President Donald Trump’s military occupations of U.S. cities have cost nearly half a billion dollars, according to an expert estimate provided exclusively to The Intercept.

The current $473 million price tag now includes $172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; and more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee, and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month.

The National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, tallied these totals from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

The skyrocketing price of Trump’s occupations come as the president threatens to deploy additional troops to more American cities to quell dissent and turn America into a full-blown police state. Trump recently said he could “send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted” into urban America — while threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, one of the executive branch’s most potent, oldest, and rarely used emergency powers. He has specifically threatened to surge troops into Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. Troops are also expected to be deployed to New Orleans later this month.

Despite the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the military within the U.S., it has kept even basic details about domestic troop deployments, including the costs, secret.

“Our National Guard troops did not sign up to police their own neighbors.”

“If Donald Trump is burning through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on his authoritarian campaign of intimidation, the American people deserve to know about it. Federal judges across the country — including a Trump appointee — have ruled that these deployments are not justified, and thus not only wasteful, but also illegal and unconstitutional, and our National Guard troops did not sign up to police their own neighbors or be used as political pawns,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept. “Trump’s continued abuse of our military to intimidate Americans in their own neighborhoods — the very same Americans he expects to foot the bill for these deployments — must end immediately.”

Duckworth was one of 11 senators who asked the Congressional Budget Office late last month to provide an independent assessment of the projected expense of deploying federalized National Guard units for “domestic security operations,” including the activation, deployment, compensation and sustainment costs. The CBO did not say whether it will provide the requested assessment, telling The Intercept that it is “unable to respond to external inquiries due to a lapse in appropriated funds.”

Over the last six months, a Trump administration urban occupation playbook has emerged. In city after city, armed federal agents storm into neighborhoods, violating people’s rights. When American citizens exercise their First Amendment right to protest the authoritarian measures, federal agents respond with violence. While such protests have remained overwhelmingly peaceful and have never overwhelmed the capacity of local law enforcement, Trump has repeatedly proclaimed himself unable to enforce the law and seized command of National Guard members over the objections of state governors to quash dissent.

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