Protesters gathered in front of Baltimore’s City Hall Wednesday evening to push back against President Donald Trump doubling down on his threats to send the National Guard into the city.
At the same time, Mayor Bradon Scott said he and Gov. Wes Moore are in talks about what kind of legal action they can take against the federal government if Trump does deploy troops.
The responses stem from a Tuesday press conference in which Trump said he’d like to send National Guard troops into Baltimore, claiming it would reduce crime.
Trump sent the National Guard into Washington D.C. in late August, along with other federal agencies like the FBI and ICE to crackdown on crime.
Baltimore residents fear they may be next and pulled together a protest overnight to make their voices heard.
“They want us to be scared and hiding in our houses and separated apart from each other, and that's why we're here to say ‘No,’” said Amy Lee, a media liaison for the Free State Coalition, which was involved in the protest. “Baltimore is not going to back down. We're not cowards. Throughout history, we have been a city that is resilient and stands on its feet and looks at injustice.”
Kyra McDonnell showed up at the protest because she felt the National Guard would add fear and terror to the city.
“We all see the stats in the news about how crime has been decreasing over the past 30 years here in Baltimore,” McDonnell said. “There are real strategies that are working. I don’t think the National Guard is going to solve anything that the city isn’t already solving for itself.”
Baltimore is at a record low for crimes and a fifty year low for homicides.
People at the protest claimed that Trump and others in power are targeting cities with large Black populations like Baltimore, Chicago and New Orleans.
Many also made connections to increased arrests and immigration raids and the growing prison industrial complex.
Mayor Brandon Scott said on WYPR’s Midday on Thursday that the city is preparing for how it will handle a possible deployment.
“We’ve done extensive planning and talking with obviously the Governor and the team at the state,” he said. “Depending on what happens, when it happens, if it happens, we’ve looked at what kind of legal actions we could take. We’ll just be prepared to do whatever we need to do in that moment.”
Scott criticized the deployments as a political tactic.
“If this was such a bright and wonderful idea - which it is not — why didn’t the President do this in his first term. When homicides and shootings and violence were significantly higher?” he said.
Trump previously claimed that a crackdown would help the crime issue. D.C. has seen some decrease in crime since the National Guard was deployed. In the two weeks prior there were 95 violent crimes, as opposed to 75 in the two weeks since the Guard came into the city.
However, there were also five sex crimes since the deployment and 0 the week before.
There are multiple larger factors to take into account — like where crime is being committed, if it's being reported, as well as a small sample size of time since the deployment that convolute whether the Guard is making a difference.
