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      ‘Not addressing the issues’: DC residents wary of Trump’s national guard deployment even amid youth crime

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      With a small group of school-age children around him, Dylan Whitehorn is the center of attention with his clippers, trimmers and brushes. He’s known as “Mr D the Barber”, and on this summer afternoon in mid-August, Whitehorn had a steady line of kids waiting for a free back-to-school haircut at a neighborhood carnival.Several Metropolitan police department (MPD) officers patrolled the event, but their presence wasn’t overwhelming. It was a distinct difference from other parts of Washington DC, where upwards of 2,000 national guard troops were on the ground as part of Donald Trump’s temporary takeover of the city’s police department with federal troops.“It’s really been heartbreaking to see it,” said Whitehorn. “And to hear Donald Trump tell [federal officers] do what you want. You know, that kind of gasses them up, because they pretty much know or feel like they can gun you down, and there won’t be any accountability for that. And when you’re sending your kids to school in that climate, especially when this country has a history of killing young Black males, it’s a terrifying thought.”Amid a sweeping crackdown that has included immigration raids and checkpoints, Trump has called for teens as young as 14 years old to be charged as adults when accused of certain crimes in DC, citing the recent case of a 19-year-old former “department of government efficiency” (Doge) staffer who was allegedly assaulted by a group of teens.In late August on Fox & Friends, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, also doubled down, and said she would push to prosecute teens even younger than what Trump suggested. “We have got to lower the age of criminal responsibility in Washington DC. The gangs and the crews are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, I can’t touch them,” said Pirro in the clip. “If someone shoots someone with a gun and they’re 17 years old and that person does not die, I can’t prosecute them. I can’t get involved with them.”Minors aren’t part of Pirro’s jurisdiction because the US attorney for the District of Columbia is responsible for prosecuting adult felonies, while the local DC attorney general handles youth criminal cases. But the focus on young people committing crimes has become one of the central issues in the capital city’s friction with the Trump administration.Juvenile justice advocates say that DC’s current legal system ensures accountability and responsibility for minors involved in harmful behavior, without incarcerating them in a system built for adults. But DC natives and parents said they had mixed thoughts about how to effectively respond to youth crime. Frustration with community gun violence, even as violent crime has gone down after the pandemic surge, has made many residents in the Democratic city warily consider federal assistance.“It honestly depends on the crime because I’ve seen some of the younger kids out here carrying guns, like I can’t even sugarcoat it. If you out here killing then, yeah, you can serve adult time,” said Will Scales, a DC parent of three. “The punishment should be appropriate.”Research from the DC Policy Center shows the juvenile arrest rate in Washington DC is nearly double the national rate. There were more than 1,120 juvenile arrests from 1 January to 29 June this year, making up roughly 7% of all arrests in the city, according to data from the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, an independent DC agency that tracks public safety statistics. These trends have remained consistent since 2023, when youth crime spiked after the pandemic.The MPD has not publicly released any information about juvenile arrests during this federal operation, as it only publishes reports on juvenile arrests twice a year.Whenever a minor is arrested, an MPD spokesperson said, they are taken to the juvenile processing center. Depending on the severity of the criminal charge, the teen may be held overnight before they can see a judge the next day, or if they are eligible to participate in a diversion program, the teen is released to their guardian the same day as the arrest.Last year, the local DC attorney general’s office prosecuted over 84% of violent juvenile offenses, including homicide and attempted homicide, gun possession, carjacking and robbery cases.Still, city officials and advocates stress that the city has done more than prosecution alone.When crime spiked in 2023, DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, issued a public emergency declaration on juvenile crime, which expanded city resources and programs. This spring, the city launched the juvenile investigative response unit, a new initiative within the police department that expands outreach to teens in the criminal justice system and investigates violent crime involving youth.More recently, the DC city council approved tougher juvenile curfews after a series of incidents involving large groups of teens engaging in harmful and criminal behavior throughout the city.“There’s no question they still need to work on public safety,” said the DC city council member Robert White in an interview. “If we could actually get support from the federal government to keep doing the things that are working, we could continue to drive down crime. If the president spent just what he is spending from the defense budget, deploying the guards to DC on homelessness and crime, we could end both of them this week, but that’s not his goal.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhitehorn, meanwhile, acknowledges that youth crime has been an issue in DC, but he believes the answer isn’t as simple as locking teens up in jail. He knows this from his own experience: Whitehorn went to prison twice, spending nearly 15 years behind bars.“I get it that [if] they kill somebody, and I hate [for it] to be me or someone I love, but 14 years old, that’s just too young. I think it’s too young to get life … and that’s normally what you get for murder,” said Whitehorn. “I don’t think they have to be tried as an adult.”DC resident and parent Benetra Hudson believes there should be more parental involvement. She said this included more community policing efforts from neighbors, not police.“I’m 40 – when I was growing up, I had a whole community,” Hudson said. “I couldn’t do things because the lady at the corner knew my mom, and she would tell my mom or my grandmother before I could even get home from doing whatever it was I was not supposed to do.”When it comes to punishment, Hudson believes that teens aged 13 and 14 are too young to grasp the reality of their mistakes fully.“I feel like it gives them less of an opportunity if they’re charged as an adult, because they’re not going into a real adult situation in jail, and they’re not rehabilitated to look forward to the future,” said Hudson. “It’s a different thing when you’re actually incarcerated and you’re going to a juvenile facility to rehabilitate you to be better than you were as a juvenile, so when you are an adult, you don’t have those same mishaps.”Michael Umpierre, director of the Center for Youth Justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, agreed that police surveillance was not the most effective way to prevent youth crime.“If we truly want safer communities, we should be investing in schools, family supports and community-based youth programming. That is how we create pathways for young people – and all community members – to thrive,” he said in a statement.Others in the community echo that sentiment, arguing that the national guard’s presence won’t address the root causes of crime in the city.“People are not coming out because you’re out there, but they’re still going to kill, they’re still going to do all they’re doing as soon as you’re gone,” said Whitehorn. “It’s not fixing, it’s just blanketing the situation, but it’s not addressing the issues.” More

