LANSING — Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is warning it may only be a matter of time before the National Guard is deployed into Michigan cities.
She argues that the Trump administration has shown a pattern of using federal resources to inflame tensions, when conditions on the ground don’t warrant the use of such force.
“These are absolutely authoritarian and strong-arm tactics,” Nessel said. “It’s something that we would see in a dictatorship and not in a democracy.”
Last month, Vice President JD Vance said the administration could bring troops to Michigan if Gov. Gretchen Whitmer requested them.
The governor called that offer “unwarranted.”
“Eventually I see this happening in all 50 states,” Nessel said. “I think it’s something to be deeply concerned about, and I don’t think people should ever get used to having the united states military police our streets — and in fact, that is expressly illegal,”
The last time the National Guard was deployed into Michigan was in 1967. Gov. George Romney and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops into Detroit in response to the city’s riots.
“We don’t have any set of circumstances like that now,” Nessel said. “And even, according to many of the judges who have already ruled in some of these other cases, you didn’t have the circumstances in those states either.”
The Trump administration deployed troops into Los Angeles over the summer and Portland, Oregon, in recent days, both with the task of supporting federal immigration enforcement.
That was over the objections of both state’s governors, the first time that a state’s National Guard had been federalized since 1965.
Judges have since blocked some of those actions, saying that the government did not provide sufficient reasoning for the deployment.
The administration also deployed troops in Washington DC and is in the process of sending members of the Texas and Illinois National Guards into Chicago.