After a series of losses in court, President Donald Trump ended 2025 with an announcement that he is pulling the plug on legally contested National Guard deployments in three major US cities—but he also pledged that troops will return in the new year.
Trump initially sent thousands of California National Guard members to Los Angeles in June amid protests against his violent immigration operations. The remaining troops left the city earlier this month in response to a pair of orders from a district judge and the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
The president also tried to deploy National Guard members to the streets of two other Democrat-led cities—Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois—but those moves were blocked by lawsuits, including one that produced a US Supreme Court decision last week.
Throughout the president’s push to deploy troops to these and other cities, he has circulated lies about crime rates. He did so again in the Wednesday announcement on his Truth Social platform, writing, “We are removing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, despite the fact that CRIME has been greatly reduced by having these great Patriots in those cities, and ONLY by that fact.”
“Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago were GONE if it weren’t for the Federal Government stepping in,” Trump claimed. “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again - Only a question of time! It is hard to believe that these Democrat Mayors and Governors, all of whom are greatly incompetent, would want us to leave, especially considering the great progress that has been made???”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat expected to run for president in 2028, said on social media Wednesday that it is “about time Donald Trump admitted defeat. We’ve said it from day one: The federal takeover of California’s National Guard is illegal.”
Newsom and the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, challenged the LA deployment. In that case, the US Department of Justice on Tuesday filed a brief with the 9th Circuit withdrawing its motion to keep the California troops under federal control.
“For six months, CA National Guard troops have been used as political pawns by a president desperate to be king,” Bonta said Wednesday. “Now, in the face of a stinging rebuke by the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is backing away from its effort to federalize and deploy CA National Guard troops.”
Although that Supreme Court decision was not directly about California, the justices’ rejection of the Trump administration’s request to strike down a temporary restraining order that barred the Illinois deployment was expected to inform other cases.
Trump federalized Illinois and Texas national guard troops to patrol in Chicago, but Illinois quickly sued and won a court ruling keeping them out of the city. The troops did training exercises instead. Today, Trump claims that the guard “greatly reduced” crime in Chicago. Did they do it remotely?
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— Mark Jacob (@markjacob.bsky.social) December 31, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another Democrat who may run for the Oval Office in the next cycle, also pointed to the recent ruling in his response to the president on Wednesday: “Donald Trump’s lying again. He lost in court when Illinois stood up against his attempt to militarize American cities with the National Guard. Now Trump is forced to stand down.”
“Illinois and Chicago have reduced crime with smart investments in police and community violence reduction programs,” he continued. “Meanwhile, Trump cut federal support for both. No matter how many lies he tells, we will keep standing up for truth and against his abuse of power.”
Ahead of Trump’s announcement, the New Republic’s Greg Sargent said that the president and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, “are actually failing in crucial ways. Deportations are lagging behind their goals, courts are mostly functioning, and their fascist, ethnonationalist cruelties have unleashed a countermobilization of unexpected scope and power.”
After the new Truth Social post, Sargent added: “Trump just announced that he’s pulling the National Guard out of Chicago, LA, and Portland while pretending he won some kind of big victory. Here’s the reality: Their authoritarian designs have faced massive civil and popular resistance.”
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