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      Trump says US will host next year’s G20 meeting at his Doral resort in Miami – live

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      Donald Trump just announced that the US will host the 2026 meeting of the G20 at his privately owned Doral golf course and spa in Miami.The president was joined by Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, for the announcement in the Oval Office.Trump initially did not mention that his Doral resort was the location, but confirmed it in response to a question from a reporter. The president then quickly moved to downplay concerns that he was using his office for personal profit, claiming that “we will not make any money on it” and that the location was chosen because “everybody wants it there”.The president was asked if he intends to invite Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to attend as an observer. He initially said that he had not yet considered that possibility, but has previously claimed that excluding Russia, over its initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, was a mistake.Minutes later, Trump was asked again and said that both Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, were welcome to attend as observers. “I’d love them to, if they want to”, the president said. “If they want to, we can certainly talk”.Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, just announced that he will not end his re-election campaign, despite reports that he was recently offered a position in the Trump administration if he would do so.Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Donald Trump just claimed that “a lot of illegal aliens, some not the best of people” were working at a factory in Georgia raided by immigration officers on Friday, resulting in nearly 500 arrests.However, a warrant for the raid on the HL-GA battery factory, which is being built to make car batteries for South Korean electric vehicles, identified just four “target persons”. The warrant was obtained and posted online by Politico.Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “Department of War”, as part of an attempt to formalize his rebranding effort without the legally required act of Congress.According to a draft White House factsheet seen by the Guardian on Thursday, the order designates “Department of War” as a “secondary title”, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.The move, to have the executive branch use a name for the department Trump called “much more appropriate”, restores a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.Referring to the creation of the defense department in 1949, the president said: “We decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense, so we’re going Department of War”.Trump also introduced the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, as “our secretary of war” and claimed that the name change “really it has to do with winning”, suggesting that the US military had somehow been hampered by the choice “to be politically correct, or wokey” and, as a result, failed to win “wars that we would’ve won easily”.The draft White House factsheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledged that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary to propose legislation that would make the change permanent.Eric Adams, the sitting mayor of New York, has just announced a hastily scheduled event to begin 30 minutes from now in which he will “make an important announcement regarding the future of his campaign”. The event is scheduled for 4.30pm ET.Adams, who is running as an independent and trails in the polls, has previously denied reports that he is in talks with the White House over taking a role in the Trump administration in exchange for ending his apparently doomed re-election campaign.At a dinner with tech industry leaders last night, Donald Trump denied that he is encouraging Adams to drop out of the race to help New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, defeat Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who is the frontrunner to be elected mayor in November. Trump then immediately said that he would like Adams to drop out for that reason.The New York Times reported on Friday that Adams met in person with Trump’s friend and diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the possibility of being nominated as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia.Last year, federal prosecutors accused members of the Turkish government of a years-long influence campaign to cultivate and secure favors from Adams.In the federal indictment, the US attorney for New York’s southern district alleged that government officials and business leaders with ties to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, showered Adams with thousands in illegal foreign campaign donations and free or heavily discounted luxury hotel stays and flights around the world.Charges against Adams were dropped by the Trump justice department this year, over the strong objections of prosecutors who claimed that there was an explicit quid pro quo arrangement in which the mayor would cooperate with federal immigration enforcement in the city in return for corruption charges being dropped.Should Adams become the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, he would oversee diplomacy with the kingdom whose de-facto leader, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, US intelligence believes approved the 2018 murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.Donald Trump plans to announce executive orders shortly in the Oval Office, with the theme we know most about so far being an instruction to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War”.Until then, here’s a quick recap of some of the day’s key developments:

