Trump Signs Off on Sending the National Guard to Memphis

The president repeated that Chicago, New Orleans and other Democratic-run cities could be next.

President Trump on Monday signed an order creating a federal task force and authorizing the use of the National Guard to crack down on crime in Memphis over the concerns of local Democratic lawmakers who are wary of a surge of policing from Washington.

Speaking from the Oval Office alongside Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee and the state’s two Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, all Republicans, Mr. Trump said the task force would be a “replica” of the large show of police and military forces currently on display in Washington.

Mr. Trump said he would also consider sending federal law enforcement officials into Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans.

“We’re going to take care of all of them step by step, just like we did in D.C.,” Mr. Trump said.

Details were scarce on Mr. Trump’s plans for Memphis, which he announced days earlier in an interview on Fox News, but the president said multiple federal agencies would be involved. In addition to working with state and local law enforcement in Tennessee, as well as Mississippi and Arkansas, it allows for the mobilization of National Guard units at Mr. Lee’s request.

Mr. Lee requested the federal assistance, Mr. Trump said. Crime rates in Memphis have dropped this year compared with recent years, according to local police, though they still remain high compared to other parts of the country.

“I’m tired of crime holding the great city of Memphis back,” said Mr. Lee, who is in his final term as governor. Earlier this year, he dispatched members of the Tennessee National Guard to Washington to help with Mr. Trump’s efforts there.

The Democratic mayor of Memphis, Paul Young, has said that he did not ask for help from the National Guard, and does not agree that its presence would help reduce crime. The F.B.I. already has an operation in Memphis, as well as a task force of Tennessee Highway Patrol officers dedicated to fighting crime in the city.

“We don’t have a say in the National Guard, but our goal is to ensure that we have influence in how they engage in this community,” he told reporters on Friday.

Several Democrats in the city are concerned about what the addition of National Guard troops might mean to Memphis. They want to know what the role of the Guard would be, how it would be identified to the public and where it would be based in the city or surrounding Shelby County. Like some of the other cities Mr. Trump has singled out, Memphis has a significant share of Black residents; more than a third of the state’s Black residents live there.

“I do not think it is a wise or necessary move for the National Guard to come in,” said Earle Fisher, a Memphis pastor and community activist, on Friday. It was, he said, “the inverse” of when troops were called in to other Southern cities to protect demonstrators during the civil rights movement.

Some have invoked the decision to send in the National Guard in 1968 after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

“That history matters — because what we are seeing now is not about justice. It’s about politics,” the Tennessee Senate minority leader, Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat, said in a statement.

At least one other Republican governor, Jeff Landry of Louisiana, has voiced support for receiving federal law enforcement support and has welcomed the idea of having the National Guard in New Orleans, another Democratic-led city.

In California, where in June Mr. Trump sent in the National Guard to deal with street protests in and around Los Angeles over the objections of the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, a federal judge ruled this month that the move was illegal. That ruling poses impediments to any plans Mr. Trump may have for sending the troops into the streets of other cities, like Chicago.

That said, Mr. Trump would still have a number of ways to display a show of force.

He could order a surge of federal law enforcement officers from the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to descend on Democrat-run cities.

But the most extreme step Mr. Trump could take would be to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the active-duty military for civilian law enforcement in American cities. Mr. Trump has mulled doing so in the past, in response to protests, but has never done so.

Still, Mr. Trump said Monday he wanted to send his law enforcement surge to Chicago next.

“We think Chicago is going to be next, and we’ll get to St. Louis,” he said. “And New Orleans, we want to get to, too.”

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