U.S. President Donald Trump looks on during the announcement of new fuel economy standards, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., December 3, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
An expert warned Thursday that the Supreme Court blew a hole in one of President Donald Trump's top legal weapons following his announcement that National Guard troops will be pulled from three Democratic cities.
Trump said on Wednesday he would withdraw National Guard troops from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, after months of deployments. He made the announcement in a post on his Truth Social platform, framing it as a temporary step and warning that forces could return in a far different and stronger form if crime rises again.
The move became the topic of discussion on CNN's "The Arena," with fill-in host Jim Scuitto telling viewers Trump notably left the door open to future deployments despite a series of legal setbacks, primarily a Supreme Court decision last week that rejected his request to send troops to Chicago to protect immigration agents.
Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, suggested Trump may just be trying to save face with his threat to return troops to the cities. Even so, she said he wants to preserve the option to try again to deploy troops to U.S. cities.
She poured cold water on his ability to do so, however.
"The Supreme Court's decision really bodes ill for his ability to do that even if he invokes the Insurrection Act, which is really the biggest gun in his legal arsenal when it comes to domestic deployment," she said.
Goitein said Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sided with the majority in the decision, may have created a roadmap for Trump to press his case on deploying federal forces.
"That may be what he's trying to do, and you can see where he gets that because the majority essentially held that under the law that the president was relying on, he would first have to have some legal authority to deploy active duty armed forces. And then he would have to show that deploying them just wouldn't solve the problem for some reason."
She called it "quite remarkable" that the high court ruled 6-3 against Trump, which signals there's a "profound discomfort" among the majority of justices with how Trump is trying to deploy troops domestically.