On a recent sunny day at a neighborhood park in Washington, D.C., dozens of people stretched out on blankets, laughing and picnicking with friends. Dogs happily rolled in the grass. A young dad played catch with a kid. And a line of four National Guard members in full uniform, each armed with a handgun, walked single file through the scene.
The troops paused at a corner and formed a circle facing outward, each looking in a different direction. They stood like that for a minute or two, surveyed the assembled crowd, and then continued on.
No one in the park seemed to take note.
Thousands of National Guard members have been patrolling the streets of Washington D.C. for a year now, in an anti-crime deployment that was quietly extended until Inauguration Day of 2029.
Armed and uniformed troops have become a ubiquitous — and controversial — part of the city scenery, appearing on busy streets, in farmer's markets, metro stations and around the national monuments. And while activists have hung signs throughout the city urging "National Guard Go Home" and "Troops Out," life in D.C. has largely settled to coexist around their presence.
It is both the longest and the largest of such deployments under this administration, which has repeatedly used the military domestically in unprecedented ways. All of those deployments have been challenged in court — but it's a pattern that constitutional experts and former military officials have been ringing the alarm bells about for more than a year.
Trump first deployed the National Guard to D.C. in August of 2025 — something the president can do because of the unique status of the city — after declaring a "crime emergency" and launching the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, despite violent crime being at a 30-year low. While homicides are down this year, violent crime is actually up compared to 2025, according to data from the city.
"I worry about these troops standing on street corners fading into the background, and people starting to accept this as just a fact of life," says Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security program. "Armed military personnel standing on the street corners in an American city should never be normal."
Nunn says that the U.S. was the first to establish the modern democratic norm of divorcing the military and civilian policing, and points to a line in the Declaration of Independence condemning King George III for keeping standing armies among the population in times of peace.
Multiple studies have since found that the National Guard presence in D.C. has had no effect on violent crime.
"They have been deployed to our communities under false pretenses," says Monica Hopkins, Director at the ACLU of D.C. "It's not a genuine emergency as to why these forces were deployed."
All guard members in D.C. have been deputized by the U.S. Marshals Service to temporarily grant them certain law enforcement powers, although they cannot carry out arrests. However they can detain people, and are issued a handgun — which is unusual for a domestic deployment.
"Americans should be concerned about this progression toward the use of the military in situations like the midterms — or in other situations that we may have not even thought about — that will essentially impose the will of the people commanding those forces on our fellow citizens," says Ret. Maj. Gen. Steven Lepper, part of a group of former military lawyers who have sent a report to Congress about their concerns.
The White House did not directly respond to a list of questions NPR asked about such concerns and for clarification about why the extension of the D.C. deployment for another two and a half years was deemed necessary, but instead linked to a press release from the U.S. Marshals Service touting the success of the Joint Task Force, without providing evidence.
The Joint Task Force in D.C. did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment about the one year mark and its mission going forward.
Troop numbers have steadily increased
Throughout the past year, the number of National Guard members deployed to D.C. – which started at around 800 – has steadily increased more than five-fold to around 4,700. The most recent influx came as part of a "summer surge" of law enforcement announced by federal officials ahead of the America 250 events in the city. There has been no indication that the number will decrease significantly in the fall.
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A vast majority of the guard members in D.C. are part of the mission voluntarily, meaning they raised their hand for the deployment. Such deployments offer extra pay for guard members.
Nunn, of the Brennan Center, points out the consistent and gradual increase of troops is part of what has allowed for their normalization.
"I think there's the risk of people getting used to the troops' presence – period. But there's also the risk of people getting used to the number of troops growing and never decreasing," he says.
Not only have the sheer numbers increased over time, but also the number of states sending them. In the early days of the deployment, the makeup of personnel largely came from the D.C. National Guard and a few Republican-led states.
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But as the year went on more Republican-led states, as well Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, began contributing. Several Democratic-led states contributed troops as part of the "America 250" celebrations, but they've remained in D.C. and have been counted by the Joint Task Force as part of the "summer surge." Those same states had previously argued in court that the mission was dangerous and illegal.
