National Guard troops can continue to patrol Memphis as part of a federal task force that was created to combat crime in the city, a Tennessee appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
A group of Tennessee lawmakers had challenged the deployment in state court late last year, arguing that Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, had overstepped his constitutional authority by sending the National Guard to Memphis in support of the task force. A lower-court judge had sided with that argument, but troops were allowed to remain in Memphis while Tennessee leaders appealed the judge’s ruling.
A panel of judges on the Tennessee Court of Appeals reversed that ruling on Tuesday, but they did not weigh in on the question of Mr. Lee’s authority. Instead, they said that the plaintiffs had not suffered the sort of direct injury that would give them the legal authority to challenge the troops’ deployment.
“Our conclusion is not that no one has standing,” the panel wrote in its opinion. “It is, instead, that these individuals lack standing.”
Lawyers for the lawmakers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The state’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, called the ruling “a big win for Memphis and a big win for Tennessee.” He added that it showed that “when elected officials disagree about policy, we resolve that at the ballot box, not the courts.”
Over the last year, the Trump administration has sent National Guard troops to several Democratic-led cities that the president has condemned as being plagued with crime. But after a series of successful legal challenges in states with Democratic governors, the administration has pulled back many of those troops.
Hundreds of National Guard members, however, have remained in Memphis since October after Mr. Lee formally summoned them to support a separate federal task force.
“If the most violent city in the country is not a grave emergency, I really don’t know what is,” Matt Rice, the Tennessee solicitor general, said in a court hearing in early March.
Hundreds of federal agents, working closely with Tennessee Highway Patrol and Memphis police officers, have made thousands of arrests over the last few months.
While Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, has said that he disagrees with troops in military fatigues patrolling the city, he has otherwise been supportive of the task force. But some Tennessee lawmakers challenged the deployment, arguing that Mr. Lee should have asked either local officials or the Tennessee General Assembly for approval.
The plaintiffs are Mayor Lee Harris of Shelby County, which includes Memphis; Councilman JB Smiley Jr. of Memphis; two Shelby County commissioners, Erika Sugarmon and Henri E. Brooks; State Representative Gabby Salinas of Memphis; and State Senator Jeff Yarbro of Nashville. All are affiliated with the Democratic Party. (A seventh plaintiff, State Representative G.A. Hardaway of Memphis, died on Friday.)
Mr. Young declined to join the lawsuit.
Chancellor Patricia Head Moskal, of Davidson County Chancery Court, sided with the lawmakers in November, signaling that she found the argument over executive overreach compelling. The appeals panel, however, focused instead on who had the legal authority to bring a challenge over the deployment.
“They reference no legislative authority that enables them to veto a decision by a governor as to whether to deploy the National Guard,” the panel wrote of the plaintiffs. Any negative effect would be on their respective institutions, the panel said, and the lawmakers had brought the case as individuals, rather than on behalf of the General Assembly, the Shelby County Commission or the Memphis City Council.
And of Mr. Harris, the Shelby County mayor, the panel wrote: “Mayor Harris is not the county itself.”
The group received legal representation and backing from the National Immigration Law Center and Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal nonprofit involved in dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration.
“The governor did not have virtually limitless authority to send armed troops wherever and whenever he wants for as long as he wants,” Joshua Salzman, a lawyer with Democracy Forward, told the court this year. “On the contrary, the people of Tennessee have consciously withheld such potentially tyrannical powers from the governor.”
Troops also remain in Washington, where the federal government exerts outsize control, and in New Orleans, where Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a Republican, has embraced Mr. Trump’s tough-on-crime strategies.
