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Dick Storey
This blue state governor sent the National Guard to her biggest city
No guns, no Humvees and no arrests. This deployment looks very different from the way Trump has used soldiers in places like D.C. or Los Angeles. And local police say it’s working.
September 26, 2025 at 6:30 am..Washington Post
ALBUQUERQUE — Halfway down a block roped off by crime scene tape, police officers investigated a midafternoon shooting in this city’s most violent neighborhood. Outside the flimsy barricade, two men idled in the desert heat inside a black SUV marked with a New Mexico seal.
They wore black polos and khaki pants. They carried no firearms. The pair looked, to any passerby, like private security.
But they were soldiers, New Mexico National Guard members 103 days into a mission to curb crime in a city with some of the nation’s highest homicide and auto theft rates. And they had been ordered to Albuquerque not by President Donald Trump, but by the Democratic governor of this deeply blue state.
Trump’s recent deployments of armed National Guard troops have sparked condemnation in Los Angeles, fear in Washington and apprehension in Memphis, where the president has ordered them to go next, though the date of the deployment remains uncertain. Critics call this use of the National Guard a dangerous militarization of law enforcement, one verging on martial law.
In New Mexico, however, city and state officials point to their guard’s mission as a stark contrast. The approximately 100 soldiers, most of them local residents, have no arrest powers, drive no Humvees and wear no fatigues. Instead, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and, officials say, glimmers of positive results. --> etc
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/09/26/new-mexico-national-guard-trump-crime/
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I lived in "QQ" for a decade after graduating from UNM. Scary place even then.
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