Pentagon Plan Envisions 1,000 Troops for Louisiana Policing Mission

The Washington Post

12:30 JST, September 14, 2025

The Trump administration has drafted a proposal to activate 1,000 Louisiana National Guard troops to serve in a law enforcement mission focused on the state’s “urban centers,” according to Pentagon planning documents outlining what would be a significant expansion of the military’s role in policing American citizens.

Among the documents is an unsigned, undated draft memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem that describes the “unique advantage” of the Pentagon’s proposed approach to law enforcement in Louisiana. This plan, the draft memo says, would allow the military to supplement law enforcement in cities such as New Orleans and Baton Rouge so long as Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who has expressed support for the idea, asks the federal government for such assistance.

It is not clear that Landry has made such a request. It is not clear either if the proposal has been approved by federal and state officials.

President Donald Trump alluded to the deployment during an appearance Friday on Fox News, where he announced a separate plan to mobilize an unspecified number of National Guard personnel for a similar mission in Memphis. Like New Orleans, Memphis is led by a Democratic mayor, and Trump has decried what he says is a prevalence of violence in both places – often evoking dystopian imagery dramatically at odds with official crime data.

“New Orleans is in really bad shape, and the governor wants us to go in,” Trump said on Fox. He claimed as well, “I can fix that up in a week and a half.”

The Pentagon’s plan, which has not been previously reported, calls for the Louisiana mobilization to last until Sept. 30, 2026 – far longer than the president’s timeline, if an announcement is imminent. The materials reviewed by The Washington Post do not identify a start date.

The Louisiana planning documents illustrate the Trump administration’s evolving strategy for deploying military forces with the power to police Americans in cities with Democratic majorities. After facing resistance from the leaders of California and Illinois, the president now is looking at states led by Republican governors who may be willing to accept troops in predominantly blue cities – such as Memphis and New Orleans – even if no event-driven emergency has occurred.

The Pentagon affirmed the documents’ authenticity but would not comment on them. “Leaked documents should not be interpreted as policy,” it said in a statement. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”

The Louisiana governor’s office did not return a request for comment.

The Pentagon’s Louisiana plan suggests a robust operation is under consideration, with National Guard personnel “supplementing” the law enforcement presence in high-crime neighborhoods, helping with drug interdiction and providing “logistical and communications support” to local authorities. There would be “clear rules of engagement and community outreach protocols to ensure transparency and public trust,” the documents say.

The documents also show the Defense Department is planning to leverage Title 32 of the U.S. Code, an authority that keeps National Guard troops under the control of a state governor but funds their operations with federal dollars. “Title 32 status permits Guard personnel to support law enforcement missions without violating the Posse Comitatus Act,” the draft memo from Hegseth to Bondi and Noem states, referring to a federal law that generally bars troops under federal control from conducting domestic police missions, with certain exceptions.

The Trump administration leveraged Title 32 in its takeover last month of Washington, D.C., where approximately 2,300 National Guard troops from eight Republican-led states and the District, which is led by a Democratic mayor, are deployed. Trump, who holds authority over troops in Washington because it does not have a governor, has said military involvement was necessary to reduce crime, though local police data indicates an appreciable decline was underway long before his declaration of an “emergency.” In the weeks since, the Guard has assisted police some while also dedicating significant resources to “beautifying” the city by laying mulch and picking up trash.

Notably, military officials overseeing the D.C. deployment declared early on that while Title 32 permits troops to make arrests, they are not authorized to do so in this case. The Louisiana plan, which appears to have originated with Elbridge Colby, a Trump political appointee overseeing Pentagon policy, does not specify whether those Guard troops would have arrest authority.

In Los Angeles this summer, Trump – acting against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) – activated thousands of the state’s National Guard personnel under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which put those troops under federal control with a limited mandate that the military said at the time would involve guarding federal property and supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Last month, a federal judge determined that some of the military’s actions in support of ICE, including establishing protective perimeters during raids, constituted law enforcement and thus were against the law. The administration is appealing the ruling.

Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in sending troops to Chicago, too, but he is limited in doing so without the permission of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat who has opposed such a deployment.

Experts called the administration’s plan for Louisiana highly irregular, noting that the documents acknowledge the Pentagon has not even received a formal request from Landry’s office stating a need for assistance.

“This is the administration imposing missions on governors that are not requested, even on a red state governor,” said Randy Manner, a retired Army two-star general and former acting vice chief of the National Guard.

The Louisiana plan also breaks norms on how the National Guard is deployed, Manner said. In his leadership role, Manner was responsible for reviewing requests for assistance from governors, most often in response to hurricanes and other natural disasters. Those requests often sought troops under Title 32 because federal money, not state funds, would pay for the troops and equipment needed.

“The governor is supposed to request this, not the president or the secretary of defense,” Manner said, calling the move “absolutely nothing more than a political grab of power” by Trump. “I’ve never heard of it happening before, he said. “I’ve never heard of this kind of thing happening before this administration – not in my 35 years” of military service.

A former senior defense official with knowledge of the process for states to request federal assistance said that while it was normal for agencies to work behind-the-scenes once a need had been identified, it’s not standard for the Defense Department to propose a potential deployment.

“This suggests that in the shopping of places to send troops, there’s probably some political conversation that is happening,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Multiple Louisiana Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have indicated they support a military deployment there. Newsom, the California governor and a potential presidential candidate, last month challenged Johnson and a host of other GOP leaders over the rates of violent crime in their states, suggesting it would be more appropriate for Trump to mobilize the Guard in those places.

“If the president is sincere about the issue of crime and violence, there’s no question in my mind that he’ll likely be sending the troops into Louisiana and Mississippi to address the just unconscionable wave of violence that continues to plague those states,” Newsom said at the time.

New Orleans has seen a significant reduction in crime this year, with the city’s murder rate falling to lows not seen since the 1970s after a pandemic-era spike, according to local police data. As of Sept. 6, overall crime was down 19 percent from a year ago, those figures show.

In Baton Rouge, which has a Republican mayor, the statistics were more mixed. As of Sept. 9, there were eight fewer homicides in the city this year compared to a year ago, but robberies and assaults over the last six months were on the rise, according to local police data.

In Memphis, Tennessee’s second-most populous city after Nashville, police officials said earlier in the week that instances of violent crime, including murder and assault, have come down.

If the Pentagon’s plan for Louisiana is fully realized, it would tie up 11 percent of the state’s National Guard personnel available for emergencies during hurricane season. Maj. Gen. Thomas Friloux, the adjutant general overseeing forces there, said that about 9,000 troops are available for disaster response when he downplayed the assignment of 135 service members from Louisiana to the ongoing mission in Washington.

“In a worst-case scenario,” Friloux said last month, “we would be having forces from other states come into Louisiana to support us.”

Trump’s use of the National Guard to supplement law enforcement is incompatible with how the force was built, and it could have a corrosive effect, said Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.

“The men and women of our National Guard signed up to defend their communities and defend their country in genuine emergencies, and the Trump administration is fabricating emergencies in ways that are dangerous to the relationship between American society and our military,” she said. “It’s destructive to businesses who employ Guardsmen. It’s disruptive to single parents. It’s destructive to the Guardsmen’s own professional development to be called up potentially for a year at a time.”