      Trump criticized the European Union’s decision to fine Google $3.46bn over antitrust concerns and threatened a wider trade probe against the EU in response to the move.

      Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr plans to announce that use of Kenvue’s popular over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, without including evidence for the claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

      Georgia is about to become the eighth state to send national guard troops to Washington DC to support Trump’s federal law enforcement big foot operation there, as the US capital sues the administration over its actions.

      Most of the 475 people arrested in a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid at a Hyundai factory construction site in southern Georgia are Korean nationals.

      The federal Ice raid is being described as the biggest single Department of Homeland Security (DHS, the parent agency of Ice) enforcement operation at one side in the department’s history. The DHS was created after 9/11.

      Treasury secretary Scott Bessent called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank.

      Vladimir Putin has said any western troops placed in Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for Russian strikes, upping the stakes for Kyiv as Donald Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal show little sign that are any closer to success.

      Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region. The action to send jets to be based in the US territory follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat that the administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers.

      And the big economics news of the day was that the US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing the slowdown amid Trump’s tariff policy.
      Donald Trump has criticized the European Union’s decision to fine Google $3.46bn over antitrust concerns and threatened a wider trade probe against the EU in response to the move.“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.Google’s fine for breaching the EU’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services marks the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US company to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.The commission’s investigation found that Google had “abused” its dominant positions in the ad-technology ecosystem.Google said the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal.Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr plans to announce that use of Kenvue’s popular over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, without including evidence for the claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Kennedy, in a report, will also suggest a medicine derived from folate called folinic acid can be used to treat symptoms of autism in some people, the WSJ reported.Tylenol, whose active ingredient is acetaminophen, is a widely used pain reliever, including by pregnant women.The report, expected this month from the US Department of Health and Human Services, is likely to highlight low levels of folate, an important vitamin, and Tylenol taken during pregnancy, as well as other potential causes of autism, the report said.The health department and Kenvue did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.It is not the first time Kenvue or J&J have faced questions about the link between Tylenol and the condition. In 2023, a judge rejected claims the drug causes autism if mothers take it during pregnancy.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says Tylenol is safe to use in pregnancy, though it recommends pregnant women consult their doctors before using it, as with all medicines.Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group formerly headed by Kennedy, has posted several times in recent weeks on social media site X about the potential link between Tylenol and autism.Georgia is about to become the eighth state to send national guard troops to Washington DC to support Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement big foot operation there, as the US capital sues the administration over its actions.Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced he would be sending 316 members of the state national guard to Washington later this month, in the latest indication that Trump’s law enforcement action there will drag on, the Associated Press reports.Kemp, a Republican, said he will mobilize the roughly 300 troops in mid-September to take part in Trump’s DC operation to relieve soldiers from elsewhere who deployed earlier.
      Georgia is proud to stand with the Trump administration in its mission to ensure the security and beauty of our nation’s capital,” Kemp said in a statement.
      Trump initially called up 800 members of the District of Columbia national guard to assist federal law enforcement in his unilateral action to impose federal resources on DC with the stated goal of cracking down on crime, homelessness and illegal immigration. Since then, seven other Republican-led states have sent troops – Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia.The nationwide debate over gerrymandered redistricting has come to Kansas, as the Topeka Capital-Journal wrote on Thursday.Republicans initiated efforts, on Donald Trump’s urging, to engineer mid-decade redistricting in Texas, to gerrymander district maps and gain an edge in next year’s midterm elections.In Kansas, Democratic congresswomen Sharice Davids, who sits in the house with three Republicans to represent the state’s four seats in the lower chamber, could be in difficulty if the district map is gerrymandered by the GOP.Davids spoke out on Friday, saying: “Under pressure from Donald Trump, Kansas state politicians are pushing an unprecedented mid-decade redraw to make the already gerrymandered maps even more extreme – breaking their promises and putting their own political power ahead of Kansans.”She added: “Their goal is clear: stack the deck in their favor because they know their policies aren’t popular, including their disastrous budget that rips 79,000 Kansans off their health care just to give billionaires massive tax breaks. Voters, not politicians, should choose their representatives. This potential gerrymander is clearly political, threatens our democracy, and deepens division in our country.”Donald Trump plans to announce executive orders today in the Oval Office, with the theme we know most about so far being an instruction to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War”.Trump was initially expected to issue first orders at 2pm ET then more at 4pm ET, but the media has since been informed that a single event at the White House is now due to take place at 4pm ET.Some context from my colleague Hugo Lowell: The US president is expected to sign an executive order authorizing the rebrand of the Defense Department, the White House said, as part of an attempt to formalize a name change without an act of Congress.The order will designate “Department of War” as a “secondary title”, an administration official said, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.But the order will instruct the rest of the executive branch to use the “Department of War” name in internal and external communications, and allows the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to use “secretary of war” as his official title.Hello, US politics live blog readers, it’s another busy Friday and there is much more to come, so stay with the Guardian for all the relevant news as it happens. Here’s where things stand:

