1.

As National Guard troops and federal officers swarmed Washington, D.C., in August, sent by President Donald Trump to confront what he declared a “crime emergency,” members of the city council expressed their outrage. Janeese Lewis George, who represents a northern ward with many immigrant residents that was immediately crawling with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, reported in November that her constituents “call me every day overwhelmed and terrified by the increased law enforcement presence,” adding, “This city is occupied.” At-large councilmember Robert White called the takeover “a dangerous political stunt.” His counterpart Christina Henderson worried that vehemently criticizing the invasion—which Trump justified by pointing to the District’s unique, not-quite-sovereign political status—would further endanger home rule in the city, but agreed nevertheless that the administration was relying on a “manufactured emergency.”

Yet to Gregg Pemberton, the leader of the local police union, the intervention was “a drastic but necessary step.” The problem that had required it, he argued in a Washington Postop-ed published less than two weeks into the federal blitz, was none other than the city council. Its “reactionary anti-police thinking,” he wrote, had put the department in an impossible position by “prioritizing wrongheaded ideology over safety.”

The principal source of Pemberton’s ire was a wide-ranging package of police-reform laws passed by the council in 2020 and updated in 2022, which banned chokeholds, restricted the purchase of military weapons, expanded public access to body-worn camera footage, and required officers to visibly display their badges when deployed for protests, among other measures intended to restrain police misconduct and abuse. The union had been insisting for years that, as Pemberton now wrote, “D.C. police cannot function under current conditions.” In contrast, Pemberton claimed that the unbridled federal presence had already reduced crime in the city, which “validates what our union has been saying.” He agreed with the councilmembers who worried that D.C.’s self-governance was in jeopardy: if local lawmakers didn’t meet his union’s demands—repealing the 2022 law and increasing the police headcount—they would, he warned, “invite action perilous to the District’s home rule.”

Trump’s mobilization has taken different forms in different locales: the frequent abductions of immigrants who have shown up to court as required at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan; the raids and seizures that ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have carried out across Los Angeles and Chicagoland, abducting parents outside schools and worshippers attending churches; the battle between protesters and federal officers outside an ICE processing facility in what Trump has called “war-ravaged Portland”; and, of course, the invasion of Minneapolis and St. Paul, which brought three thousand officers to the Twin Cities at its peak (five times the number of city police in Minneapolis), catalyzed a vast local opposition, and killed two legal observers whose names—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—have become synonymous with the resistance to Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

All of these interventions represent a form of shock and awe turned inward. Trump’s vision, delivered in September to a hastily assembled conclave of generals, is that rather than “police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within,” the military will occupy cities “run by the radical-left Democrats” to “straighten them out one by one.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has referred to the deployments as a “surge,” calling to mind the Pentagon’s last-ditch attempt to turn the tide in 2007 by ordering almost 30,000 more troops to Iraq. “Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe, most dangerous city in the United States of America, and to a large extent beyond,” Trump told the generals. “You go to Afghanistan, they didn’t have anything like that.”

One might expect all of this to go over poorly in the station house. By invading American cities, after all, the Trump administration is usurping not only the power of mayors and city councils but also the responsibilities of local police. What’s more, cops have often borne the brunt of protesters’ anger at ICE—or even found themselves gassed by federal officers when trying to keep demonstrators at bay.

Indeed, some police leaders have joined elected officials in denouncing the urban occupations. Chief Elaine Bryant of Columbus stood with the mayor at a press conference where he stressed that, while federal agents “say they’re here to keep us safe, the fact is we’re already safe”; she urged residents to call 911 if ICE engaged in “illegal or dangerous conduct.” In Helena, Montana, Chief Brett Petty announced that the city’s police department had withdrawn from a drug task force over the initiative’s collaboration with Border Patrol. In Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the local police issued a statement contradicting some aspects of DHS’s initial account of an incident in which ICE agents shot and wounded an undocumented man they accused of trying to ram them with his car. “We do not enforce immigration law, nor do we conduct immigration enforcement operations with ICE,” the department emphasized. Three weeks before Good’s shooting, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara criticized ICE for using “questionable tactics” against protesters and demonstrating an “egregious disregard for human dignity.” A week after the shooting, he told The New York Times that he feared his officers were at a “breaking point”; he later said that learning of Pretti’s killing left him “physically shaking” with distress.

