National Guard Members on Their D.C. Deployment: Hey, This Sucks!

National Guard members are speaking out about their feelings of humiliation and frustration being involved in Donald Trump’s yearlong federal takeover of Washington D.C.

National Public Radio spoke with three National Guard members who were deployed for many months as part of the so-called “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force”—and surprise, surprise, they hated it.

“I will say very frankly that the bad taste that this mission left in my mouth, it actually embarrasses me to be involved in any way,” one guard member told NPR.

“I don’t want to think about the National Guard. I don’t want to necessarily discuss my affiliation with the National Guard. I don’t want to fulfill my normal National Guard duties just because of the abuses of the National Guard in this D.C. mission,” the guard member added.

After being summoned to address a so-called “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital, the National Guard was quickly looped in on trash pickup and other landscaping duties on the National Mall. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that all three National Guard members expressed skepticism about the reason they were deployed.

“Now, with it being a year, it’s hard to feel like that justification holds any water,” said another guard member. “It feels like the guard is being exploited in a sense.”

One of the guard members criticized Trump’s federal takeover as feeling like a “very authoritarian move.”

Another one of the guardsmen said that their deployment felt like a political stunt, and pointed to the organization’s insertion in Trump’s false narratives about the city. Last month, the National Guard was ordered to patrol the perimeter of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after the president falsely claimed that it had been targeted by vandals.

“I hope that there will be some accounting someday—probably after President Trump is gone—about why we were there, and was it worth it? But none of that is gonna happen right now,” that member said.

The Trump administration has continued to lie about lowering the crime rates in the District of Columbia. Last month, the White House claimed that Washington D.C. had seen one of the steepest homicide drops of any city nationwide in the first six months of the year—but multiple reports have found that’s not true at all.

Last month, the Center for American Progress found that Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to American cities has cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion and failed to reduce the rate of violent crime. The Trump administration has responded by suing the organization for defamation.

A federal judge filed a temporary restraining order requiring an informant’s immediate return to the United States after he was deported three times—even after he willingly advised the Justice Department on Mexican cartel activity.

The informant, referred to as John Doe, provided “substantial assistance to the Department of Justice … against defendants affiliated with Mexican drug cartels” in 2024, placing his own life on the line for the U.S. government, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher wrote. And yet last month, with no prior notice, the Department of Homeland Security deported him to Guatemala before turning him over to Mexican officials—even though a judge ruled over two years ago that he was “more likely than not to be tortured by the government or by individuals acting with the acquiescence of the government if he were returned to Mexico.”

Guatemala refused to accept him as he wasn’t a Guatemalan official, and Mexican officials at the embassy there refused to accept him after learning he had received protection under the Convention Against Torture. Doe was sent back to Texas and shuffled between different holding facilities until DHS tried to send him directly to Mexico around July 15. Mexico again refused. Finally, on August 1, DHS successfully deported Doe back to Mexico, where he has been since—hiding for his life out of fear that “the cartels that he provided information against will find him and torture or kill him before he can return to the United States,” Gallagher noted.

To deport a man risking deadly retribution after helping the U.S. government fight cartels—something the Trump administration claims is a massive priority—is absolutely cruel and unusual.

“A man put himself at enormous risk to turn on the cartels and testify against them, making him a target for a hideous death if they ever got their hands on him. As a result, he got protection under the Convention Against Torture,” American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X. “The Trump admin deported him to Mexico anyway.”

Gallagher, a Trump appointee, expressed a similar sentiment in her TRO.

“The record clearly demonstrates that there is an imminent danger of irreparable harm, in the form of potential torture or even death, if Doe is not immediately returned to the United States.... Doe was sent [to] a region of Mexico where there is active cartel activity, without any of his money or personal belongings, reliant on the help of strangers while attempting to remain in hiding,” she wrote. “The Court thus finds that the irreparable harm factor overwhelmingly supports the immediate necessity of ordering Doe’s return to the United States.”

Actor Mark Ruffalo fired back Sunday against accusations of antisemitism over his criticisms of Paramount Skydance’s planned merger with Warner Bros., calling the attacks “appalling and fundamentally dishonest.”

In a statement posted to social media, Ruffalo referenced Paramount CEO David Ellison and his father, Larry, the co-founder of the tech company Oracle.

“This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary,” Ruffalo warned.

Ruffalo made the statement after he shared an Instagram post on Friday from the BDS Movement, which advocates boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel and any companies that profit from its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The post showed former Oracle CEO Safra Catz explaining that the Israeli military runs its occupation with the help of “really profoundly scary technology at Oracle.”

According to NBC News, Ruffalo’s story post said, “These ‘really profoundly scary technologies’ will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you. Look how [Catz] revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”

Ruffalo also made a call to action for his followers to oppose the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger because it would increase cable costs and reduce competition, which would be “catastrophic for our film industry.”

