Sgt. 1st Class Andres Agag with the California Army National Guard pushes against the shields of other unit members while playing the role of an aggressive demonstrator during riot and crowd-control training on June 22, 2025, at Joint Forces Training Base, Calif. (Jon Soucy/U.S. Army)

All troops assigned to federal protection missions in Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Ore., are returning home, putting an end to deployments that were mired in legal battles even before some cities saw service members in the streets, the military said Tuesday.

Roughly 500 National Guard troops were still deployed among the three cities as of November, though they have spent the past month training and planning — not fulfilling the operational mission of protecting federal buildings and personnel, according to U.S. Northern Command, the joint command overseeing them.

The command did not respond Wednesday about how many troops remain on the mission or the timeline to finish closing up operations.

Troops were deployed during protests of heightened immigration enforcement operations that have included surging federal assets into cities to detain people suspected of entering the United States without authorization, which began after President Donald Trump came into office last year.

Though troops did conduct operations in Los Angeles over the summer, troops in Chicago and Portland never got the chance because of legal battles. On Dec. 31, Trump announced he would stop pushing for the deployments to move forward.

Troops are also deployed to other U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., but those missions do not fall within the scope of Northern Command.

Trump sent troops first to Los Angeles in June as protesters marched outside of a federal building following immigration raids on area businesses. At its peak, more than 4,000 National Guard members and active-duty Marines were in the city.

Guard members also protected federal agents as they made immigration-related arrests in the area. By July, just 250 troops remained and eventually shifted to conducting training instead of operations.

Trump then sent troops to Portland in September and Chicago a month later, citing rising crime rates as a factor. However, those deployments were immediately caught up in lawsuits and troops did not actually get into the cities. Instead they conducted training as they waited out the legal battle.

“We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again,” Trump said on social media.