The courts have acted as checks on Trump’s deployments, Greenfield said, but they also have regularly struggled to keep pace with the administration’s blitz of actions.
“The courts do not have their own army,” Greenfield said. “These are the kinds of acts that can be a flashpoint of violence, for state-versus-state violence. And we have a president who is unconcerned with constraint.”
While the action is playing out elsewhere, Massachusetts leaders are paying close attention, given that Boston and its stance on immigration have been a target for the president and other leading administration officials. As the legal fight started to play out Sunday, White House policy chief Stephen Miller issued a warning, via X, that the administration would see to “the full and unrestricted enforcement of federal immigration law in all fifty states.”
Trump suggested he could even go a step further, telling reporters Monday that he’s willing to invoke the Insurrection Act to sidestep governors if he feels the need arises. The law allows the president to dispatch active-duty military in states that are unable to put down an insurrection.
Trump and his leading aides have regularly defended the deployments, framing them as efforts to help protect ICE facilities, particularly in Portland and Illinois, where ICE activity has been met with protest, or in Memphis, to help fight crime.
Trump, in turn, has intensified his rhetoric. He’s called Portland a “war zone,” a label local officials have hotly disputed, as did US District Judge Karin Immergut, who, over the weekend, temporarily blocked Trump from sending any troops to Oregon.
His administration has claimed it’s within his authority to deploy Guard members, and last week, Trump suggested in a speech to military leaders that the government should use cities where he’s sought to deploy troops as “training grounds,” saying there is “a war from within.”
A federal judge on Monday declined to block the deployment to Illinois in what Governor JB Pritzker told reporters was “an unconstitutional invasion.”
“The President has the right to call up the National Guard in cases where he deems it’s appropriate,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters Monday, arguing that regular protests outside the ICE facility in Portland had effectively put it “under siege.”
“The President wants to ensure that our federal buildings and our assets are protected, and that’s exactly what he’s trying to do,” Leavitt said.
That said, Trump’s actions have no precedent in the modern era of the country’s professional military, said Carrie Lee, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Lee said she and others feared in June, when Trump deployed National Guard troops in Los Angeles, that it could open the door to “abuses of power later on.”
immediately, Lee said, it appears “the White House is stepping through the door.”
“The immediate fear is that this becomes normalized with the American public,” she said. “It’s not that far a leap, given the scope and the breadth of the executive order and how the administration appears to be trying to stretch it immediately, that you can see uses of the military far beyond what we’ve historically seen and what we as Americans should be comfortable with.”
Several lawsuits against the administration have argued, in part, that the Trump administration’s move to federalize National Guard members breaks the Posse Comitatus Act, a 1878 law that generally bars military personnel from enforcing domestic laws except in special circumstances.
The law itself is “poorly written,” and its inclusion of criminal penalties for those who violate it is not a realistic enforcement measure, said Sean Kealy, a Boston University law professor.
But he said it has a worth as a statement that “we don’t use federal forces to patrol civilian populations.”
“Trump is going to push and push until someone pushes back on him and pushes back hard,” Kealy said, suggesting that ultimately the Supreme Court may need to weigh in on the issue of National Guard deployment.
“The problem is [Trump] has got the Texas governor in his pocket,” he said of Greg Abbott, who’s authorized Trump’s use of Texas National Guard members in other states. “He finally has the private army that he’s always desired.”
Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June to quell protests over immigration raids, even though state and city leaders objected to the military involvement and accused Trump of exaggerating the level of danger.
Then, in August, Trump sent Guard troops to Washington to patrol the streets in what he called a “public safety emergency” to address violent street crime following the shooting death there in June of a Massachusetts college student. Critics cited data showing crime was actually down and accused Trump of using his power to try to roll back the city’s ability to govern itself.
He said he was sending National Guard members to Memphis with the support of Tennessee’s Republican governor, and last week, said he’d do the same in Portland, Ore., claiming the city is “burning to the ground.”
On Saturday, he sent 300 troops to Chicago, a move that quickly prompted Illinois and Chicago to sue, though with Monday’s decision, the deployment is expected to move ahead for immediately.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, who in her role is the commander of the state’s National Guard, said last week that she sees the deployment of the National Guard in American cities as a move by Trump to “inflame and incite and get people’s reaction.”
“It’s just really disrespectful … that the Guard would be attempted to be used or manipulated in that way,” she said on GBH’s Boston Public Radio.
Healey, like others, also cast the repeated deployments as a type of political theater to distract from other challenges and the administration’s response to them.
“‘We’re going to send the Guard here, so you’re not going to pay attention to the fact that we’ve got inflation still,’” the first-term Democrat said, adding that she believes the deployments are “very bad policy decisions.”
“I think they undermine public safety,” she said.
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout. Samantha J. Gross can be reached at samantha.gross@globe.com. Follow her @samanthajgross.
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