Appeals Court Greenlights Trump’s D.C. Military Deployment

An appeals panel Wednesday unanimously cleared the way for President Donald Trump to keep troops in Washington, D.C.

The three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed a lower court ruling that found the deployment was likely unlawful and inflicted serious harm on D.C.’s right to govern itself.

The panel said that the Trump administration was likely to prevail in D.C.’s lawsuit against the deployment because the president “possesses a unique power” to deploy National Guard troops in the district.

Trump deployed hundreds of D.C. National Guard troops in D.C. as part of his federal law enforcement surge over the summer. Several Republican governors also sent out-of-state Guard troops to the district at Trump’s request.

The judges — two of whom were appointed by Trump and another appointed by former President Barack Obama — said the lower court block “threatens severe disruption” by forcing the over 2,000 Guard members currently in the district to leave even though higher courts could find that Trump’s deployment was lawful.

“That would severely disrupt the lives of the affected service members, their families who would have to endure the difficulties of on-again and off-again separations, and the guard members’ employers who would have to accommodate their unpredictable absences from and returns to the workplace,” the appeals order, written by Obama-appointee Judge Patricia Millett, reads.

The judges further concluded that the Trump administration will likely succeed in arguing that the district court erred in finding that the president’s use of out-of-state troops in the district “raised a serious federalism question under the Constitution.”

Out-of-state troops in D.C. could not raise such concerns “because of the District’s unique constitutional status as a federal territory, the Nation’s Capital, and the seat of federal government,” they wrote.

In a separate opinion, the two Trump appointees on the panel — Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao — went further, claiming that D.C. shouldn’t have had standing to challenge the deployment because it is not a state.

“We have never recognized that the District possesses an independent sovereignty that can give rise to an Article III injury from actions of the federal government,” they wrote.

Trump’s National Guard deployments and federal law enforcement surge, both of which were predicated on false claims of rampant crime in Washington, have reignited calls for the D.C. to be granted statehood. The appeals court ruling will likely strengthen that decades-old movement.

This story had been updated with additional details throughout.