Trump Suggests Sending National Guard to New Orleans

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump suggested on Sept. 3 that he might federalize the Louisiana Army National Guard and send them to combat crime in New Orleans, the state’s largest city.

Trump made the remarks at the White House during a bilateral meeting with the president of Poland, Karol Nawrocki.

“We’re making a determination now: Do we go to Chicago? Do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad,” Trump said in the Oval Office.

“So, we’re going to be going to maybe Louisiana, and you have New Orleans, which has a crime problem. We’ll straighten that out in about two weeks. It’ll take us two weeks. Easier than D.C.”

On Aug. 11, Trump issued an executive order declaring a “crime emergency” in Washington.

The order invoked his powers under the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 to take control of the Metropolitan Police, and the D.C. National Guard—over which the president has full control—and federal law enforcement officers were also deployed to combat crime.

Since the crackdown in Washington, Trump has publicly mused about deploying such federal resources to Chicago, the country’s third-largest city, where violent crime has been a historic problem, particularly in the city’s South Side.

Trump’s statements on the matter have been criticized by officials in Illinois and Chicago, such as Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Should such a deployment to New Orleans occur, there may be greater cooperation between federal and state authorities.

Unlike Washington and Illinois, which are both heavily Democratic jurisdictions, Louisiana is dominated by the Republican Party, even as New Orleans itself is historically Democratic.

Landry did not immediately comment on the matter, although he has been supportive of Trump’s criminal justice policies in the past and has been constructing detention facilities to hold illegal immigrants before their removal from the United States.