      Most of the 475 people arrested in a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid at a Hyundai factory construction site in southern Georgia are Korean nationals.

      The federal Ice raid is being described as the biggest single Department of Homeland Security (DHS, the parent agency of Ice) enforcement operation at one side in the department’s history. The DHS was created after 9/11.

      Treasury secretary Scott Bessent called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank.

      Vladimir Putin has said any western troops placed in Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for Russian strikes, upping the stakes for Kyiv as Donald Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal show little sign that are any closer to success.

      Donald Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region. The action to send jets to be based in the US territory follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat that the administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers.

      US jobs report. Our sister live blog run by the business team in London has closed now, so here’s our story on the big economics news of the day, that the US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing the slowdown amid Trump tariffs.
      Reuters notes that the arrests could exacerbate tensions between Washington and Seoul, a key ally and investor in the US, as the countries remain at odds over the details of a trade deal that includes $350bn of investments.Just last month, South Korea pledged $150bn in US investments – including $26bn from Hyundai Motor – at a summit for the nations’ leaders.The arrested workers were being held at Ice’s Folkston detention facility in Georgia, Schrank said. Most of the 475 people are Korean nationals, he said.Local Korean media said roughly 300 people detained were South Korean nationals.“It is our understanding that none of those detained is directly employed by Hyundai Motor Co. We prioritize the safety and well-being of everyone working at the site and comply with all laws and regulations wherever we operate,” a Hyundai spokesperson said in a statement provided to Reuters.Homeland security officials said the workers it arrested at the Hyundai facility in Georgia were barred from working in the US after crossing the border illegally or overstaying visas.The investigation took place over several months, Steven Schrank, special agent in charge of investigations for Georgia, said during a press briefing.“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses,” he said in comments reported by Reuters.Schrank said there was a network of subcontractors on the site.A spokesperson at Hyundai’s battery joint venture partner, South Korean battery maker LG Energy Solutions, said in a statement it was cooperating and had paused construction work.The facility, a joint venture between LGES and Hyundai Motor, was due to start operations at the end of this year, according to LGES.With some 475 workers arrested, according to US immigration officials, the Ice raid at the Georgia Hyundai facility is the largest single-site enforcement operation in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, Reuters notes.Treasury secretary Scott Bessent earlier called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank, whose insulation from short-term political pressures is widely seen as key to its effectiveness.“There must also be an honest, independent, nonpartisan review of the entire institution, including monetary policy, regulation, communications, staffing and research,” Bessent wrote in the Wall Street Journal.He called for the Fed to leave bank supervision to other governmental authorities and to “scale back the distortions it causes in the economy”, including by bond purchases made outside of true crisis conditions.A US homeland security department spokesperson had earlier said that US immigration authorities executed a judicial search warrant at the Hyundai facility in Georgia on Thursday over unlawful employment practices and other alleged federal crimes.The spokesperson said in a statement provided to Reuters that Ice’s investigative arm executed the warrant as part of acriminal investigation.“This operation underscores our commitment to protecting jobs for Georgians, ensuring a level playing field for businesses that comply with the law, safeguarding the integrity of our economy, and protecting workers from exploitation,” the spokesperson said.Following on from my last post, the White House said today that the Trump administration will enforce laws that require foreign workers have proper authorization to be in the United States, after immigration authorities raided a Hyundai facility in Georgia.“Any foreign workers brought in for specific projects must enter the United States legally and with proper work authorizations,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, quoted by Reuters.“President Trump will continue delivering on his promise to make the United States the best place in the world to do business, while also enforcing federal immigration laws.” More

