Trump sued over District of Columbia ‘military occupation’ by state National Guard units

Members of the National Guard stationed outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 18, 2025. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

The District of Columbia’s attorney general sued the Trump administration Thursday over the ongoing presence of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital, arguing the deployment amounts to a military occupation that violates the district’s right to self-rule.

President Donald Trump’s deployment of D.C. National Guard troops and units from states outside the district  violates laws against using the military for domestic law enforcement and a 1973 federal law allowing the district to govern itself, D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb wrote in a complaint in federal court in the district.

“No American jurisdiction should be involuntarily subjected to military occupation,” the complaint says, adding that Trump’s “command and control of out-of-state National Guard units when they are in state militia status violates the Constitution and federal law.”

The administration’s actions, which Trump has characterized as an attempt to control crime in the city, “flout the Posse Comitatus Act,” a 19th-century law, and other sections of federal law that “enshrine the nation’s foundational prohibition on the participation of military forces in domestic law enforcement absent the most extreme exigencies, such as an invasion or rebellion,” the complaint said.

“Defendants have established a massive, seemingly indefinite law enforcement operation in the District subject to direct military command. The danger that such an operation poses to individual liberty and democratic rule is self-evident,” the complaint said.

Despite a Tuesday morning ruling from a federal judge in California that called Trump’s use of military personnel for law enforcement in Los Angeles illegal, the president has continued to explore further use of Guard units for what he said is crime prevention in other U.S. cities. 

States with a military presence in the district cited in the suit are Louisiana, South Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and South Carolina.

This is a developing report that will be updated.