Boston refused the king’s troops 250 years ago. Will it refuse Trump’s National Guard?

Her name was Kate. She was calling from Providence. And when she thinks about soldiers patrolling the streets of Boston, she remembers a painful chapter in her family’s history.

It’s “horrifying to me, because, as a family, you know, that lost people in the Holocaust, the image of … [the] military stopping people’s freedom of movement, which is probably on the docket there somewhere, is terrifying,” said Kate, who phoned into WGBH-FM’s “Boston Public Radio” program on Wednesday.

Since President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this week authorizing the creation of specialized National Guard units to put down civil unrest in states nationwide, the idea of soldiers in the streets in the city where the fight for American independence was born has gone from an abstraction to a very real possibility.

So it’s also entirely reasonable to consider how famously opinionated Bostonians would react to the sight of armed soldiers, who are today a fact of life in Washington D.C., strolling Beacon Hill or rumbling through the streets of Dorchester.

Would they stoically accept it? Or would they fill those same streets with protest marches?

When WGBH-FM hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagen asked their listeners to weigh in, they got the expected earful.

Here’s Scott, from Marblehead.

“I grew up in the South, and we had some riots in the ’90s, and the National Guard, armed with armored personnel carriers, was deployed,” he recalled.

“It was probably needed at the time because the riots were not great. However, riding my bike to work in the morning was the most chilling experience,” he continued. “I’ll never forget. And all the businesses shut down because nobody wanted to go out.”

“And what I think is happening is I don’t believe the real, visceral feeling of what a deployment like this feels like is being adequately characterized,” he said.

Some absolutely know what it would be like. And that’s because they’ve seen it firsthand.

Speaking to ABC News, retired Maj. Gen. Randy Manner, a former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau and vocal critic of Trump’s reliance on Guard troops to aid law enforcement, said the Republican president’s orders were unnecessary and “100% political.”

“The administration is trying to desensitize the American people to get used to American armed soldiers in combat vehicles patrolling the streets of America,” Manner told ABC News.

Trump wants Guard units “whose purpose is to, quite frankly, dominate and police the American people. And that is extremely disturbing,” he told the network.

U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-4th District, a Marine veteran, cut right to the chase.

“Greater Boston refused to quarter the king’s troops 250 years ago, and we should refuse to quarter the president’s troops today,” the Newton lawmaker told MassLive.

And what’s that look like?

“Mass, non-violent resistance,” he said.

But it can be complicated to put residents in that position: unlike active-duty military personnel, National Guard soldiers return to their day jobs and communities when their work is completed.

Using Guard soldiers for long-term law enforcement could turn neighbor against neighbor, another Guard veteran suggested.

“What happens if there’s an escalation and civilians are killed? Or Guardsmen are killed? I don’t think we have an answer for that,” said retired Maj. Gen. Linda Singh, who led thousands of troops in Baltimore, Maryland, during the 2015 riots after the death of Freddie Gray, told ABC News.

Without a plan to return policing power to local civilian authorities, “I think we are setting precedents we can’t come back from,” said Singh, a former adjutant general for the Maryland Army National Guard.

Auchincloss offered a similar sentiment.

“This is why we have Posse Comitatus. This is why we have the principle and the law that generally prohibits the use of the military for law enforcement,” he said. “Precisely because Americans tap into a 500-year tradition that would not think that law enforcement should be militarized, and does not want to pit neighbor against neighbor against their will.”

Boston City Councillor Ed Flynn, a Navy veteran, testified to the state Guard’s professionalism, particularly during the pandemic.

But “I’m not calling for them to patrol the streets of Boston,” said Flynn, whose council district includes South Boston, Chinatown, parts of the South End and Downtown.

In Boston, where relations with Washington are, to put it mildly, strained, over the city’s immigration law limiting cooperation with federal authorities, Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu said she’s already making preparations.

“We are following what’s happening in other cities around the country very closely,” Wu said during an appearance on Boston Public Radio on Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, we have seen a little bit of what it would look like if that should come to pass, and that this federal administration is willing to go beyond the bounds of constitutional authority and federal law to try to activate National Guards even when local communities aren’t asking for it and don’t want it,” Wu continued.

Wu told the station that her office was “reviewing all the court cases today, and getting ready should it come to that. And we’d be working very closely with community members to ensure people know what’s happening and that this is not something that is needed or wanted or legally sound.”

Wu’s main opponent for re-election, Josh Kraft, said he generally agreed with Wu’s approach, adding that he believes that “when it comes to Trump, it’s not about performance, it’s about action.”

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, is commander-in-chief of the state’s National Guard and has the final say on state-based missions, making it entirely unlikely that she would agree to the deployment of soldiers in Boston.

She dismissed Trump’s hardline as political theatrics that are “disrespectful to the men and women in the Guard.”

“Here we are at the start of hurricane season,” Healey said during an event in Revere earlier this week. “It doesn’t make any sense to take guardsmen away from their states and send them elsewhere where local law enforcement is well equipped to discount with things.”

Still, the president can federalize the troops to serve abroad and domestically, taking that decision out of Healey’s hands.

Until Trump sent National Guard members to Los Angeles in June to quell the protests, a president has not activated a state’s National Guard without a request from that state’s governor since 1965, Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent law and policy organization, told the New York Times.

And, if and when they come, Boston will be waiting.