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      Trump signs executive order rebranding Pentagon as Department of War

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      Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947.The directive will make Department of War the secondary title, and is a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency, an administration official said.“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”The administration has already begun implementing the symbolic changes: visitors to the Pentagon’s defense.gov website are now automatically redirected to war.gov.The move comes days after a deadly US navy airstrike killed 11 people on a small boat in international waters, which the military said involved a drug vessel operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Some legal experts questioned whether the strike was lawful under international law.The combination of aggressive military action and symbolic rebranding goes in contrast with Trump’s repeated claims to be “the anti-war president” who campaigned on promises to end conflicts and avoid new wars. Trump said during the signing of the order that his focus on strength and trade has improved America’s position in the world..Trump has argued the original name better reflects military victories and honestly represents what the department does. The rebrand would reverse the 1947 name change made as part of postwar reforms that emphasized defense over warfare.Seven US warships and one nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine were reported to be heading for the Caribbean following Monday’s strike, another layer in the measures Trump has taken to combat what he claims is the threat from Tren de Aragua.Congressional approval would ultimately be required for any permanent name change, though the House member Greg Steube from Florida and the senator Mike Lee from Utah, both Republicans, introduced legislation to make the switch official.“We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct,” the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, said in the Oval Office. “We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this war department, Mr President, just like America is back.” More

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      Trump’s domestic troop deployments aren’t about crime – they’re about intimidation | Moira Donegan

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      “We’re going in,” Donald Trump said on Tuesday, when asked whether national guard troops would be sent to invade Chicago. The comment came as reports emerged that national guard troops from Texas – not yet federalized under direct presidential control – were preparing to deploy to Chicago in the coming days, in defiance of the opposition repeatedly and forcefully expressed by the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, both Democrats.The White House and the president’s allies have claimed that the deployment is a response to violent crime in Chicago. This is a lie. Crime in Chicago has dropped dramatically over the past decades, as it has in every major American city – including Los Angeles, where Trump deployed the national guard and the marines earlier this year, and Washington DC, where armed federal agents have patrolled the streets for much of the past month. The deployment of armed forces to American cities – serving at his pleasure even when they are not officially under his direct command – has nothing to do with “crime”, except insofar as the administration has sought to redefine the term to mean Democratic governance, racial pluralism or the presence of immigrants. There is no violent crime in Chicago, or in any of these cities, that federal troops can be usefully deployed to quell.Instead, the federal agents who will probably invade Chicago in the coming days are there to serve a very different purpose. They are there to assert Trump’s personal authority over government actions, to intimidate populations that did not vote for him, to terrorize and kidnap immigrants and destroy their families, and to make sure that every American knows that even if they succeed in electing Democrats to run their cities and states, the Trump regime can send armed men to their neighborhoods who answer to Republicans.As Trump expands his military occupation of opposition-controlled cities, the chances of a violent confrontation between armed agents of the regime and ordinary Americans rise dramatically. American city dwellers have not yet been terrified into silent submission; many of us still retain the self-respect that has been engendered by a lifetime of democratic citizenship. These people will inevitably, and righteously, protest the Trump administration’s incursions. They will shout with outrage when they see their neighbors dragged into vans by masked men; they will jeer and mock the jackboots sent to terrorize them. Eventually, it seems inevitable that someone will throw a rock, or slam a door too loudly, or frighten one of the masked, armed men who knows he has been deployed by an unpopular ruler to suppress a once-free public. And one of those men, terrified and hate-filled and ashamed, might, in that moment, fire his gun. By sending troops into cities that do not support him, the Trump administration is assembling kindling in neat stacks around a frayed and fragile civic peace; they are pouring lighter fluid, and lighting a match. They are hoping for a conflagration that will provide an excuse for even more brutality.It seems almost naive to ask if any of this is legal. The supreme court has made it clear that the president – or, at least, this president – has virtually no limits on his authority under conditions of an “emergency”. That no emergency is in evidence in Chicago or any of the other opposition-controlled cities that Trump-aligned forces are invading is irrelevant: an “emergency”, like a “crime”, can be whatever Trump wants it to be. The supreme court will, eventually, either greenlight Trump’s actions or delay intervening against him for long enough that he will be able to accomplish his aims anyway.But lower courts are showing more willingness to check Trump’s more flagrantly illegal conduct – at least temporarily. In California on Tuesday, a court ruled that Trump’s deployment of the marines and the federalized California national guard into Los Angeles earlier this year violated the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that prohibits the use of federal armed services to enforce domestic law. But in Chicago, the Trump administration is trying a workaround: according to Pritzker, the troops that are amassing are un-federalized members of the Texas national guard – technically under the command of Greg Abbott, the governor, though unambiguously serving the president’s aims. If Pritzker’s claim – which Abbott’s office has disputed – is true, then the theory is apparently that Republican-controlled states have the authority to send their own troops into Democratic- controlled states – against the wishes and without the permission of the local authorities – to enforce partisan policy preferences.Pritzker, in an attempt to calm his people and prevent needless violence, implored Chicagoans to “not take the bait”. And certainly the ground forces will create some viral video moments that the president will enjoy posting to his followers. But the line between what is a mere performative display of power and what is an actual seizure of power is no longer quite clear. The boots and the guns, at any rate, are real.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Pentagon sending up to 600 military lawyers to serve as immigration judges