Still in legal limbo
Like the rest of Trump's controversial domestic deployments of the National Guard, the D.C. deployment has been challenged in court.
Almost immediately, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued to end the deployment. Nearly two dozen states — all of which are led by Democrats — filed an amicus brief in support of that lawsuit. Several of those states, like Michigan and Hawaii, are now contributing troops to the city.
In November, a judge ruled to end the deployment in the city, calling it "unlawful." But the administration appealed the ruling, and weeks later, a Federal Appeals Court ruled the deployment could continue while the court decides the case.
In the ruling, the judges wrote that Washington, D.C.'s unique status as a federal district and not a state allows President Trump to largely control the deployment of troops in the city. For that reason, they said that the Trump administration is likely to win the overall case.
That reasoning has frustrated many local residents and officials, loudening calls for D.C. statehood.
"Not only do we have no recourse, but we cannot hold anyone accountable," says Hopkins of the ACLU of D.C., one of many organizations that have been pushing for statehood. "We deserve to hold our officials accountable, and we can't do that here."
A ballooning cost
All of the troops in D.C. are deployed under Title 32 status, meaning they are federally funded, although they are still technically under the control of their respective governors (or the president, in the case of D.C. guard).
A report last year by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that this deployment costs about $600 a day per guard member, meaning at the current troop levels, it costs roughly $3 million per day.
The Pentagon recently told Congress extending the deployment will cost an additional $1.4 billion. A recent estimate from the nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog Project on Government Oversight found the total cost of the deployment until 2029 to be around $3 billion.
That steep cost is coming at the expense of other priorities for the National Guard, says retired Gen. Randy Manner, who was once a top official in the National Guard at the Pentagon.
"This is actually negatively impacting readiness because those funds are usually used to pay for fuel, for food, for lodging, and for training exercises for our National Guard. So this is not free money, even though the president views it that way," Manner says. "We're robbing our nation's readiness to be able to pay for the president's deployment."
A recent emergency supplemental funding request that the White House submitted to Congress, primarily to cover the cost of the ongoing war in Iran, included around $1 billion earmarked for the National Guard's deployment in D.C.
Concerns about the elections
Trump has repeatedly touted the success of the deployment in D.C., falsely claiming that the city has reached "no crime" or "almost no crime." He has said he would like to replicate the task force elsewhere.
There are already other similar anti-crime National Guard deployments in Memphis and New Orleans, both in states with Republican governors who welcomed them. Many legal and military experts are concerned that there will be more such deployments to come, particularly heading into an election season.
"You don't need to have boots in your streets or in your community, for you to have a stake here. It's something that affects all of us," Beau Tremitiere, counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal center that has been tracking the D.C. deployment.
He worries the normalization of a longstanding domestic deployment in a non-emergency situation could allow Americans to accept it as the new norm.
"A normalized, ongoing, years-long deployment in D.C. makes it much easier for the government to attempt to deploy troops in other communities. There are legal nuances as to why it's not an easy copy and paste from the D.C. mission to elsewhere. But the broader point is still very much true," he says.
Ret. Maj. Gen. Lepper has been working with other former military lawyers to cue in lawmakers and other officials about their major worries about these deployments — namely around the midterm elections. There are very clear and strict laws that prevent the military being used around polling places, but Lepper and his colleagues have been tracking various executive orders from the president that could challenge such laws. They recently submitted a report to Congress expressing their concerns.
"We have described how we've connected those dots, and we've sounded the alarm to hopefully wake up our fellow citizens to the idea that we may be seeing something like this in November," Maj. Gen. Lepper says.
Republicans have dismissed such concerns as alarmist. In May, Trump announced on social media that he would launch an "Election Integrity Army" this year, but did not offer specifics.
Maj. Gen. Lepper says he worries that Americans are banking on the idea that members of the military will reject illegal orders if such an occasion does arise, but he says that's not something soldiers are trained to do.
"We all sort of cling to the hope that the military will ultimately save us from efforts to use it in illegal ways inside our country. We should abandon that hope," he says.
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