Democratic Attorneys General Race To Counter Trump's Latest Escalation On Troop Deployments

Democratic attorneys general across the country are rolling out carefully crafted plans to block President Donald Trump's ongoing push to militarize cities and encountered setbacks this week, despite early signs of success.

Trump using emergency powers to direct troops within and across state lines was among the worst-case scenarios Democratic attorneys general planned for as they huddled in virtual war rooms ahead of his inauguration and into his second term. And when the president began sending the National Guard into Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and beyond, the attorneys and their legal staffs started sharing strategies, according to interviews with five of them.

Now, as Trump threatens the Insurrection Act — which gives a president power to deploy troops domestically to quell what the commander in chief deems an insurrection — they are gearing up for an even bigger escalation.

“There is no insurrection anywhere in the country by any conceivable definition of the term,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said. But, he added, “We’re ready.”

The officials sprung into action hours after Trump attempted deployments in Oregon and Illinois — rapid responses borne from the ongoing coordination among the party’s top prosecutors and their months of prep work.

Nevertheless, they're facing roadblocks. An appeals court on Wednesday hit pause on the order blocking the federalization of Oregon National Guard members, though Trump still cannot deploy them. And a judge in Illinois declined to issue a restraining order Monday to stop Trump from sending troops to Chicago from that state and Texas. Lone Star State soldiers arrived in the Chicago area Tuesday.

Democrats are regrouping ahead of hearings in both Oregon and Illinois today.

“This is developing in real time,” Bonta said of the legal battle. But Democrats’ “collaboration has only grown and strengthened over time” and “it's all systems go.”

And as they counter Trump in court, the prosecutors are pressing their party to run on the fight over federal troops in the midterms, when they try to break the GOP’s federal governing trifecta.

“This should be all the motivation they need to get back in the business of winning elections,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said. “If you start winning elections, you’ll be able to control the branches of government that ensure that we continue to have the constitutional order that I think we now view as very much under threat.”

Trump’s whack-a-mole approach to picking which blue city will be his next target against what he claims — often falsely — is lawlessness is keeping Democrats’ emergency legal defense system on high alert.

They say their fight will need to intensify if Trump invokes emergency powers or if he finds more red-state governors willing to send their Guard troops to do his bidding in blue cities — a workaround to federalizing the volunteer force that Republicans successfully employed in Tennessee.

But Democrats have spent the better part of a year preparing for this battle.

After troops were sent to Los Angeles and were about to deploy to Washington, D.C., Bonta in California said he conferred with his counterparts across the country to game out how the capital city’s unique legal standing would factor into their arguments. Staff shared research and precedents that were already working in the California-based Ninth Circuit court, such as arguing the deployments were causing irreparable harm. Twenty-two Democratic attorneys general filed an amicus brief supporting the District’s case.

Because Trump is the commander of Washington’s National Guard, Democrats were limited in what they could argue and failed to stop the deployment. Bonta said the defeat informed his and other attorneys’ moves going forward.

By the time Trump trained his sights on Portland, Democratic prosecutors were well versed in how to stall him. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield and Bonta spoke multiple times over this past weekend, Rayfield said, as first Oregon and then California sued to stop Trump from federalizing the Beaver State’s Guard and from sending in troops from California and Texas.

Democrats convinced a Trump-appointed federal judge to issue injunctions to pump the brakes on it all.

As his administration battles in court, Trump is returning to the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller argued on X that Trump is already facing a “legal insurrection” after U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut blocked the administration’s efforts in Portland.

New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin slammed the prospect of Trump turning to emergency powers as “completely untethered from the facts on the ground” — a nod to Immergut’s decision that the president’s assessment of the situation in Portland was “untethered to facts” and that he lacked the legal basis to federalize the Guard.

“This is not about an emergency,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul added. “It’s about political animus.”

It’s emblematic of how Democrats are fighting this war on two fronts, parrying the administration’s legal arguments in hearings, while countering the GOP’s case for militarizing major cities in the court of public opinion. To judges, Trump’s team contends that the Guard is being deployed to protect federal employees and buildings. In other settings, the president has said he wants to use U.S. cities "as training grounds” for troops. On Wednesday, he wrote on social media that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” for “failing to protect” immigration officers deployed in the cities to carry out the president’s aggressive push to increase deportations. Democrats counter that Trump is using Guard troops as pawns to carry out a political retribution against his opponents.

And the administration’s contradictory messaging is pushing Democratic attorneys general to get in front of judges “as quickly as possible … so that we can have an independent arbiter,” Rayfield said.

For all their preparations, Democratic prosecutors admit there are times they’ve been caught off guard.

Trump has been far more brazen in his second term in his attempts to bend the nation’s judicial system to his will and to circumvent courts that don’t rule in his favor. Meanwhile, his lawyers have made heavy use of the Supreme Court’s so-called shadow docket, prompting justices to grapple with emergency motions at a higher rate than in previous years. They have frequently sided with the president in those cases.

Those wins “only encourage [the Trump administration] to engage in more assertive and aggressive behavior,” Torrez, the New Mexico attorney general, said. “But again, we will continue to make the arguments … as each of these cases sort of present themselves.”

Shia Kapos contributed to this report.