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      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has approved sending up to 600 military lawyers to the federal justice department to serve as temporary immigration judges, according to a memo reviewed by the Associated Press.The military will begin sending groups of 150 attorneys – both military and civilians – to the justice department “as soon as practicable” and the military services should have the first round of people identified by next week, according to the memo, dated 27 August.The effort comes as Donald Trump’s presidential administration cracks down on immigration across the country, ramping up arrests and deportations. Immigration courts are also already dealing with a huge backlog of roughly 3.5m cases that has ballooned in recent years.However, numerous immigration judges have been fired or left voluntarily after taking deferred resignations offered by the administration, according to their union. The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) said in July that at least 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause” in courts across the country.That has left about 600 immigration judges, union figures show, meaning the Pentagon move will double their ranks.The move is being done at the request of the justice department, and the memo noted that the details will initially last no more than 179 days but can be renewable.When asked about the move, a justice department spokesperson referred questions about the plan to the defense department. Pentagon officials directed questions to the White House.A White House official said on Tuesday that the administration was looking at a variety of options to help resolve the significant backlog of immigration cases, including hiring additional immigration judges. The official said the matter should be “a priority that everyone – including those waiting for adjudication – can rally around”. More

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      ‘Racist as hell’: Trump’s cabinet is almost all white, and he keeps firing Black officials

