President Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops mainly to states run by Democratic governors — California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker, Oregon’s Tina Kotek — is being met with opposition from leadership in the places Trump says he is trying to help. Newsom sued the administration for sending troops to Los Angeles this past summer and joined with Kotek more recently to sue over the deployment of California troops in Portland, Oregon.
Trump’s deployment tactics aren’t new. During his first administration, in the summer of 2020 when Black Lives Matter protests rose across the country after George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump sent federal law enforcement officers to Portland, Oregon with the stated reason being to quell the protests which had included car and building fires and skirmishes with local police.
Yet Trump’s critics characterized the deployment, codenamed “Operation Diligent Valor”, as an unnecessary and provocative, asserting that the federal law enforcement presence escalated rather than defused the situation, with federal officers — arriving after the size and ferocity of the protests had dwindled — reigniting outrage among the protesters.
According to the New York Times, “The arrival of federal officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol and other federal agencies prompted tens of thousands of people to take to the streets around the courthouse and the justice center.” Subsequent clashes between protesters and the federal authorities followed.
Today, Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, warned on social media: “I co-wrote Trump’s first anti-terrorism plan in 2017-18. He’s not trying to stop ‘left-wing’ terrorism. He is staging it. His troop deployments are a false flag — meant to provoke a response in order to justify harsh crackdowns. This is now very obvious.”
I co-wrote Trump’s first anti-terrorism plan in 2017-18. He’s not trying to stop “left-wing” terrorism. He is staging it.
His troop deployments are a false flag — meant to provoke a response in order to justify harsh crackdowns.
This is now very obvious.
— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) October 7, 2025
Trump said yesterday that he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act, which would give him greater latitude to avoid scrutiny in the courts when deploying troops to American cities he considers dangerous, a fact notable especially because Trump recently told a gathering of top military brass summoned to Quantico to beware of the “enemy within” and suggested American cities should be used for “training” the military.
Asked about the Insurrection Act, Trump said: “I’d do it if it was necessary. … If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors, or mayors were holding us up. Sure, I’d do that.”
The Insurrection Act is reserved for nation-threatening emergencies like invasions, and it is no coincidence that Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration as an “invasion of our country” — using language that is coded for use in the legal circumvention Posse Comitatus, which forbids the use of the military against U.S. citizens.
Essentially concurring with what Taylor describes as Trump’s “false flag” intentions, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance recently wrote of Trump’s Chicago and Portland troop deployments: “It’s hard to mistake what’s happening here. This is a president in the process of looking for excuses and seeing how far he can go until someone—right now it’s the courts—reins him in.”