On Friday evening, a Paramount spokesperson said in a statement that the company is “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute,” adding that “words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong—they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.”

Ruffalo rejected those attacks, saying, “Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel.

“To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life,” Ruffalo added.

Ruffalo has a history of political activism, supporting environmental causes including opposing fossil fuel extraction, supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia, protesting against President Trump, and standing up for Palestine, which he said in an interview last year has cost him friends.

“I can’t talk to them anymore. They’re either trying to convince me that the Palestinian people are all terrorists and they all deserve to die, or, in the same breath, will tell me that they’re actually human shields and they deserve to die because they’re human shields,” Ruffalo said to Mehdi Hasan in November.

Trade talks with Canada collapsed over the weekend after the Trump administration demanded the country curtail its culture. But one interesting wrinkle is that the Trump administration’s intransigence has potentially, if only temporarily, healed a rift between the French-speaking Quebecois and their English-speaking neighbors.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended the talks on Friday, triggering President Trump’s 50 percent tariff rate on roughly $28 billion in Canadian exports. Carney has promised to match the tariffs “dollar for dollar.”

In a powerful speech delivered the following day, Carney referred to the United States as untrustworthy and unreliable, informing the Canadian public that the country would need to forge a more independent future without the U.S.

“We cannot control the storm blowing in from Washington,” Carney said. “We can chart a new course by building Canada strong at home and diversifying our trading relationships abroad.”

The “new U.S. tariffs are designed to hurt us and divide us,” Carney continued. “They’re a miscalculation.”

Canada’s reciprocal tariffs against goods and services from the U.S. are expected to begin September 8.

The two nations had spent months drafting a suitable trade agreement—talks that, according to Trump, were fruitful. Last Tuesday, Trump told reporters that the countries had reached a deal and were fine-tuning some details. On Friday, hours before the midnight deadline, Trump still insisted that he believed a deal could be reached.

Canadian officials did not paint the same picture. Premier Christine Fréchette told reporters Saturday that the U.S. had demanded last-minute concessions relating to Quebec’s French-language protections. “A red line,” she noted.

“Our culture, our language, is central to our identity, and it is important to exclude that from the negotiating table,” Fréchette said, according to The Montreal Gazette. “Even though we are threatened with different tariffs, it won’t change. We will stay the way we are.”

Carney similarly said that the U.S. had “asked too much.”

The Trump administration has singled out two Canadian laws as pressure points in the negotiations: Bill 96, an act that identifies French as the official language of Quebec, as well as Bill 109, which affirms the cultural sovereignty of the region and grants it the ability to set French-language quotas for French-language content (which it has not yet done). The two laws were passed in 2022 and 2025, respectively.

American officials have claimed that the laws have placed an undue burden on U.S. manufacturers, requiring them to produce packaging, controls, and instruction manuals in French in order to sell products in Quebec. Some of America’s biggest streaming companies—including Netflix, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify—have also argued against the laws, contending that there are practical issues relating to the theoretical implementation of language quotas in their databases.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a statement that “this is a missed opportunity for Canada to partner with the United States,” adding that the offer would have given Canada “the best treatment of any major exporter to our market.”

In response to this weekend’s trade talks, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the leader of the currently out-of-power Parti Québécois, said that any future referendum on Quebec’s independence would be delayed until Trump leaves the White House. “This unpredictability of the American administration will harm our process as well as the quality of the debate on our future as a nation,” he said.

There are currently no scheduled meetings to continue talks between the two countries, according to a senior Trump official.

A Florida father was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol while his son serves on the now infamous USS Lincoln in the Persian Gulf.

Luis Manuel Aviles, a 19-year U.S. resident with a work permit, was detained by Border Patrol agents outside of his Key West home on Saturday. Originally from Nicaragua, Aviles was working as a handyman when he was detained.

“Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, claiming that it “does not pick and choose which laws to enforce.”

Aviles’s son Joshua expressed devastation and “heartbreak” as he heard the news aboard the Lincoln.

“I’ve been deployed for over nine months, out at sea in the Middle East aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, fighting for a country that has given me everything. I just got a call that my dad was taken by ICE,” he wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday. “My dad has his driver’s license, Social Security card, and work permit. We have done everything through immigration to get his green card approved, and we are just waiting.

“This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly being treated like a criminal,” he continued. “My dad’s only ‘crime’ was coming to this country to give my siblings and me a better life.”

The USS Lincoln—which has been out at sea for over 270 days, a record—has reportedly suffered from food shortages and sanitation issues. There have also been multiple instances in which sailors tried to jump overboard. On top of all of that, Aviles is now forced to spend the remainder of his time on the ship tortured by the thought of his father’s detainment and potential deportation—as he may not even get to see him after hundreds of days in the Persian Gulf.