Yet a significant number of rank-and-file police and their unions have cheered on the takeovers. One of the reasons is bluntly pragmatic: the credibility of police departments has been in tatters since 2020. That year the nation’s largest protest wave brought attention to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many more black men and women before them; the pandemic, meanwhile, shredded the country’s social fabric, contributing to a spike in violent crime. This reputational quagmire has created widespread difficulties in hiring and retaining officers. Some police see the federal takeovers as a chance to offload a portion of the labor of crime control onto other agencies (though federal courts have limited the ability of the National Guard to engage in law enforcement in Portland and Los Angeles, while greenlighting such activities in D.C. and refusing to halt them pending an appeal in Memphis). The surprise ICE deployment to Charlotte, North Carolina, in November, for example, came six weeks after the local police union had issued a letter to city leaders asking them to support its request for federal intervention amid a “severe staffing crisis.”

Another advantage of the federal invasions is less obvious: to some cops and the unions that represent them, this season of repression promises to extinguish the expectation that police might have to answer to the locally elected officials who allocate their budgets and authorize their mission. Washington, D.C., is something of a test case for this theory. The city’s lack of political and fiscal independence and the fragility of even its limited home rule have offered Pemberton a unique form of leverage in his face-off with the city council.

But in other respects Pemberton’s union is hardly atypical. Since 2016 police officers across the country, and especially their union leaders, have composed an underappreciated flank of Trump’s coalition. Where cops used to associate the feds mainly with civil rights oversight, in recent months many officers have acted more as if the administration is coming to their rescue. Rather than a lawyer asking probing questions or a grant-maker whose funds come wrapped in red tape, Washington has become a wingman. To be sure, polling shows that the DHS operations have grown increasingly unpopular, and the department’s refusal to cooperate with local investigators after incidents like the shootings of Good and Pretti has put cops in “uncharted territory,” as a Minnesota police superintendent put it. Cracks in the coalition, however, have yet to widen into a major rift, and in many cities the rank and file’s allegiance to Trump remains strong. The federal invasions are usurpations—but not necessarily of police authority. Instead, in some cities—particularly in blue states—they have become opportunities to hamstring liberal city governance and further weaken the already fraying democratic constraints on police power.

2.

To make sense of Trump’s law enforcement operations, it is useful to see the police less as a simple instrument of state power than as a political body in its own right, with different factions vying for leadership. Under Trump, the fortunes of CBP and ICE—together the country’s largest police force, though still far too small to cover this vast land—have risen, as have those of sheriffs, who have widely embraced far-right ideas on crime, immigration, and guns, buttressed by the idiosyncratic assumption that they themselves ought to be the Constitution’s chief enforcers. Meanwhile risk-averse police chiefs, particularly the reformers on whom Barack Obama relied after the killings of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, have fallen into disfavor.

Police unions, which largely represent rank-and-file patrol officers, have incubated reactionary politics for decades.¹ Although they initially coalesced, amid a wave of public-sector unionization in the 1960s, to fight for better working conditions—including protections from overbearing and erratic commanding officers—they immediately married labor militancy with a push for freer rein, rejecting civilian review and affirmative action inside the station house and hitting back against civil rights and black liberation on the streets. They have long seen progressive elected officials as an obstacle, if not an enemy, and have sought to outflank and overpower them, whether by forging alliances with conservative state legislators and lobbying for police-friendly legislation, or by more directly defying leaders with mass absenteeism (“the blue flu”) or other unlawful slowdowns and wildcat strikes. These unions have also commonly rejected reforms; after the first crescendo of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014–2015, they challenged new oversight and disciplinary measures across the country.

