stage, the government had “failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois” under the specific Title 10 theory the administration invoked. Title 10 of the United States Code, the body of federal law governing the armed forces, sets out the narrow circumstances under which a president may call a state’s National Guard into federal service over the objection of that state’s governor. The Court did not address the Insurrection Act, a separate and broader statute the administration had not invoked.
The Withdrawal from Three Cities
Eight days after the Supreme Court ruling, President Trump announced that he was dropping the National Guard effort in three cities. The three situations were not identical: troops had actually been operating in Los Angeles, and that deployment ended, while in Chicago and Portland the contemplated deployments had been blocked by courts before they fully materialized, and the administration abandoned them. Each city involved its own separate litigation; the Supreme Court’s ruling directly addressed only Illinois. Still, the retreat was widely read as the administration accepting, at least for the moment, that its Title 10 theory would not sustain deployments into states whose governors objected. Guard members had been deployed in 2025 to Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, the Chicago area, Memphis, and New Orleans. After the December retreat, the District of Columbia deployment remained the largest and most durable.
Why Washington, D.C. Is Different
The National Guard is organized on a state-by-state basis, and in every state and territory, the governor is the commander in chief of that state’s Guard. A president can take control only by federalizing the Guard under the specific conditions Title 10 allows, which is exactly what the Supreme Court found had not been satisfied in Illinois. The District of Columbia has no governor. Under Title 49 of the D.C. Code, the section of District law governing the D.C. National Guard, the President of the United States is the commander in chief of the D.C. National Guard directly and at all times. There is no federalization step, because there is no intervening state official to displace. This is a consequence of the District’s constitutional status: it is a federal district rather than a state, and Congress retains ultimate legislative authority over it. The practical effect is that the single legal mechanism that stopped the Chicago deployment does not exist in Washington. The mayor of the District of Columbia has no authority comparable to a governor’s to refuse.
What the Courts Have Said About the D.C. Deployment
The absence of a governor did not mean the D.C. deployment went unchallenged. District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued the administration, and in November 2025, U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb ruled that the deployment was unlawful. Cobb found that the administration had exceeded the bounds of its authority under Title 49 of the D.C. Code by using the D.C. National Guard for what she described as non-military, crime-deterrence purposes, including patrols in public spaces. Her reasoning was that although Title 49 does make the president commander in chief of the D.C. National Guard, that authority is limited to instances in which the relevant civil authorities request the Guard’s assistance. Cobb also found that the president had assumed powers that belong to Congress, that the District’s autonomy had been violated, and that the administration was moving to make the deployment a potentially permanent fixture of the city. She granted a preliminary injunction but stayed her own order for 21 days to allow the administration to appeal. In December 2025, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stayed Cobb’s injunction pending appeal, concluding that the administration was likely to prevail on the merits. That is a significant signal, not a final ruling; the appeal remains pending, and the legal question of what limits apply to the president’s command of the D.C. Guard remains contested. Separately, a conservative legal organization has urged the appeals court to dismiss the District’s lawsuit entirely on the theory that the District cannot sue the federal government because it is part of the federal government.
The Extension Through 2029
The deployment began in August 2025, after President Trump declared a crime emergency in the District and signed an executive order authorizing the mission, which the administration named Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful. Its end date has been repeatedly pushed back. An early deadline of February 28, 2026, was extended, at one point with Justice Department attorneys telling a court the mission might run through the July 2026 celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In January 2026, the administration extended the deployment through the end of 2026. Then, in mid-July 2026, the Department of Defense extended the authorized mission period until January 20, 2029, or until terminated by the president — an authorization covering the remainder of Trump’s term, though not a guarantee that every current unit will remain that long. The Defense Department provided Congress with an estimate of approximately $1.4 billion in additional projected costs for fiscal years 2027 through 2029, a figure based on an assumed average force of about 2,500 Guard members; it does not include what has already been spent since August 2025. Actual troop levels have fluctuated: roughly 2,500 in May 2026, about 3,450 by early June, approximately 5,000 during the summer around the 250th anniversary events, and roughly 4,600 as of late July 2026, drawn from the D.C. Guard and contingents from 23 states and territories, several of them temporary.
The Bill That Would Change It
Legislation to change the underlying arrangement has existed for years. The District of Columbia National Guard Home Rule Act would transfer command of the D.C. National Guard from the president to the mayor of the District, giving the mayor authority comparable to what every governor already holds. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the District in the House of Representatives without a vote on final passage, has introduced versions of the bill repeatedly across multiple Congresses. It passed the House in 2022 as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill setting defense policy, but the provision was removed before that bill became law. It has not been enacted. District officials including Council Chairman Phil Mendelson continue to publicly oppose the deployment, arguing that Guard members are not trained for civilian law enforcement and that the ongoing military presence has harmed local businesses. Absent either a favorable ruling from the D.C. Circuit or passage of the Home Rule Act, the District has no mechanism to end the deployment on its own. The authorized mission period runs until January 20, 2029, or until terminated by the president.