Jaiden Booth has been keeping a close eye on viral videos in cities across the country where National Guard and immigration enforcement agents have been deployed, especially how people of color are being treated during immigration raids and protests.
Over the past few months, Booth, a St. Louis resident, said he has seen federal agents and unmarked vehicles in various immigrant communities around the city, which pushed him to start preparing to better support vulnerable people.
He came to a recent federal enforcement safety town hall in a St. Louis gym hosted by local activists and immigration lawyers to learn more about trainings to monitor ICE activity. Booth is opposed to immigration agents or National Guard members policing communities of color, because he said it does not make them safer.
Booth fears that the presence of troops and federal agents could set the stage for more negative interactions with Black Americans, including harassment or mistreatment. And this is also a concern for some Black police officials across the country.
Like in most American cities, crime is down in St. Louis. Over the past year, violent and property crimes decreased, and the city's homicide rate is the lowest it has been in years. There have been 123 murders in 2025 to date, compared to 224 in 2020, according to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. Even with crime trending downward, President Trump suggested in September that St. Louis needs help addressing crime.
"We've got to save these cities," Trump said during a recent interview in the Oval Office. "This isn't like, you know, we're gonna do something … We have to save St. Louis."
On Oct. 1, Missouri's Republican governor activated the state's National Guard to help ICE agents with clerical duties. St. Louis Public Radio reported that 15 guardsmen will help ICE with tasks such as data entry, logistical support and case management.
Neither the governor's office nor the state's National Guard responded to a request for an interview.
The aggressive push to send troops into Democratic-led cities and their communities of color drives a wedge between police and residents, said Donny Walters, president of Ethical Society of Police, St. Louis' Black police officers union.
"This type of heavy-handed tactic is pushing us backwards instead of bringing us closer together," Walters said. "What should be done from our federal government is they should be giving us resources to help our Black and brown communities [as] opposed to feeling like, 'Oh, we got to do more enforcement.'"
He is concerned that if federal agents or National Guardsmen mistreat Black St. Louisans or other communities of color, it will erode the trust Black police officers worked hard to build.
"Let's say they come in for six weeks, and whatever they are doing, however they are doing it, when they leave, we now are left with the fallout," he said. "We're now left with dealing with the community after the fact."
Some Black police officers say there are other ways to drive down crime, and that interventions should be led by city leaders and social service organizations.
"No city is without its challenges, but what we recognize is across this country, we have seen a decline in violent crime and other crimes throughout the cities, and it's due to the work that has been done by mayors, city managers and police chiefs," said Renee Hall, president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.
Hall said the aggressive tactics used by troops and federal agents resembles policing during the Jim Crow era. She said Black communities have been historically over-policed, and described this as a legacy of American slavery.
"And so now we're deploying those same kinds of tactics that resemble the 1940s and 1950s," Hall said. "It just sends the wrong message in the United States, when we have done so much work in law enforcement to step away from those stereotypes … and it's performative and it doesn't get us the results that most Americans are looking for, and that is actual results of reducing crime."
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