Although generally powerful locally, police unions held diminished sway in Washington during the Obama and Biden eras. National organizations retained a seat at the table, but they often had to share space with civil rights advocates. Joseph Biden had been a close supporter of police unions when he was the most powerful tough-on-crime Democrat in the Senate—but by the time he entered the White House the tide of law-and-order policies was receding as the crime rate ebbed and demonstrations against police killings of civilians continued. Like Obama before him, Biden focused on technocratic reforms, emphasizing “action to enhance accountability and repair trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve,” as the White House put it after a 2022 meeting with law enforcement groups.

Police management and rank-and-file officers are represented by different associations, and they have traditionally maintained different allies in Washington. The standard-bearer for the former is the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which has generally aligned itself with reform-oriented liberals; on the latter side, a host of organizations, of which the largest is the Fraternal Order of Police, have more often teamed up with law-and-order conservatives.² Sheriffs, meanwhile, have their own organization, the National Sheriffs’ Association, which has a history of vexed relations with the other groups because it splits the difference between them: its politics veer conservative, but it sees itself as representing managerial interests. Occasional collaborations have produced major legislation, like the 1994 crime bill, whose passage Biden oversaw.

But Black Lives Matter and the ascendance of MAGA have scrambled the old order. Early in Biden’s presidency, amid national pressure for reform in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the Fraternal Order of Police sensed the prevailing mood. It put aside cats-and-dogs tendencies to join with the International Association of Chiefs of Police in negotiating with Congress on the provisions of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; its participation amounted to an acknowledgement that the profession’s relations with the public had gone awry. More moderate than competing legislation endorsed by the Movement for Black Lives, the bill would have instituted reforms similar to those included in the D.C. law two years later. At the same time, it contained grants to aid police with recruitment, training, and retention. But the National Sheriffs’ Association rejected a compromise on legal liability for misconduct and worked to torpedo the bill, to the consternation of Fraternal Order of Police and International Association of Chiefs of Police leaders. The two organizations again joined hands last winter to decry Trump’s pardon of January 6 rioters—though they also shoehorned a critique of Biden into their statement. (In contrast, this past summer, the sheriffs’ association selected a new president, Chris West of Canadian County, Oklahoma, who had marched on the Capitol during the melee—though he claims he did not storm the building.)

Over the past decade, meanwhile, Washington’s push for police reform and Trump’s relentless support for cops have propelled many officers firmly into the MAGA camp. Police unions, where brash and outspoken leaders often set the tone, have been the vanguard of this shift. The national lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump for president in 2016, and in subsequent election cycles more and more state and municipal-level unions followed its lead. This has again widened a gulf between the voices urging face-saving reform, which are generally from the upper ranks, and the associations that represent the majority of cops.

One of the factors driving this shift has presumably been Trump’s willingness to return policing to the thing it was a century ago: a vehicle for patronage. Rather than benefits flowing upward to a ward leader or machine boss, however, today they flow downward from Trump. There’s no better example than the advantages reaped by the National Border Patrol Council, which represents members of the Border Patrol. It was the first major law-enforcement outfit to endorse Trump in the 2016 election and has remained his most avid and reliable supporter among police unions ever since. When the administration suspended collective bargaining rights for federal workers in “national security” sectors by executive order in March 2025, the Border Patrol was spared. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in summer 2025, contained a $4.1 billion windfall for CBP, including enough money to hire three thousand agents, as well as $8 billion for its rival sibling, ICE, to hire 10,000 new officers.

Trump has also given city police concrete reasons to feel grateful to him. The April 2025 executive order that set the stage for the city invasions promised, among other things, to provide pro bono legal assistance to officers facing lawsuits, to “modify, rescind, or move to conclude” consent decrees imposed on police departments with a pattern or practice of civil rights violations if the government finds that they “unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions,” and to “pursue all necessary legal remedies” against local and state jurisdictions whose officials obstruct law enforcement. (The implication was that enforcing sanctuary policies that stop police from collaborating with ICE could be grounds for prosecution.)

Even more invaluable is the intangible support Trump offers to police. By affirming that cops in American cities are fighting a war on two fronts, against criminal perps on the one hand and Democratic pols and “Marxist prosecutors” on the other, Trump amplifies talking points usually confined to cop groupchats and Fraternal Order lodge bars and pool tables. If Black Lives Matter made police feel constrained and wary, Trump has consistently offered license. Whether in his July 2017 speech urging officers to bang suspects’ heads into squad cars or the April executive order, which he titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” Trump has vindicated a worldview widely shared among police: that the job was easier and better before reform-minded commanders and civil rights attorneys got in the way, and that it’s time that the old approach had a renaissance.

*

No city police union has participated more openly in the federal subversion of local authority than D.C.’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #2. Ever since the District’s city council passed its package of police-reform laws, Pemberton has waged a bitter campaign for repeal. The union was especially incensed by a provision that exempted matters of discipline from negotiation at the bargaining table. Pemberton’s WashingtonPost piece was only one in a long line of efforts to spread the message that the council’s reforms have compromised public safety by creating “a devastating staffing crisis” for the force. He lambasts city council members and departmental policies on X and directly lobbies Republican members of Congress. In August he appeared on a talk show hosted by Trump’s first White House spokesperson, Sean Spicer, to declare yet again that the council had “destroyed policing.”

When federal agents invaded the city, all of this put the boosterish three-term mayor, Muriel Bowser, in the strange position of insisting that the police department was up to the task of patrolling D.C. while police themselves argued otherwise. Under pressure from the Trump administration, Bowser and her police chief signed off on increased police cooperation with ICE during the takeover, angering constituents and city councilors and imperiling the District’s sanctuary commitments—but earning a nod from the police union, which praised her “efforts to align…with federal priorities.”

At stake in this four-way contest between the Trump administration, the union, the mayor, and the city council was the future of the District’s partial self-governance, which has always been conditional on the maintenance of law and order. Richard Nixon, who laid the groundwork for home rule (which took full effect under Gerald Ford, in 1975), did so only after the District requested one thousand new cops and Congress passed an omnibus crime bill that, among other things, poured federal resources into D.C. crime control.

The arrival of home rule, however, set the stage for conflict between a newly empowered police force and a newly anointed city government—especially once the Fraternal Order of Police gained representation of the D.C. force in 1981. For the city’s black majority, the push for home rule had long been inextricable from the fight for equal rights and against white supremacy. This made it especially significant that the Fraternal Order of Police—which ran what local reporters called a “bitter” and “racially tinged” election campaign against the incumbent union, the International Brotherhood of Police Officers—was, in the assessment of TheWashington Post at the time, “a predominantly white social organization that has turned to union organizing.” The D.C. force had the highest proportion of black officers of any department in the country, and the Fraternal Order of Police’s membership application at the time asked officers to identify their race. The order’s lodge, where cops socialized, was notoriously unwelcoming to black officers. As one reported, “I was treated like I had a disease.”

The International Brotherhood of Police Officers had maintained friendly relations with the city government, including with Marion Barry, the scandal-dogged but exceedingly popular mayor who had been the city’s most prominent civil rights activist. But the Fraternal Order of Police almost immediately began feuding with Barry. When Barry enacted a residency requirement for city employees, including cops, the police union argued it would lessen the quality of recruits. (Congress ultimately nullified the requirement.) The organization regularly attacked D.C. self-governance by fanning anxieties about crime, implying by 1989 that Barry was not up to the task of controlling a spike that had led journalists to label the city America’s “murder capital.” When Barry refused to endorse hiring more officers that year, a union official responded that the mayor should have no authority over the police department at all because “he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t give a damn.” The union leader at the time, Gary Hankins, argued, “If you set out to destroy the police department, you couldn’t do a more comprehensive job than the Barry administration has done.”³

Since Pemberton took the helm in 2020, the union’s long-simmering hostility toward home rule has intensified to a degree not seen since the 1980s. A detective since 2008, Pemberton was the lead investigator in the “J20” case, involving the mass arrest of over two hundred protesters on the day of Trump’s inauguration in 2017; most charges were dropped after the first defendants tried were acquitted, and the District’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel later alleged that Pemberton and the prosecutor had manipulated evidence. (Pemberton has not commented on the accusations, while the prosecutor, Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, has denied wrongdoing.) Soon after Pemberton took over the union, the national Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump for the second time.

This swing toward the MAGA right was soon accompanied by an escalation of the union’s showdown with the local government. The catalyst was not only the police-reform bill but also an effort to clarify and modernize the city’s penal code that passed around the same time, which eliminated most mandatory minimum sentences, among other measures. Pemberton—in alliance with James Comer, a MAGA Republican from Kentucky who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform—launched a scorched-earth campaign to overturn the two legislative initiatives.

Crime was up, and Pemberton blamed the city council. Although the code revision process began long before the uprisings of 2020 and the pandemic-related crime spike, and the amended police-reform bill did not take full effect until 2023, the police union leader—via legal challenges, television ads, congressional testimony, and speeches to GOP powerbrokers—contended that the council had restrained cops and prosecutors exactly when tough measures were needed most. Pemberton caricatured the reforms as “pro-criminal” and derided the council for jumping on the post-2020 “bandwagon of anti-police rhetoric.” Conservative media took up the story, and the revision became a national symbol of how progressive elected officials were out of touch with reality.

Ultimately, the union and its lobbyists convinced enough members of Congress to block both sets of reforms, in a rare override of a council vote. Biden allowed the new criminal code to be undone, but he reinstated the policing reform by presidential veto on the third anniversary of George Floyd’s death. Pemberton resolved to continue the fight. In 2024 he told a local news station that the city council “has decided to act in favor of the activism, in favor of the criminals,” and to treat police like “garbage.”

3.

If Biden attempted to treat the D.C. policing reform as a kind of bookend to the 2020 protests, righting some historical wrongs, Pemberton and other vocal police union leaders seem to view the contemporary contretemps as a do-over of their own—a chance for the police and the Trump coalition alike to banish the spectacle of their former defeat and roll back the changes wrought by reformists (modest though they may be compared to the protest movement’s erstwhile demands). In D.C., Trump’s actions strengthened the police union’s hand in its fight not only with the city council but also with the department’s leadership. Pemberton had been at loggerheads with the police chief, Pamela A. Smith, since she assumed the role in 2023. (The first black woman confirmed in the post, she joined the department as an outsider, having previously led the US Park Police.) Smith was focused on numbers, particularly homicides, and she pushed the force to deploy resources to the “hot spots” where crime was predicted to occur; police unions have long bristled at the way such data-driven operations change the quality of their members’ work. The chief wasn’t popular among the rank and file: officers claimed she was imperious, humiliating ineffective subordinates and retaliating with unjustified disciplinary measures. But crime dropped dramatically on her watch. In January 2025 the US attorney touted the fact that violent crime in the District had hit a thirty-year low.

This undermined Pemberton’s argument that the mayor, the city council, and the chief of police were presiding over a city in crisis. How could crime rates fall when the department was short eight hundred officers?  He responded with an extreme measure, even for a union at war with the brass: running to the media with claims that the evidence of a decline was unreliable. In press interviews, Pemberton accused commanding officers of forcing their underlings to reclassify felonies as lesser offenses, trying to make serious crime disappear by sleight of hand. In reality, most any police department can sometimes be found taking advantage of interpretive leeway under pressure to keep crime low; Smith vehemently denied that she had done anything improper. But Pemberton’s claims were soon picked up by lawmakers, and ultimately by Trump, who demanded on Truth Social that the mayor cease “giving false and highly inaccurate crime figures.” In August US Attorney for the District Jeanine Pirro, formerly one of Trump’s most ardent advocates on Fox News, announced an investigation into the Metropolitan Police Department focused on manipulation of statistics, and Comer’s House Oversight Committee later launched its own investigation. Pemberton helped gather information for both probes, reviewing crime reports and interviewing officers across the District about the department’s practices; the union ultimately organized three dozen officers to volunteer records that, they suggested, showed crimes had been misclassified—though none amounted to proof of wrongdoing.

All of this fed Trump’s longstanding argument that crime was out of control in the District, ultimately helping to justify the federal invasion of the city. In late August, when Trump claimed that the federal takeover had sent crime rates “down like we wouldn’t believe,” the police union backed him up—claiming an 8 percent decline in the first week overall, with carjackings supposedly down a whopping 83 percent. Three weeks in, the union reported a 21 percent overall decline. Now the stats were suddenly ironclad. Unmentioned was the 8 percent year-over-year decline that had been reported the month prior to the takeover—suggesting that if crime had indeed gone down during the invasion, it may have been following an established trend.

The takeover of D.C. formally concluded in the second week of September, but on the streets of the city little changed. ICE has continued to make arrests. National Guard soldiers continue to patrol the District; over 2,500 were still deployed in mid-December. Although Bowser had claimed that city police would cease cooperating with ICE once the takeover ended, collaboration has continued.

In December, presumably concluding that her position was untenable, Smith announced her retirement. Both Pirro and Comer publicized findings that same month. The Justice Department called the crime statistics “likely unreliable and inaccurate,” while the Oversight Committee’s interim report quoted officers praising Trump’s federal takeover and criticizing the “extreme” pressure from the top to keep crime down.

For his part, Pemberton has continued to broadcast the message that the takeover helped the forces of order regain control of the city—and to intimate that the only way to make the drop in crime durable is to override the city council, which has “prioritize[d] the protection of criminals.” His union lauded the efforts of some of the most zealous right-wingers in the House to introduce a bill restoring the collective bargaining abilities concerning discipline that the 2022 reform measure eliminated; it passed in June, after an endorsement from the national Fraternal Order of Police, but has yet to advance further. In September a new bill, the Common-Sense Law Enforcement and Accountability Now (CLEAN) in D.C. Act, proposed even wider-ranging rollbacks of the District’s criminal-justice reforms. Pemberton testified that the bill, introduced in the Senate by Ted Cruz, would undo the reforms’ “attack” on the police. Republicans echoed his line, excoriating the “radical liberals on the D.C. Council” (Sen. John Cornyn) for their “reckless” (Sen. Katie Britt) and “severely misguided” (Rep. Andrew Clyde) approach to policing. Comer held an oversight hearing grilling Bowser, the chair of the city council, and the attorney general about the “radical, left-wing policies of the D.C. Council” and the resulting “crime crisis.”

With the pendulum threatening to swing away from local control, D.C. officials have not remained entirely defiant: soon after the emergency ended, the city council quietly passed a 13 percent raise for cops. Pemberton called it “a start.”

4.

Elsewhere in the country, the response of city police to Trump’s surge has been uneven. But Pemberton’s is far from the only union to respond to the takeovers by targeting progressive critics and trying to gain the upper hand in local battles. When Trump deployed federal agents to “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion” in June, the city’s police union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, maneuvered to aid the administration’s assault on Democrats, not unlike its D.C. counterpart would in the months ahead. The LAPD itself was careful to assert that city police officers were not participating in immigration enforcement—even as it performed crowd control during ICE operations and declared an “unlawful assembly” to force protesters who had massed outside the federal courthouse to disperse from downtown. Meanwhile, the Police Protective League blasted officials who refrained from using the word “riot” to describe the protests, including prominent Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The union also attacked Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who represents south-central Los Angeles, for having her “head in the sand” when she said at a press conference that she hadn’t witnessed any violence on the streets. It targeted local officials as well, echoing the DHS social media team by demanding the resignation and even possible prosecution of a vice-mayor in a Latinx enclave who called ICE “the biggest gang there is.”

The union’s rhetoric was pitched to a national audience, but its demands remained local. Since well before the takeover, its leaders had been pushing the city government for additional hires, as well as for overtime pay guarantees. They faced a difficult fight in upcoming contract negotiations; the city council includes progressives and democratic socialists who have advanced a critique of policing and incarceration. The federal intervention tilted the balance of power. As ICE induced chaos, Bass and other Democratic elected officials decried the raids but relied on and praised city police; residents accused the mayor of dismissing reports of police misconduct during the takeover. In September, Bass—who will be up for reelection and is facing low approval ratings for her responses to the January 2025 wildfires, as well as ongoing affordability issues—quietly greenlit a streamlined officer hiring process to facilitate the growth of the LAPD. By granting a union wish, she may have quieted one critical voice during the upcoming campaign.

Chicago-area officers, meanwhile, have found themselves caught between federal agents and local residents. In Broadview, where protesters consistently mobilized outside an ICE facility, local police were themselves teargassed by federal agents when they tried to hold a line and keep the crowd contained. The small town’s chief of police, Thomas Mills, accused ICE of monopolizing his department’s limited resources, including through false emergency calls.⁴

In contrast, the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police lodge’s president, John Catanzara, used the ICE operations to criticize the police department’s leadership. He denounced them especially vigorously after police did not intervene in a wild incident on October 4, in which a Border Patrol agent shot a woman after colliding with her vehicle, then sought backup when a crowd gathered; the lodge responded with a vote of no confidence in the chief of patrol, accusing him of telling his underlings to “stand down.” (The police department denied this, noting in an official statement that Chicago police engaged in crowd and traffic control.) As in other cities, the federal invasion had heightened existing tensions, pushing the union’s long-running feud with the top brass back to the fore.

Meanwhile the administration had concluded a “blitz” that amounted to state terrorism. Unfocused and blunt, shocking and terrifying, the operation was spectacle. Its premise, according to Trump, was to deport the “worst of the worst.” Instead it nabbed people with no criminal record, subjecting them to detention that likely violates a court order prohibiting warrantless arrest without probable cause. Of 614 individuals detained in Chicagoland by mid-November, DHS determined that only sixteen posed a “high public safety risk” if released.

Perhaps nowhere has the partnership between local police and the White House been more explicit than in the case of the “Memphis Safe Task Force.” This operation deployed federal law enforcement officers and National Guard personnel to supplement the city’s police department, which has been in a tailspin since officers beat Tyre Nichols to death during a 2023 traffic stop, leading to a slew of legal charges and firings. The police union, the Memphis Police Association—which is locked in litigation with the city over the local government’s alleged violations of negotiated contracts—has been complaining that the department is short five hundred officers. Inaugurating the new task force in October, Stephen Miller explained to gathered police that they were now “unleashed,” and would be provided with “a level of support you cannot even imagine.” Mother Jones recently reported that “local cops are chauffeuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers around town, leaving many immigrant families afraid to leave their homes.” Residents have taken to calling the task force “the occupation.”

Meanwhile the administration again took its show on the road, to New Orleans, Columbus, and Charlotte—where eighty-one people were arrested on the first day of the federal invasion—and to Minneapolis. Even before the killing of George Floyd, the Minneapolis police union had been a trendsetter in seeking a MAGA alliance. When Mayor Jacob Frey banned off-duty city police from appearing in uniform at political events in 2019, the firebrand union president at the time, Bob Kroll, responded by strolling on stage with the president at a rally wearing a “Cops for Trump” shirt, which the union then sold for $20 a pop. The union has so far stayed mum throughout the occupation, but the president of its counterpart in St. Paul has argued that Good and Pretti might not have been killed if local police were permitted to accompany DHS officers and control crowds: “Had we been allowed just a little bit of coordination…I believe, had we been able to do that, that there would be no loss of life at this point.” Meanwhile, in a move reminiscent of the Los Angeles union, two statewide police associations in Minnesota have condemnedofficials who have “vilified” ICE.

*

The federal invasions, and the support they have received among police unions, illustrate a broader fact about the country’s current political reality. In a reversal of Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum, today no politics are local. Polarization and gridlock in Congress have pushed national battles—over the place of religion, the status of gender and sexuality, gun control, and the environment, among other contentious issues—into the arena of state and even local politics, as political scientists like Jacob Grumbach have lamented. In the past several decades, particularly since the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, major donors, political action committees, and other special interest groups have coordinated across the country to dump huge amounts of money on elections for things like school boards and judgeships, disrupting local democracy, heightening polarization, and creating stark policy disparities between red and blue states. Ultimately, as Grumbach shows, the consequences are “democratic backsliding”: gerrymandering, repression of protest, and voter suppression.⁵

Police unions don’t have the deep pockets of the political action committees now bending the country’s politics to their will—but their playbook also increasingly involves amplifying local stories to serve national agendas. For instance, after the incident in Chicago when police supposedly failed to respond to a plea for help from ICE, the national and Illinois state lodges of the Fraternal Order of Police issued a joint statement of condemnation even before the city lodge reacted. The city police union was fighting a highly local battle with commanders in the department; the national and state lodges, meanwhile, evidently saw an opportunity to leverage the incident as part of their account of how local officials and even police commanders have caved to progressive pressure and sanctioned lawlessness.

Ultimately, conflating local and national concerns has the effect of elevating the MAGA narrative, pushing cops as a whole to reject local control and embrace Trump’s agenda, particularly to undermine sanctuary policies. Over the past year the president and his most trusted allies have gone a long way toward transforming ICE and CBP into their own personal police force, wholly unaccountable to Congress or the broader public. But perhaps the more lasting transformation will be Trump’s intense and partisan politicization of the country’s local police forces.

Even as police unions defy city governments, the federal operations scramble the distinction between civilian law enforcement and the military. With National Guard troops deployed alongside ICE and Border Patrol, who are themselves deployed alongside city police, it can be difficult to know which forces are responsible for what—which in turn makes it impossible for observers to know what is going on, and where to turn for aid and accountability. Visually Border Patrol and ICE agents resemble soldiers, carrying rifles and wearing tactical gear, camo or black clothes, gaiters, and boots. Some mix uniforms with skinny jeans and Under Armour athletic wear. These haphazard assemblages are versions of the “operator aesthetic,” a look drawn from military special forces and adopted by border militias and other extremist paramilitary groups. Even if called upon only for crowd control, local police are joining the operations in their own militaristic tactical gear, ready for riots or worse. Face masks both further this aesthetic blurring and tacitly acknowledge that this moment won’t last forever; there remains a slim chance that those committing this unpopular violence will be held responsible someday.

None of these developments is quite new. Police have long held disproportionate power in cities, and the continuum between them and the military has been narrowing for decades.⁶ Since Trump was first elected in 2016, liberals warning about creeping fascism have tended to focus on how he and his confederates are reshaping the federal government. Yet the country’s extant bases of authoritarianism have been hiding in plain sight: the jail, the prison, the police stop, the police union. Even as Trump’s administration embraces authoritarianism from above, in recent months it has also been steadily strengthening these sources of authoritarianism from below.  

This may appear to be a novel configuration on the home front, but it has antecedents abroad, where the United States has often delegated its overthrow of democracy to local proxies. During a recent trip to the borderlands of Arizona, I heard an activist and translator from Guatemala explain that, for many of the Indigenous Central Americans he meets these days, the masked federal agents kidnapping their neighbors, friends, and relatives look terrifyingly familiar. They are practically indistinguishable, he said, from the armed men that pushed many of them to flee for the United States in the first place—masked, shadowy “escuadrones de la muerte.”