A senior military leader told lawmakers that he had not been given orders to target “the enemy within,” a reference to language President Donald Trump used earlier this year.
Gen. Gregory Guillot, commander of U.S. Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee he has “not been tasked to do anything” against whom Trump described in a late September address to senior military officers as “the enemy within.”
He appeared in front of the committee on Thursday for a hearing on the president’s deployment of the National Guard to several U.S. cities, including Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Memphis, Tennessee.
Guillot, who was in the audience for Trump’s speech, was asked about the president’s previous remarks multiple times.
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“The president essentially indicated that you should be prepared to conduct military operations in the United States against this enemy within,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Thursday. “Are you doing that?”
“Sir, I have not been tasked to do anything that reflects what you just said,” Guillot said, adding that he does “not have any indication of an enemy within.”
Trump, in his address to hundreds of senior military officers at Quantico on Sept. 30, said he told Secretary of War Pete Hegseth that the military “should use some of these dangerous cities [in the U.S.] as training grounds for our military, National Guard.”
Republicans blame crime on Democratic policies
Republicans largely defended the administration’s National Guard deployments, arguing that they are only necessary because local officials have not done their job keeping the public safe, whereas Democrats view the deployments as an abuse of power by the president.
“In recent years, violent crime, rioting, drug trafficking, and heinous gang activity have steadily escalated,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said. The deployments, he added, are “not only appropriate, but essential.”
“It would not be necessary [if] state and local officials were helping get criminal illegal aliens and violent repeat offenders off the streets, [but] the problem had metastasized, and President Trump needed to step in,” Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) said.
Democrats cite cost, legal concerns
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) said during her allotted time that the various deployments have cost the military $340 million to date.
“Trump is forcing our military men and women to make a horrible choice: uphold their loyalty to the Constitution and protect peaceful protesters, or execute questionable orders from the president,” Duckworth, a combat veteran who served in the Illinois National Guard, added.
Democrats questioned the legality of Trump’s National Guard deployments as well as what could come in the future, given that the president signed an executive order in August that called for the creation of a “quick reaction force” made up of National Guard troops available for “rapid nationwide deployment.”
The subject of the legality of orders given to U.S. troops has been a widely discussed topic on Capitol Hill in recent weeks after a handful of lawmakers, including two members of the armed services committee who were part of the hearing, shared a video warning service members not to follow illegal orders. The video sparked outrage among Republicans and the administration, who argued they were subtly trying to undermine their agenda, even though they were accurately stating U.S. law.
Hegseth ordered a Navy review into Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), the only one of the six Democrats who participated in the video who is still required to abide by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The results have not been reported, but Hegseth directed Secretary of the Navy John Phelan to brief him on the findings of the review by Wednesday, Dec. 10.
Many of the lawmakers in the hearing expressed their condolences to the family of Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, who was killed in a shooting in Washington while on duty, and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, who is still hospitalized following the same shooting. The two were allegedly shot by an Afghan national.
The shooting of the two National Guard members in late November reignited outrage toward the Biden administration’s effort to bring thousands of Afghan allies who worked alongside the U.S. military to the U.S. with limited vetting at the end of the war in Afghanistan in August 2021. The suspect in the shooting is Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who worked with the CIA in Afghanistan before he was among the thousands of Afghans brought to the U.S. He was approved for asylum in April under the Trump administration.
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In a separate hearing on Capitol Hill, National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent told lawmakers on the House Homeland Security Committee, “NCTC has identified around 18,000 known and suspected terrorists that the Biden administration let come into our country.”
Kent testified alongside Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who faced calls for her resignation from Democrats on the committee.
