Appeals court lets Trump keep National Guard troops in DC for now
By Devan Cole, CNN
(CNN) — A federal appeals court is letting President Donald Trump continue his deployment of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital.
In a unanimous decision issued Wednesday by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the court indefinitely paused a lower court order that had required Trump to remove thousands of guard members from the city’s streets. The court had previously frozen that order while it considered whether to pause it for a longer period of time.
The appeals court said that given the city’s status as a federal district, Trump appears likely to succeed in a lawsuit brought by DC’s attorney general over the deployment of troops from both the city’s militia and that of several GOP-led states.
Without the court’s intervention, Judge Patricia Millett wrote for the three-judge panel, there would be a “profound level of disruption to the lives of thousands of service members who have been deployed for four months already.”
“The President’s order implicates a strong and distinctive interest in the protection of federal governmental functions and property within the Nation’s capital,” added Millett, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.
The other two members of the panel were appointed to the appeals court by Trump during his first term.
Under Wednesday’s order, Trump can keep National Guard members in the district through at least late February. The appeals court will now consider the underlying merits of the city’s lawsuit, and it’s possible the court later rules against Trump’s deployment.
The presence of several thousand National Guard troops in DC has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks following a shooting of two guard members last month that left one dead and another in critical condition.
Just after the shooting, lawyers for the Trump administration asked the DC Circuit to freeze the ruling from US District Judge Jia Cobb but made no mention of the attack in court papers.
The legal wrangling in the nation’s capital is playing out as a series of separate cases over Trump’s deployment of troops in other Democratic-led cities and states around the US continue to unfold.
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