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      A day after Donald Trump announced that he was firing Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, the White House proudly released a photo. It showed Trump, his cabinet and other officials giving a thumbs-up. Of the 24 people in the Oval Office, only one was Black.For those who have studied the US president’s long and troubling history of racism, the two events were more than mere coincidence. They were indicative of a man who has recently brought white nationalist perspectives from the margins back to the mainstream.Trump has vehemently denied that he is a racist, pointing to a modest increase in support among African American voters in last year’s election, when his opponent was a Black woman. But critics suggest that his effort to oust Cook fits a pattern of purging diverse voices from the higher ranks of leadership.“He chose to fire her out of all the governors because she’s a Black woman,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the organisation Black Voters Matter. “His goal is to get control of the Federal Reserve and for that to no longer be an autonomous, independent body. But what he does recognise is that in America everything is about race. It is as lethal as a nuclear bomb.”Cook taught economics and international relations at Michigan State University, and was previously on the faculty of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She was a Marshall scholar who received degrees from Oxford University and Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta.Cook dedicated much of her scholarship to examining how racial discrimination and targeted violence created barriers to economic advancement for African Americans. She also advised the Nigerian and Rwandan governments on banking reforms and economic development.In 2022 she was confirmed to the Fed’s board of governors by the Senate in a party-line vote. Republicans argued that she was unqualified and found her research overly focused on race; Democrats brushed off such critiques as unfounded.On Monday, Trump said he fired Cook after the director of a housing regulatory agency, whom the president appointed, alleged that she committed mortgage fraud. She refused to resign and filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump has no power to remove her from office.Trump’s order aligned with his effort to expand his power across once independent parts of the federal government and broader economy and culture. It also marked another potential high-profile removal of a Black leader from the federal government amid Trump’s broader crusade against diversity and inclusion policies.Brown observed: “He knows that racism and sexism is a very effective tool to cast doubt and that’s the pathway. Lisa Cook isn’t even the chair of the board. So why would you pick her?“He picked her because he is betting that, in an industry that is probably 90% or more white male, his odds of removing her are greater than the odds for removing others from the board. That in itself is rooted in the history and how insidious racism is built into the fabric of how we see people of colour in this country.”Over the past seven months Trump has targeted other prominent Black leaders. He fired Gen Charles Q Brown Jr, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the second Black man to serve in the position. Brown had delivered speeches about racial discrimination and issued policies that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in the military.The president dismissed Carla Hayden, the first Black person to serve as librarian of Congress, after a conservative advocacy organisation accused her of being a “radical”. He ousted Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to sit on the National Labor Relations Board, which hears private-sector labour disputes.View image in fullscreenTrump’s critics argue that his life and career have given succour to white supremacists. In 1973 he and his father were sued for housing discrimination in New York; in 1989 he took out full-page ads in several newspapers calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, Black and Latino youths who were later exonerated.Trump broke through in national politics with the “birther” conspiracy theory, falsely claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the US and therefore ineligible to be president. After a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”.He has reportedly described Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries”, has called Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu”, and, on the campaign trail last year, said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”, echoing the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.Since returning to the White House, Trump has imposed a travel ban on many of the world’s poorest countries even as the US granted refugee status to about 50 white South Africans, claiming they were victims of racial persecution and “white genocide”.He issued executive orders to curb DEI initiatives in the federal government and even sought to blame DEI for an air crash. He is seeking to purge “divisive, race-centered ideology” from Smithsonian Institution museums, suggesting that there is too much focus on “how bad Slavery was”.The attempt to fire Cook is the most dubious move yet, prompting an outcry from Democrats and civil rights groups, who pointed to her gender and race as vital factors.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCongresswoman Nanette Barragán of California posted on the X social media platform: “If you haven’t noticed yet – this is a disturbing pattern for Trump. Fire or drive out smart, competent women, in particular women of color, from high ranking positions and fill many of these positions with white men.”Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said: “Dr Cook’s credentials outshine Trump’s entire cabinet. This president simply cannot stomach Black excellence when it reveals his failures, particularly those in positions of power. In reality, this is about bending the Federal Reserve to Trump’s will, and he’s using racism as a tool to do it.”But Trump’s actions are being cheered on by white nationalists. Far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have been quoted as saying that they no longer need to take to the streets to demonstrate because the president has so comprehensively adopted their talking points and embraced their agenda.Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist, observed: “When you have white supremacists who are holding key roles in government and you have leaders in this country who come and play footsie to their drumbeat they don’t have to resist because what they want is laid out for them in the form of a buffet.”Trump has been quick to point to Black allies when politically expedient, such as Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, the representative Byron Donalds of Florida and Alveda King, a niece of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King. But critics note there is no guarantee this will translate to policies that address racial injustice.Nor has it manifested in significant representation at the heart of government. Towards the end of the first Trump presidency, the Washington Post identified 59 people who had held cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs. Only seven were people of colour and only one – the housing secretary, Ben Carson – was Black.In his second term, Trump has picked only one Black person to serve in his cabinet: Scott Turner, the secretary of housing and urban development. Joe Biden, by contrast, appointed the most diverse cabinet in history with more women and people of colour than any that had come before.Seawright said: “We went from generational progress to generational rollback, and what this president and this administration has done in seven months could take 70 years at least to replenish. It should be a friendly reminder for all people, but particularly African Americans, that all progress is not permanent.”Trump’s cabinet includes Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with no experience of running a major organisation, at the Pentagon; Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, at the health department; and Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive, at the education department. The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has associated with white nationalist thinkers and groups and is the architect of his hardline immigration policy.Rashad Robinson, a civil rights leader and former president of the group Color of Change, added: “We live in a very diverse country, a country with many different types of people that come from many different backgrounds, and the president exhibits his values by who he puts in office.“This is not simply that Donald Trump has put only one Black person in his cabinet. It’s that Donald Trump has gone out of his way to find some of the most unqualified and ill-equipped people to put in those jobs as a way to actually avoid having to put Black people in his cabinet.”For Brown, the voting rights activist, Trump’s cabinet picks demonstrate that he is “as racist as hell”. She added: “Quite frankly, I’m glad he doesn’t have a whole lot of Black people in his cabinet because that would be deeply embarrassing to me. Who would work in that mess?” More

