Trump removes National Guard from some US cities
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Rachel Wright, and in the early hours of Thursday, the 1st of January, these are our main stories. Donald Trump will pull National Guard troops out of three U.S.
Why did Trump withdraw the National Guard from US cities?
cities after a Supreme Court ruling. And in a New Year's address, President Zelensky says Ukraine will not sign a weak peace agreement with Russia.
Also in this podcast, if every Syrian people will not take this risk, who will build our country?
We speak to a Syrian refugee who's ready to move home. In the final hours of 2025, Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing federal troops from three U.S. cities, Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland. Over the course of the year, the president has deployed the National Guard to several Democrat-run cities. He claimed they were needed to crack down on rampant crime and help with immigration enforcement.
I saw today on one of your networks, not a friendly network, They interviewed about 12 people. Most of them were African-American, who were black. And they were saying, please, please, please let the president send it. These were people from Chicago. Please, we need help. We need help. We can't walk outside. We're petrified.
But Democrats criticized the move as an unnecessary and unconstitutional abuse of power. And several legal challenges were filed to block the deployments. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to send troops to Chicago, citing a longstanding law against using the military as a domestic police force. And now President Trump has announced they'll be withdrawing, claiming that crime rates in the three cities have been reduced. But he said federal authorities could return if crime rose again. Our correspondent in Washington, Sean Dilley, told us more.
Some courts have given the federal government temporary permission to carry on with their deployments in some areas. But he's been facing an awful lot of legal challenges. And there are now several judges who have said that it's a federal overreach to use these powers to deploy the National Guard in various places across the United States. And there is not evidence that it's necessary to send troops in to protect property and in particular to protect federal property. Because while the National Guard obviously would normally be aligned to a state, they can deploy. under some circumstances, be deployed by the federal government. It's all a question of proportionality. An awful lot of people think the deployment is quite an extreme reaction, particularly in Washington, DC, from where I speak to you now.
The National Guard are absolutely everywhere on an individual basis. Of course, they are extremely friendly when it comes to tourists and people locally here but it is still the case that it's controversial in washington dc president trump had essentially at one point overtaken the local law enforcement department the metropolitan police department and he has consistently argued that crime is soaring and something needs to be done but his critics have suggested that he's been exaggerating isolated incidents at largely peaceful protests to justify the sending in of the troops
Is there any evidence that the security situation has changed at all in any of these cities as a result of the National Guard presence?
It's almost a little bit early to say because those annual crime statistics would not be in in the same way. Certainly, President Trump claims that crime levels have come down in those areas. But no, I mean, there's no magic bullet there that says, right, OK, crime was at this level. The National Guard came in on this date and he's been deploying them since June in various places across the United States. Nowhere can we say, well, hang on a minute, that's definitively reduced crime.
And what's the situation like in the other cities where Trump has deployed the national card?
There are still National Guards deployed here in Washington, D.C. There are National Guards deployed in Memphis and in New Orleans.
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