AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn now to Memphis, Tennessee, after President Trump on Monday signed an order authorizing the deployment of National Guard and the creation of a so-called safe task force, which Trump claims will address violent crime in the city. Trump’s order came as the Memphis Police Department reported crime is at a 25-year low, with robbery, larceny, burglary all at record lows over the past eight months.

Tennessee Democrats gathered in Memphis Monday to condemn Trump’s crackdown. We’re joined by Justin J. Pearson, Democratic Tennessee state representative.

State Rep, thanks so much for being with us. You were one of the people who spoke out against the National Guard deployment. Why?

REP. JUSTIN J. PEARSON: This is an abuse of power by the Trump administration. It is moving us from a democracy to an authoritarian regime led by a wannabe dictator. We cannot normalize the behavior of the nationalization of — the federalization of the National Guard against our own citizens, against our own communities. If they really wanted to address the problems of crime, they would address billions of dollars of disinvestment as it relates to eradicating poverty. They would make sure that we do something about gun safety laws. But this is not about that. This is about taking away our power, targeting and attacking Black-led majority cities and destroying our democracy for their own political gain.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Representative, on Monday, President Trump met with your governor, Bill Lee, with two U.S. senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty. And Governor Lee said, “I’ve been in office for seven years. I’m tired of crime holding the great city of Memphis back.” But this is really in contrast to the plummeting crime rate in Memphis, at a 25-year low. Could you talk about that?

REP. JUSTIN J. PEARSON: Yeah, the statistics do not net out for what they are articulating. But Governor Bill Lee has been governor for nearly eight years and has never once presented a plan to reduce and eradicate poverty in Memphis, Tennessee, has not fought for any legislation to reduce gun violence and have gun violence prevention laws against his own party. He has not exercised the political will or the desire to address any of the root causes in the systemic problems that we have.

This is giving Donald Trump and this administration more power to take over communities that they disagree with, that are Democratic-led, for their own political gains. And this gets much more scary for some folks when it’s an election season and the National Guard is going to be posted up in front of our polls. That’s going to happen at the midterms. It’s likely to happen during the presidential election. This is not what is supposed to be happening in our country, and we all need to be unified in realizing that this is nothing more than a power play for more authoritarianism from this administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Justin J. Pearson, you’ve talked about Trump manipulating racist rhetoric to perpetuate false claims of rising crime waves in cities like Memphis. Elaborate.

REP. JUSTIN J. PEARSON: Absolutely. Look, it is no coincidence that the cities that Donald Trump and this administration are targeting have been overwhelmingly Black-led cities — Karen Bass in Los Angeles, in Chicago, sought to attack Baltimore, now here in Memphis. The idea of Black criminality is something that has been perpetuated by racists and white supremacists like Donald Trump for centuries. And so it is not new to us. It is not unfamiliar that Governor Bill Lee is perpetuating this. Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty are also perpetuating the lie about Black criminality and not taking accountability, responsibility for taking away access to healthcare, eliminating SNAP benefits through the big, ugly bill that just recently passed, transferring wealth to the richest people in the world and taking from the poorest people. And then, dealing with those consequences, they say, “Well, you all are the problem. It isn’t the policies we push. It isn’t the laws that we’ve done to make it harder for you to live and to survive. It is you. It is you, Black folks, who are in power that are the problem. It is not the policies and the laws and our inaction that is the consequences that you all are dealing with.”

And today we are dealing with the consequences of people who are in positions of power who do not care about our lives, who do not care about our communities, who don’t care about eliminating poverty. They don’t even care about crime. They’re doing this as a part of an authoritarian regime to take more power and to see how far we are willing to go to allow them to destroy our democracy. And in Memphis, in Shelby County, we are saying no.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Justin J. Pearson, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Democratic state representative whose district includes parts of Memphis. He is also the subject of a new documentary that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival called This Is Not a Drill — we’ll be talking about that in the weeks to come — about his activism before becoming a Tennessee state representative. Thanks so much for joining us from Memphis.