Trump to use cities as military ‘training grounds.’ Is that legal?

President Trump warned the country’s best military officials on Tuesday that they could head to “war” with American citizens, reporting a major escalation in the current legal battle on his authority to deploy soldiers on the American police streets.

“What they did in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles – These are very dangerous places, and we will straighten them one by one,” Trump said in an address at Top Brass à Quantico, Virginie on Tuesday. “It is also a war. It is a war of the interior.”

Commanders should use American cities as “training fields,” said the president.

Trump’s words caused an instantaneous step. Oregon has already filed a legal challenge and the experts have expressed their concern about what the president describes is against the law.

“He suggests that they learn to become warriors in American cities,” said Daniel C. Schwartz, former general councilor of the National Security Agency, who heads the legal team of national security leaders for America. “It should scare everyone. It is also boldly illegal.”

The use of soldiers to help the federal immigration raids, the control of crowds during demonstrations and otherwise apply civil laws was a point of discord with the mayors of big cities and the governors of the blue state for months, starting with the deployment of thousands of federal national troops and hundreds of navies in Los Angeles in early June.

This deployment was illegal, ruled a federal judge this fall. In a 52 -page burning decision, the judge of the American district court Charles R. Breyer prohibited soldiers under the command of Trump to pay his functions of application of the law across California, warning a “national police force with the president as chief”.

However, hundreds of soldiers stayed in the streets of Los Angeles while the case was under dispute. The case always exceeding the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, hundreds of others should now arrive in Portland, with a hundred more on the way to Chicago – everywhere in the objections of state leaders and local leaders.

“Isolated threats against federal goods should not be sufficient to justify this type of response,” said Eric J. Segall, professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “The threat should be really serious, and I don’t think the Trump administration has done this case.”

Others have accepted.

“I am extremely worried,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “The use of soldiers for interior police is something characteristic of authoritarian regimes.”

The Attorney General of Oregon deposited a legal action on Monday alleging that the president applied an “baseless hyperbolic pretext” to send the troops. Illinois officials, where the Trump administration made Chicago a focal point of the application of immigration, are also ready to make a challenge.

Although the facts on the ground are different, legally, the costume of Oregon is a brown sugar close to the battle of California which is still raging before the courts today, experts said.

“This is exactly the model they follow,” said Carl Tobias, professor at the School of Law at Richmond University.

Unlike the controversial decision to send the national guard troops to Washington in August, the deployments of Los Angeles and Portland relied on an esoteric subsection of the law, which allows the president to federate troops on the objection of the governments of the States in certain limited cases.

California’s challenge to these justifications has so far waded before the court, the judges of the 9th circuit must be “very deferential” to the interpretation of the facts by the president on the ground. This case is being examined by a larger group of judges.

In a memo deposited on Monday, the assistant general request for California, Christopher D. Hu, warned that the June decision had encouraged the administration to deploy troops elsewhere, quoting Portland as an example.

“Defenders apparently believe that the memorandum of June 7 – issued in response to events in Los Angeles – indefinitely authorizes the deployment of national guard troops anywhere in the country, for practically any reason,” Hu. “It is time to put an end to this unprecedented experience in militarized police and the conscription of the troops of the National Guard of the State outside the close conditions authorized by the Congress.”

Experts warn the dark law of the 19th century at the heart of the debate is vague and “full of shortcomings”, worrying some who consider repeated deployment as a slippery slope to long -term generalized military occupations.

“This is not our experience at least since the civil war,” said Schwartz. “If we get used to seeing service staff in armed uniform in our cities, we may not oppose it, and when we stop opposing it, it becomes a standard.”

The joint address to Virginia military leaders attracted these fears more.

“We are under invasion of the interior,” urged the president of the generals and admirals gathered in the auditorium. “Not different from a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because it does not wear uniforms.”

He praised the move in August to create a “rapid reaction force” to “repress civilian disorders” – a decree folded in his decree performing the deployment of DC troops.

“George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, George Bush and others have all used the armed forces to keep the domestic order and peace,” said Trump. “Now they like to say, oh, you are not allowed to use the army.”

These historical cases have significant differences with 2025, according to experts.

When Grover Cleveland sent troops to break a railway strike and to write the violence of the crowd against Chinese immigrants, he invoked the insurrection law. The same goes for 15 other presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and George HW Bush.

Experts stress that Trump did not use the law, despite controlling it often during his first mandate.

The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, largely avoided the theme of “enemies inside”, rather praising “warrior ethics” at the heart of his project of military reform. He took what he saw as the corrupt culture of the modern army – as well as his aesthetic gaps.

“It’s tiring to look at combat formations and see oily troops,” said Hegseth. “It is completely unacceptable to see the big generals and admirals in the corridors of the Pentagon. It’s a bad look. ”

While deployments are multiplying across the country, the experts declared that they were looking at what the appeal division and, ultimately, the Supreme Court will decide.

“It will be a test for the Supreme Court,” said Schwartz. “Whether they are willing to continue to allow this president to do everything he wants to do in clear violation of constitutional principles, or if they will hold him back.”