Trump Suggests Possible Deployment of 50,000-75,000 Federal Agents to ‘Help’ Cities: ‘We Can Solve These Problems so Fast’
President Donald Trump threatened to deploy tens of thousands of Department of Homeland Security agents to “solve the problems” in cities with high crime rates and civil unrest, he said in an interview with Sean Hannity Thursday night.
Trump, frustrated that cities like Chicago and New York City have denied and denounced his usage of federal force, have asked for officers to be “invited in” but the mayors in those cities “just don’t want to ask.”
“We want to go in and help the cities, we want help Chicago, we want to help all of them,” Trump said on Fox News. “Detroit is having problems. A very good police chief in Detroit but they are having problems. We’ll go into all the cities, any of the cities. We’ll put in 50,000, 60,000 people that really know what they are doing. And they are strong, tough, and we can solve these problems so fast. But as you know, we have to be invited in.”
Of note: DHS has 240,000 total employees, per its website, and, as of 2016, the agency employed roughly 62,000 full-time law enforcement officers. That number includes roughly 38,000 Customs and Border Protection officers, 12,000 ICE officers, more than 5,000 Secret Service agents, and nearly 1,000 Federal Protection Service agents. The Justice Department includes another 44,000 full-time law enforcement agents, among them the FBI, ATF, and DEA.
“I spoke with the mayor of Chicago, Mayor [Lori] Lightfoot,” Trump continued, moments later. “And I had a great talk, but within minutes after that talk — you just reported it tonight — a couple of more people were shot. Young, very young children were shot. It’s a shame. It’s a shame. If they invited us in, we would go in with 55,000, 75,000 people. We would be able to solve it like you wouldn’t believe and quick. But they just don’t want to ask, maybe for political reasons, but they don’t want ask. It’s a disgrace.”
Make no mistake, what Trump suggested would be a massive escalation of force into American cities, equivalent to re-tasking every officer in DHS — including every border agent guarding the nation’s borders — and then possibly pulling thousands more from the DOJ.
Trump has deployed federal officers several times this year, but never approaching anything the scale he discussed with Hannity. Last week, roughly 100 federal agents — a mix of DHS and DOJ officers — were redirected to Portland in response to ongoing protests there. And earlier this week, the Trump administration said it would send anywhere from 150–200 federal agents to Chicago and Kansas City, and a few dozen to Albuquerque to quell a rise in violence crime in those cities.
Watch above, via Fox News.
