Topline
Washington, D.C.’s attorney general sued the Trump administration and the military Thursday, claiming that sending the National Guard to patrol the nation’s capital earlier this year violated federal law prohibiting the military from being used in domestic law enforcement—echoing a federal judge’s recent ruling in a separate case in California.
Washington, D.C. attorney general Brian Schwalb, a Democrat, accused the Trump administration in the lawsuit of having “run roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy—that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement.”
The suit comes after U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled Tuesday the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits the military from being used for civilian law enforcement when it sent the National Guard to patrol protests against Trump’s immigration policies in Los Angeles earlier this summer.
Trump deployed the National Guard in Washington last month as part of a so-called crime crackdown in the city that included a federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department, and he has threatened to replicate the effort elsewhere, including Chicago, New Orleans and Baltimore, despite a decrease in violent crime in all three cities.
This is a developing story and will be updated.