Gov. Healey: No reason for Trump to deploy the U.S. military to Massachusetts

Matthew Medsger, Boston Herald on Sep 3, 2025

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BOSTON — There is no conceivable reason for President Donald Trump to deploy U.S. military personnel to Massachusetts, according to Gov. Maura Healey.

Healey, speaking Wednesday to Bloomberg Television, said that the Trump administration’s threats to send troops to Democratic strongholds across the nation is especially baseless when it comes to the Bay State.

“There is no need to federalize the Massachusetts National Guard,” the governor said, before saying that people need to “focus on what’s actually going on.”

On Tuesday, a federal judge in California declared that the president’s use of active duty Marines and members of the National Guard as law enforcement agents was a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the federal government from using the military to enforce federal law.

The Trump administration lost that case, according to Healey, in part because there was no reason for the troops to be on the ground in Los Angeles in the first place.

“The emergency was not in L.A., that’s why Trump lost that case,” Healey said. “There are emergencies — there are real emergencies right now in our country that need to be addressed — emergencies that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to want to talk about, particularly the economy.”

Threats to send troops to Chicago and elsewhere, Healey said, are just attempts by the administration to distract from the things “that the president and the administration are not delivering on.”

Beyond that, policing the streets of the United States and the behavior of their fellow countrymen is not the task for which the National Guard was formed, nor is it the mission its members joined to support, according to the governor.

“To put the Guard on the streets in a way that they were never intended to be used — which is domestically against our own citizens — that’s not what the Guard is supposed to be doing. That is not the mission, nor do I think it is the mission that the good men and women of the Guard signed up for,” she said.

Trump on Wednesday indicated some measure of indecision on where he might next send the U.S. military against American civilians. The 47th president seemed to suggest it may be better to deploy troops to Louisiana, where he is less likely to encounter the sort of pushback he’s seen in recent days from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Trump said, “Do we go to Chicago? Do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad.”

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