Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers is facing criticism from the city of Detroit and his political rivals for calling on President Donald Trump to send military troops to Detroit.
Rogers, who is endorsed by Trump, is urging the president to add Detroit to a list of cities, including Washington D.C., Chicago and Baltimore, where military troops patrol streets.
“The numbers don’t lie: Detroit has become a hub for violent crime,” Rogers, a Republican, said in a statement published on his campaign website Thursday. “These aren’t just statistics – they’re people and families, whose lives have been flipped upside down because they aren’t even safe in their own community anymore. We have got to make our cities safe again… The Mayor of Detroit should be on the phone with the President now calling for backup,” Rogers said.
City leaders, including the mayor’s spokesperson, pushed back hard against Rogers’ quotes.
“Rogers is proving himself just another uninformed, grandstanding politician,” city spokesperson John Roach said in a statement. “In 2013, the City of Detroit had more than 750 carjackings. In 2025, we had 57 as of yesterday, a 90% reduction. Our strong partnership with US Attorney Jerome Gorgon has just added several more federal prosecutors to drive the violence down even further. The historic drop in Detroit crime in recent years has come from the efforts of serious law enforcement professionals, not from non-serious politicians like Rogers.”
In 2023, Detroit reported 252 homicides in 2023, marking the lowest number of killings since 1966. However, the homicide rate per capita is higher today than it was then.
Republican activists like 180 Church pastor Lorenzo Sewell and Ramone Jackson pointed to the homicide rate per capita stat last year at a campaign event for Rogers’ U.S. House campaign. U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-SC, sat at a roundtable with Rogers, Sewell and Republican activists who questioned the legitimacy of the city’s crime stats.
Rogers’ political opponents are also criticizing his comments.
“Serving the City of Detroit as its health director even decades afterward, I saw the painful echoes of the summer of 1967. So no, Mike: Detroit doesn’t need masked agents cosplaying cops,” U.S. Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed said in a statement. “Michiganders in Detroit and beyond need the Medicaid Trump just cut, the paychecks he’s making smaller, and the food he’s making less affordable. Stop being a Karen, and go back to Florida. Nobody wants you here.”
Abdul-El Sayed described Rogers’ call a “federal invasion of Detroit.”
State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, reshared a post from last fall criticizing Trump for saying the whole country will be like Detroit if former Vice President Kamala Harris was elected president.
“In light of Mike Rogers’ call to deploy the National Guard to Detroit. I point you to my statement the last time MAGA came after our city: As a proud elected representative of tens of thousands of Detroiters: F*** this guy. Don’t come back.”
U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens criticized Rogers, saying military in Detroit, “Was wrong in ‘67 and it’s wrong now.”
However, Stevens in 2016 called for the National Guard to be sent to prevent crime in Chicago.
“It is time to call in the National Guard. Enough is enough,” Stevens said.
