Trump Signs a Presidential Memorandum Establishing the Memphis Safe Task Force, Sep. 15, 2025
September 15, 2025 · The White House · 0:47:03
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum at the White House on September 15, 2025, establishing the Memphis Safe Task Force, in a signing carried in full on the White House channel. “Today, at the request of Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee, who’s standing with us, I’m signing a presidential memorandum to establish the Memphis Safe Task Force,” the President said. “It’s very important because of the crime that’s going on, not only in Memphis, in many cities, and we’re going to take care of all of them step by step, just like we did in D.C.”
The President said the task force would be “a replica of our extraordinarily successful efforts here” in Washington, and that its effort “will include the National Guard as well as the FBI, ATF, DEA, ICE, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Marshals, and more, along with the prosecutors,” with the Justice Department led by the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee and Attorney General Pam Bondi, present at the signing, “heading it up.” He said an FBI deployment sent about four months earlier had already brought some numbers down.
His case for Memphis, as he stated it: in 2024 the city had “the highest violent crime rate, the highest property crime rate, and the third-highest murder rate of any city in the nation,” and “a person is four times more likely to be murdered in Memphis, Tennessee today than in Mexico City.” He cited 249 murders, 429 rapes, 5,616 burglaries, and 12,522 violent assaults across 2024 and into 2025, as he stated the figures, and a recent carjacking in which an elderly woman was dragged from her car at a movie theater. Chicago, he said, would likely be next: “We’re going to lose Chicago… We’re not going to lose Chicago.”
Why it matters
The Memphis memorandum is the export of the Washington model — a named federal task force, requested by a governor, combining the Guard with the full federal law-enforcement stack — and the template the President said would be applied city by city. Attorney General Bondi’s Justice Department owns the prosecutorial side.
Scoreboard watch
This signing is a scoreboard candidate: the Memphis Safe Task Force’s establishment by presidential memorandum on September 15, 2025, and the President’s stated 2024 Memphis crime figures, to be checked against the memorandum’s published text and the task force’s reported results.
Sources: The White House, “President Trump Signs a Presidential Memorandum, Sep. 15, 2025” (official upload, embedded above; the upload’s description places the event at the White House). All figures and characterizations as stated by the President in the broadcast.
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