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      America survived a coup attempt. Can it endure dictatorial creep? | Lawrence Douglas

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      January 6 demonstrated that longstanding democracies can readily resist a disorganized effort at a coup. They are less equipped to withstand the normalization of exceptional measures: the use of federal agents to quell domestic protest, the staging of police raids on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, the pretextual invocations of emergency powers. Each of these steps may seem temporary and targeted; they may even enjoy a thin patina of legality. But over time, a democratic order turns into what Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish lawyer whose book The Dual State stands as one of the first and most perceptive examinations of Hitler’s regime, called a “prerogative state” – a government in which the executive “is released from all legal restraints and depends solely on the discretion of the persons wielding political power”.So let us be clear: Trump’s commandeering of control of the Washington DC police department was simply an opening salvo. While Americans were greeted with images of soldiers in combat gear, toting rifles and establishing roadblocks and checkpoints near the National Mall, Trump was already tasking his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with creating “specialized units” of the national guard to be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues”.What are the politics behind this militarization of domestic policing? Trump says he alone has the will and resources to pacify the “killing field” of Chicago, but clearly his “crime fighting” justification is no more than a ruse. Statistics – that is, reality – tell us that the crime rate in Washington DC was at a 30-year low when Trump sent in the troops. Which is not to deny the rhetorical power of ruses. Installing soldiers in Democratic strongholds allows Trump to present himself as the protector of law and order, especially to Maga supporters who have been trained by rightwing news outlets to view the nation’s largest and most multiethnic metropolitan areas as dens of iniquity and vice. Never mind that this is the president who pardoned members of the lawless mob that stormed the Capitol, fired career justice department prosecutors who worked to hold insurrectionists to account, and has installed in the department the likes of Jared Lane Wise, an insurgent who was charged with urging his fellow rioters to kill members of the police.Militarizing the police also serves Trump’s politics of intimidation. Here we can connect the deployment of troops on the National Mall to the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s residences. Both are disturbing displays of the kind of force more familiar to a police state than to a constitutional democracy. The fact that both acts were formally legal – two federal magistrates signed off on the Bolton warrants, while several statutes specific to the District of Columbia authorized the president’s use of the national guard – makes them textbook examples of the kind of dictatorial creep that Fraenkel diagnosed.Deploying troops to police Chicago would, of course, represent a far more alarming and legally dubious exercise of executive power. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a post-Reconstruction law, essentially bars presidents from using troops as domestic police. But we would be naive to conclude that federal law provides an adequate safeguard against the consolidation of the prerogative state. The Insurrection Act carves out disturbing exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, allowing the president, in cases of “rebellion”, to deploy the military to enforce federal law. Would a supreme court that has held that a president enjoys broad immunity from future prosecution for all “official acts”, no matter how nefarious, question a president’s determination of what constitutes a “rebellion”?While the appearance of troops on the streets of Chicago or New York may frighten marginalized communities from exercising their basic rights of free movement, it may also trigger an equally dangerous and predictable response. The specter of city streets patrolled by soldiers trained to fight enemy combatants, not US citizens, may well serve not to quell violence but to invite it. The prospect of protests turning ugly and violent is all too real. The deployment of troops, under the pretext of responding to an emergency, then works to create the very emergency that justifies an ever-greater deployment. The danger is this is precisely what the president wants.Why? Trump has already aggressively inserted himself in the battle over the 2026 midterms, pushing Texas to further gerrymander its already gerrymandered districts; jesting that war may supply a justification for delaying elections; and pledging to issue an executive order ending mail-in ballots – while clearly lacking the authority to do so. What if he were to deploy troops to polling places on election day?In principle, a strong edifice of law explicitly bars such a deployment on election day, but imagine if the president, in the wake of a series of violent protests, invokes the Insurrection Act to “safeguard” polling stations from domestic unrest. Now we have armed soldiers at polling stations, handling ballots and “monitoring” the chain of custody – all done in the name of protecting democracy. Legally, such a deployment would stretch the Insurrection Act beyond recognition, but courts deliberate slowly; elections are decided in days.As Fraenkel noted, authoritarianism does not operate outside law; it manipulates law until legality and illegality are indistinguishable.

      Lawrence Douglas is a professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts More