The Guardline
The Trump administration has deployed roughly 35,000 federal troops within the United States this year, according to exclusive figures provided to The Intercept by official military sources. That marks a 75 percent increase on the previous count offered by The Intercept in July.
These occupation forces, drawn from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and National Guard, have been operating under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.
The true number of federal troops deployed may be markedly higher. When asked directly, Northern Command, which oversees military operations in North America, said it has no running tally of how many troops have operated under Title 10. The Office of the Secretary of War has, for weeks, dodged questions about the total number, refusing to say if they even know it themselves. The increase of 15,000 troops since July could reflect better accounting, as opposed to a marked spike in Title 10 deployments over the last two months, but it’s impossible to know for certain due to efforts by the Department of War to conceal basic information about the forces.
Trump “has forced 35,000 troops into a role they did not sign up for: intimidating their own communities.”
Experts say that the increasing use of military troops in the interior of the U.S. represents an extraordinary violation of Posse Comitatus, a bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal military forces to execute domestic law enforcement that is seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America. The deployments continue to nudge the United States closer to a genuine police state.
“The Trump administration has forced 35,000 troops into a role they did not sign up for: intimidating their own communities as pawns in Trump’s authoritarian power grab,” Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, told The Intercept. “The scale of the abuse of both our communities and troops who signed up to defend the Constitution and now are routinely being ordered to violate it is breathtaking.”
The financial expense may also be astronomical. These deployments could already have cost hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. The actual number is unknown because the Pentagon is engaged in a coordinated cover-up of the costs.
“It’s impossible to know exactly how much the rapidly expanding police state is costing taxpayers,” Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, told The Intercept. “The aptly renamed Department of War refuses to publicly disclose the total number of troops deployed on U.S. streets, or the costs of the National Guard’s participation in the illegal, ineffective, and inhumane mass deportation agenda.”
Some 23,866 federalized Army National Guard troops have been deployed within the United States since January 20, 2025, according to exclusive statistics provided to The Intercept by the National Guard Bureau Press Office.
Some of these National Guards members are part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing military occupation of Los Angeles. In June, Trump deployed troops to LA to put down protests against his administration’s immigration raids. The number of troops crested at around 5,500 but has since shrunk to around 300. In addition to the Guard members, Trump sent in 700 Marines, who were later replaced by a contingent of 400 additional Marines.
More than 10,000 troops are deploying or have already deployed to support the mission to secure the southern border, according to Northern Command, bolstering the approximately 2,500 service members who were already assisting Customs and Border Protection’s border security mission when Trump took office. Of these forces, around 8,500 or more have been active-duty troops from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines — operating under Title 10 authorities — according to a NORTHCOM spokesperson.
Around 1,200 members of the Marine Corps and Naval Reserve also provided clerical support at Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities earlier this year while serving under Title 10 status. In July, these troops were transferred to Title 32 status, according to chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, meaning they reverted to the control of their state’s governor, although their duty is federally funded and regulated.
In addition to these almost 35,000 Title 10 forces, other National Guard members are serving under state control. National Guard forces deployed to Washington, D.C., as part of Trump’s federal takeover of the district last month are operating under Title 32 status. With no governor to report to, the D.C. National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general, to the secretary of the Army, to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, to the president.
This month, Trump has repeatedly announced the deployment of troops to Memphis, Tennessee. During a phone interview that aired on Memphis radio station KWAM in August, Trump said the occupation of Washington was a template. “We’re doing sort of a test right now in D.C., it’s working unbelievably,” Trump said. “We’ve arrested hundreds of criminals, hard-line criminals, people that will never be any good.” National Guard troops there have been seen doing custodial work, including picking up 500 bags’ worth of trash, removing graffiti, and raking leaves around the capital.
“WE’RE COMING, and when we do that, as we did in now VERY SAFE WASHINGTON, D.C., the no crime “miracle” begins. ONLY I CAN SAVE THEM!!!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday in regard to a National Guard deployment in Memphis.
“The Soldiers and Airmen of the Tennessee National Guard always stand ready to support the citizens of our state and nation,” a spokesperson for the Tennessee National Guard told The Intercept by email. “Planning is underway for a strategic mission to address crime in Memphis, and we will continue to coordinate with our state and federal partners to determine the most effective path forward.”
The spokesperson did not provide estimates of the number of troops that would take part in the occupation and could not say for certain whether the troops would be deployed under Title 10 or Title 32 status. “Once things are finalized, that information will be available,” she said in an email. “No guardsmen have been deployed to Memphis during this planning stage.”
Trump has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, New Orleans, Oakland, and Saint Louis.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled earlier this month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers as law enforcement officers in colonial America. He warned that Trump intends to transform the National Guard into a presidential police force.
“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced,” is how Breyer began a 52-page ruling that found Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles was illegal. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
Breyer ruled that the Pentagon systematically used armed soldiers to perform police functions in California in violation of Posse Comitatus and planned to do so elsewhere. “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth,” he wrote, “have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country … thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country,” said Hina Shamsi, director of American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “President Trump may want to normalize armed forces in our cities, but no matter what uniform they wear, federal agents and military troops are bound by the Constitution and have to respect our rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, and due process. State and local leaders must stay strong and take all lawful measures to protect residents against this cruel intimidation tactic.”
Trump’s troop deployment in Washington is already estimated to have a price tag of more than $1 million per day, based on the reported deployment of around 2,100 Guard members to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser opened the door for federal forces to continue policing the district indefinitely, which could push costs into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
Homestead estimates that if Trump deployed National Guard members to Chicago — as he has repeatedly threatened to do — a force of just 3,000 troops would cost around $1,590,000 per day.
In June, the estimated cost of deploying the first 2,000 Guard members and 700 Marines to Los Angeles was $134 million, according to the Pentagon’s acting comptroller/CFO, Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell.
In mid-July, a Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept that he would provide an updated estimate of the total in a matter of days. He then went silent, and Department of War press secretary Kingsley Wilson stepped in and refused to offer an update. “Nothing additional for you at this time,” she told The Intercept, after offering nothing. She provided a similar response when asked for the total cost of all Title 10 deployments.
“Congress continues to provide a blank check to the military to make our streets look like war zones.”
While the costs associated with these troops are being kept secret, they are expected to skyrocket. Sec. 20011 of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act appropriates $1 billion, available through September 30, 2029, “for the deployment of military personnel in support of border operations, operations and maintenance activities in support of border operations, counter-narcotics and counter-transnational criminal organization mission support, the operation of national defense areas and construction in national defense areas, and the temporary detention of migrants on Department of Defense installations.”
“Congress continues to provide a blank check to the military to make our streets look like war zones,” said Homestead. “There is not a single measure of wellbeing that has not declined in the U.S. over the last three decades as the Pentagon budget has increased.”
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the potential cost of domestic troop deployments running into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
