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The city is challenging the federal government’s authority to send troops into the city for what the president has called a “public safety emergency.”
Sept. 4, 2025, 11:09 a.m. ET
The District of Columbia sued the Trump administration in federal court on Thursday, challenging the president’s deployment of National Guard troops in the city.
Thousands of Guard members from the city and seven states were mobilized last month as part of a sweeping federal intervention that has also brought hundreds of federal law enforcement agents to the city’s streets.
The intervention, which President Trump has said is a response to a “public safety emergency,” has prompted criticism and protests from many people in the city who say the president wants to use his power of the federal enclave to roll back the city’s limited self-governance and punish it for policies he objects to.
The lawsuit by Washington comes two days after a federal judge in California ruled that the president’s decision to send National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles was illegal.
Even as the Guard deployments have faced local pushback and legal challenges, Mr. Trump has been promising to send troops to other cities, including Baltimore and Chicago. Like Washington and Los Angeles, Baltimore and Chicago are led by mayors who are Black and are Democrats.
“No American city should have the US military — particularly out-of-state military who are not accountable to the residents and untrained in local law enforcement — policing its streets,” said Brian Schwalb, D.C.’s attorney general, in a statement. “We’ve filed this action to put an end to this illegal federal overreach.”
