President Donald Trump suggested on Wednesday that he may prioritize the deployment of federal troops to New Orleans, Louisiana.
During an appearance in the Oval Office to meet Polish President Karol Nawrocki, President Trump said his administration would decide which state to focus its law enforcement efforts on.
"We are making a determination now: Do we go to Chicago? Or 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 has become quite – quite tough, quite bad?" President Trump said.
"You have New Orleans, which has a crime problem. We’ll straighten that out in two weeks, easier than D.C.," he said.
The discussion is a pivot from comments President Trump made earlier in the week, in which he suggested he would send National Guard troops to Chicago, Illinois — potentially without the consent of Illinois' Democratic government.
The president on Tuesday called Chicago a "hellhole" and said crime rates in that city justified a federal intervention.
"There's no place, there's no place in the world — including, you can go to Afghanistan — you can go to places that you wouldn't think of. They don't even come close to this," President Trump said of Chicago.
That proposal drew immediate backlash from Illinois' Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who on Tuesday called the plan "unhinged" and made clear that he would not request such federal assistance.
"When did we become a country where it's okay for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything," Pritzker said. "Especially something we don't want. Have we truly lost sense of sanity in this nation that we treat this as normal?"
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Multiple Republican-governed states have sent National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in the last month, to support President Trump's crackdown on crime and homelessness in the city.
Mississippi's Republican Gov. Tate Reeves announced the state would send 200 of its National Guard troops.
Louisiana's Republican Gov. Jeff Landry announced he had approved the deployment of about 135 National Guard members to D.C.
States including Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina planned to send more National Guard troops to D.C. at the Trump administration's request.
