On September 9, 2025, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced a new measure in the ongoing national debate over immigration enforcement: up to 40 Arkansas National Guard personnel will be deployed to assist federal immigration officials within the state. The move, which Sanders described as a partnership with the Trump Administration, signals a deepening alliance between state and federal authorities on immigration, and has reignited conversations about the role of military personnel in domestic law enforcement.
According to a news release from the governor’s office, the Arkansas National Guard will provide administrative and logistical support to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they operate in Arkansas. The mission will see 27 airmen and 13 soldiers—funded by the federal government—helping with detainee transport, riding alongside ICE agents, processing detainees, and performing administrative duties. "Violent, criminal illegal immigrants have no place in Arkansas," Sanders stated in the release, underscoring her administration's alignment with President Trump’s efforts to tighten border security and enforce federal immigration law.
This is not the first time Arkansas has contributed National Guard resources to immigration enforcement. Last year, Sanders sent 40 guardsmen to Texas as part of a multi-state effort to bolster border security, a move that was met with both support and criticism across political lines. The current operation, however, is notable for its focus on in-state support, reflecting a broader trend of state-level involvement in federal immigration initiatives.
While Arkansas’s latest deployment has been celebrated by supporters as a necessary step to combat crime and support federal law, it has also sparked a wider legal and constitutional debate—one that extends well beyond the state’s borders. At the heart of this debate is the question of how, and under what circumstances, the National Guard can be used in domestic law enforcement roles, especially when state guards are deployed outside their home states or at the request of federal authorities.
Recent reports have highlighted President Trump’s consideration of a more controversial plan: sending units of the Texas National Guard to Chicago to carry out federal law enforcement missions. As reported by Politico, this proposal would see the Texas National Guard operating in Illinois, but crucially, they would remain under the command of the Texas governor rather than being federalized. This arrangement, enabled by a little-known provision of federal law that allows National Guard missions "at the request of the President or Secretary of Defense," is designed to keep the troops under state—not federal—control, even while they operate far from home.
From the administration’s perspective, this legal maneuver could serve multiple purposes. It allows the president to take action in a city often at odds with his policies (in this case, Chicago), while sidestepping the political and legal risks that come with directly ordering federal troops into a domestic law enforcement scenario. By keeping the Texas National Guard under state command, responsibility for any negative outcomes is diffused—falling more on the Texas governor than on the president himself.
But constitutional law experts are sounding the alarm. Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, argues that this strategy violates a core principle of American constitutional law: accountability. Primus points to the landmark 1819 Supreme Court case McCulloch v. Maryland, which established that governmental power must be exercised by officials who are accountable to the people affected by their actions. In that case, the Court struck down a Maryland tax on the federally chartered Bank of the United States, reasoning that Maryland’s legislature could not impose costs on people who had no say in electing them.
"The citizens who bear the burdens of governmental action must be able to hold the relevant government accountable," Primus explains, referencing the logic of McCulloch. The analogy is clear: just as Maryland could not tax the entire nation through the Bank, Texas should not be able to exercise military power over Chicagoans who have no mechanism for holding Texas officials accountable. "Any military force is likely to behave with less restraint toward a population to which its leaders are not responsible than toward a population to which its leaders must answer democratically," Primus warns. "The governor of Texas never appears on any ballot in Illinois. He has nothing to fear, politically, from the people his National Guard will police."
This issue of accountability is not just academic. The use of military personnel for routine civilian law enforcement is fraught with risks, both practical and constitutional. The possibility of abuse of power looms large, especially when troops are not answerable to the communities in which they operate. Critics argue that such deployments undermine the foundational American value that those who govern must be accountable to the governed—a principle that traces its roots back to the earliest days of the republic and the rallying cry of "taxation without representation is tyranny."
Supporters of the Trump Administration’s approach, however, see things differently. They argue that the crisis at the border and the challenges of enforcing immigration law require robust, coordinated action between federal and state authorities. For them, the deployment of National Guard troops—whether in support roles within their own state, as in Arkansas, or in more direct law enforcement capacities across state lines, as proposed for Texas—is a necessary response to what they view as a failure of existing systems to keep communities safe.
Yet, as Primus and other constitutional scholars point out, the distinction between supporting federal agencies within one’s own state and policing another state’s citizens is not just a matter of degree, but of constitutional principle. The deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., for example, is treated differently under the law because D.C. is governed by Congress, not by locally elected officials. The people of D.C. may lack representation in Congress, but the city is constitutionally distinct from the fifty states. In contrast, Illinoisans are entitled to be governed by officials they can hold accountable. Sending Texas troops to police Chicago, critics argue, would upend this balance.
Meanwhile, in Arkansas, the debate is less about out-of-state deployments and more about the proper role of the National Guard in supporting federal immigration enforcement at home. Sanders’s administration has made clear that the guardsmen’s duties will be largely logistical and administrative, rather than direct law enforcement. Still, the symbolism of the move—and its timing, amid renewed national conversations about the militarization of immigration enforcement—has not gone unnoticed.
As the Trump Administration continues to push for tougher immigration enforcement measures, and as states like Arkansas step up their cooperation, the constitutional questions raised by these deployments are likely to grow more pressing. The tension between state-federal collaboration, local accountability, and the risks of militarizing domestic law enforcement is not easily resolved. For now, the debate continues, with Arkansas’s guardsmen preparing to take up their new roles, and the nation watching closely to see what comes next.
In a moment when the lines between state and federal authority, military and civilian roles, and accountability and power are being redrawn, the choices made in Arkansas—and the debates unfolding in Chicago—may well shape the future of American law enforcement far beyond 2025.
