Dive Brief:
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President Donald Trump said in a Dec. 31, 2025, social media post that National Guard troops will leave Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, after the Supreme Court refused to block a ruling against their deployment in Chicago on Dec. 23, 2025.
- “President Trump has finally admitted defeat,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Dec. 31, 2025, statement, but Trump’s New Year’s Eve Truth Social post pledged, “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again.”
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“This is basically a punt,” Paul Gowder, a professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, said of the Supreme Court ruling. “I actually find this really worrying because it seems like basically just an invitation for Trump to go straight to the Insurrection Act next time.”
Dive Insight:
Lower courts ordered the Trump administration to end its takeover of the California National Guard on Dec. 10, 2025, and permanently barred National Guard troops in Portland on Nov. 7, 2025.
The Supreme Court ruling was the result of the Trump administration’s emergency appeal after the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in October refused to allow the administration to override a court order blocking troop deployments to Illinois.
The justices leaned heavily on a friend-of-the-court brief from Georgetown law professor Martin Lederman, arguing that the basis of the case was not whether the Trump administration had the authority to send in troops but whether it had proven it could not enforce federal laws with “regular” U.S. military forces, Gowder said.
The Trump administration “thought that meant regular law enforcement,” such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Gowder said. But the ruling indicates “the legal criteria for using regular military forces hasn’t happened yet. In other words, the Posse Comitatus Act applies.”
Posse Comitatus is a federal law that bars the military from performing domestic law enforcement unless expressly authorized by the Constitution or an act of Congress.
In a footnote to his concurrence to the Supreme Court ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that “one apparent ramification of the Court’s opinion is that it could cause the President to use the U.S. military more than the National Guard to protect federal personnel and property in the United States.”
“That leaves the door open, essentially, for Donald Trump to go back and this time to use the Insurrection Act — in other words, to say, ‘Okay, then fine, in my discretion as president, I say that there’s a rebellion going on and so ordinary military forces can be used,’” Gowder said. “Then I’m going to say, ‘Okay, they’re not enough,’ and call up the National Guard, and then all the same questions that both parties wanted the court to answer come right back.”
