Can National Guardsmen deployed to US cities claim conscientious objection?

CHICAGO – In the desert, he realized Humvees don’t uphold the Constitution: People do.

Twenty years later, Iraq War veteran Aaron Hughes continues spreading his realization that soldiers can better champion American ideals by following their conscience over orders.

The 42-year-old is sharing the message more vociferously than ever as President Donald Trump moves to deploy troops to cities around the U.S. in what the president says is an effort to fight crime and support immigration enforcement.

“When people withdraw themselves from the gears of the machine, that’s power, and service members need to know they have power to withdraw their consent,” said the Chicago-area native.

Hughes is an Illinois-based member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, an organization formed to stop “militarism and endless wars” that has been slamming the White House’s efforts to use soldiers to police Americans and is urging troops to resist being deployed.

“We’re trying to rebuild the GI resistance movement,” said Hughes, referring to the sweeping efforts veterans and service members made to end the Vietnam War. “We don’t want our brothers and sisters participating in this authoritarian adventurism.”

Efforts to build a new resistance movement come as Trump deploys troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tennessee. Most recently troops have deployed to Portland, Oregon and are expected to deploy to Chicago.

The Trump administration has already signaled an unwillingness to allow dissent in the ranks. At a recent gathering of generals, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lambasted “decades of decay” at the Pentagon and said that new measures would weed out political correctness among the world’s most powerful armed forces.

“If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink,” Hegseth told hundreds of generals. “Then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”

Quantico meeting takeaways: Hegseth rips Pentagon ‘decay,’ ‘fat generals’

Vets rally around the country

Hughes and other Chicago-area veterans are just a chapter in About Face’s national efforts to rally troops to refuse what they view as Trump’s “unlawful orders” to deploy to American cities.

In Washington, D.C., the group members were arrested protesting the deployment of soldiers to Los Angeles; outside military bases, including Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, they’ve set up billboards questioning if supporting immigration agents is what soldiers signed up; and as Trump threatened to send troops to Baltimore, members rallied against the planned potential deployment.

“A lot of vets out there are feeling really devastated right now to see everything they had felt they signed up to protect crumble,” said About Face Organizing Director Brittany Ramos DeBarros. But, “there’s still an opportunity for us to stand up for the values we signed up for.”

DeBarros said the local chapter organizations are staging protests around the country, trying to spread information about what options troops facing deployment have and eventually develop more legal avenues for troops to claim conscientious objection.

“I know there are thousands and thousands of vets out there who would agree with us but haven’t heard of us,” said DeBarros, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. “I want people to know the door is open and there’s a community here that will have your back.”

DeBarros said the organization has about 2,000 members nationwide at the moment but that hundreds of new members have joined in recent months. Among them are active-duty soldiers, said the former Army captain, who resigned from her position in 2018 after being investigated by the military for speaking out against the war in Afghanistan.

More: Trump orders troops to Portland, Oregon; governor and mayor push back

Can soldiers claim conscientious objection?

Soldiers do have at least one path to resisting orders to deploy: Conscientious objection. The process refers to soldiers who won’t fight on the basis of moral or religious grounds.

But conscientious objection is a narrowly defined status that can be difficult to claim because a soldier must object to all conflicts in order to qualify, not just a single deployment, several experts told USA TODAY.

“If you are willing to be part of an armed force but just don’t like this moment, then you don’t qualify,” Steve Woolford, a GI Rights Hotline worker, told USA TODAY. “For those people, the military considers that a political objection.”

Woolford, who has been taking calls at the GI Rights Hotline since before Sept. 11, 2001, said in recent months he’s seen about a 50% uptick in calls from soldiers interested in conscientious objection or in exploring options to resist orders to deploy to U.S. cities.

“There’s people asking a lot of different questions they weren’t asking before because they’re seeing themselves in roles they didn’t expect to see themselves in,” said Woolford. “They’re not talking about things in political ways, they’re not shirkers, they’re people who are dedicated to serving the country, willing to risk their lives and they don’t want to feel like they’re doing something wrong.”

More: ICE wants National Guard troops in Chicago amid ‘riots’ and arrests. Governor fights back

Can soldiers refuse orders?

The U.S. military is a volunteer fighting force but while in the service, soldiers can’t pick and choose which orders to follow. Doing so could lead to serious consequences, including years in prison, according to Steve Levin, a University of Maryland Carey School of Law professor.

“In the military, disobeying a lawful order threatens the entire chain of command,” said Levin on why resisting orders can be a serious offense. “The system depends on discipline and the military runs on instant obedience for the simple reason that defiance can cost lives.”

The only exception, according to Levin and other legal experts, is for unlawful orders though meeting that standard can be exceedingly difficult, even as Trump opponents, including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, call deployments illegal.

“Under the present deployments the legality of the orders is dubious, but historically it’s not within the ken of any individual service members to make a decision,” said John W. Hall, a professor of military history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Can soldiers resist anyway?

A lack of legal options hasn’t stopped U.S. soldiers from resisting orders in the past.

“The U.S. has had a democratic tradition when it comes to military service where, though you pay a price for dissent, when that occurs, it’s a warning to the political leadership that even the troops who are ordered to do these things will speak out,” said David Cortright, a professor at the Notre Dame Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Cortright participated in that kind of resistance himself after being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Stationed in New York, he participated in protests in Manhattan when he was off duty and signed a petition against the war.

His efforts to resist got him reassigned to a base in Texas, where “all we did was clean the barracks floor continuously for months,” said Cortright.

“If you join in protests, you have to know or expect you could face punishment, commanders never like it when their soldiers disagree with the mission. But back with Vietnam, we didn’t care,” he said. “The thinking soldier is a real thing, thank goodness for our society, we’re not just robots.”

‘Legacy of freedom fighters,’ vet says

Hughes signed up to join the National Guard at an armory in Chicago before 9/11, imagining he would be helping flood victims or sandbagging the Mississippi River. Instead he deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, where a gung-ho belief in the mission gave way to misgivings.

“I wanted to go help build a democracy but it didn’t take long to realize occupying forces don’t build democracies,” Hughes said.

Hughes and others began resisting orders in passive ways, showing up late or taking patrols extra slowly.

For Hughes, it was the start of a new sense of patriotism: U.S. soldiers don’t just follow orders, they uphold American ideals and sometimes that means refusing orders. In About Face, he discovered thousands of other soldiers who felt the same way.

“It’s often that they think they’re alone and they’re not, there’s a history and legacy of freedom fighters that they are a part of that we want to connect them to,” Hughes said. “What gives me hope is that the figures who have captured our security state still depend on people complying and acting out their orders and historically, those people have shown that when things are unjust and immoral we have the power to withdraw our consent.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Vets call on National Guard to refuse deployment orders