Two Tennessee National Guard troops shot and killed a 20-year-old man during a foot chase in Memphis early Sunday morning, triggering a state investigation and renewing debate over the federal-state crime task force that put soldiers on the city's streets nearly a year ago.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation identified the man as Tyrin Johnson. TBI stated the guardsmen shot Johnson during a foot chase around 4 a.m. Sunday after the National Guard joined Memphis police responding to reports that a man was armed with a handgun and had fired shots in the area, ABC News reported. Memphis police said Johnson turned his weapon toward the guardsmen before they fired.

TBI did not elaborate on how the encounter escalated. The bureau has opened a formal investigation. The two guardsmen have not been publicly identified.

What led up to the shooting

The shooting occurred under the umbrella of the Memphis Safe Task Force, a joint federal, state, and local law enforcement operation President Trump announced last September. Approximately 1,472 National Guardsmen remain deployed in Memphis. The troops operate under Title 32 orders, their movement is controlled by the governor, but the federal government pays the bill.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee backed the deployment. Local officials were less enthusiastic. A lower court initially sided with local elected officials and temporarily blocked the troop presence, but the Tennessee Court of Appeals found the lawmakers lacked standing and greenlit the deployment.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young, who has been publicly skeptical of the National Guard deployment, called the shooting "unfortunate" but kept his public comments brief. "The incident is under investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and we will allow that process to conclude before making additional comments," Young said in a statement.

That restraint did not extend to every elected official in Memphis.

Questions about rules of engagement

State Sen. London Lamar, who represents parts of Memphis, called for a rapid investigation and pressed for transparency from TBI. She told ABC News that community members want clarity on when and how the National Guard is authorized to use lethal force.

"I think that a lot of people want to know what actually happened to cause the National Guard to use their deadly force."

Lamar also framed the deployment as a top-down decision imposed on Memphis. "I think people need to realize the local authorities didn't ask for the national guard to come. It was a state decision by our governor and President Trump, and so it was sold to everyone that when all of these authorities come into our city, that crime will cease," she said. "And unfortunately, crime is still happening."

That last line deserves some context. City figures show an almost 40 percent reduction in citywide crime year-over-year and a nearly 35 percent drop in crime downtown. The U.S. Marshals Service reported that as of June 10, the task force had made more than 10,000 arrests and seized 1,708 firearms. Those are not the numbers of a program that has failed to move the needle.

Whether a particular use of force was justified is a separate question from whether the broader mission is working. Critics who conflate the two are making a political argument, not a factual one.

The ACLU enters the fray

ACLU of Tennessee Executive Director Miriam R. Nemeth called for "a full, transparent, and independent accounting of exactly what happened when Tennessee National Guard troops opened fire on a civilian." She described the two prior fatal shootings involving task force federal agents in May, both still under TBI investigation, as a "deeply concerning" pattern.

Federal law enforcement shootings in the line of duty are not unique to Memphis. A recent incident near the White House involved Secret Service agents engaging an armed suspect after an exchange of gunfire, a reminder that armed confrontations with law enforcement carry inherent risks regardless of the agency involved.

Nemeth went further, characterizing the task force presence itself as destabilizing.

"People who are not from Memphis are coming in, don't know the community, don't have any ties or any accountability to this community, and are just being allowed to exert power in a way that really destabilizes the community and really undermines daily life."

That argument, that outside law enforcement inherently lacks legitimacy, is a familiar one from the ACLU. It also sits uneasily beside the reality that Memphis residents have endured years of violent crime that local authorities alone could not contain. The ACLU also filed a lawsuit last month seeking to block Tennessee's HALO law, which restricts how close bystanders can get to law enforcement activities.

The task force's track record

The Memphis Safe Task Force has been a signature initiative for the Trump administration's approach to urban crime. Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi visited Memphis in late March to highlight the task force's results. During that visit, Trump praised the city's trajectory.

"You have now developed a reputation as a city that's coming back stronger than any city in the country because of what's happened with crime and because your political leaders had the courage to do what they did."

The deployment is part of a broader initiative. Approximately 120 National Guard troops are stationed in New Orleans, and roughly 5,000 Guard troops serve in Washington, D.C., most drawn from Republican-led states. The Niskanen Center, a Washington think tank, published an analysis finding that the National Guard's D.C. mission had no impact on violent crime but coincided with a decline in property crimes.

The question of how federal and military assets interact with local policing is one that courts, lawmakers, and communities will continue to work through. Recent federal court rulings on law enforcement use-of-force authority show that the legal landscape around these deployments remains active and contested.

What remains unanswered

The TBI investigation will need to answer several questions that the initial statements leave open. Did Johnson fire at the guardsmen, or did he only point his weapon in their direction? What specific rules of engagement governed the National Guard troops' authority to use deadly force? Were there witnesses beyond the parties directly involved?

The Tennessee National Guard did not respond to ABC News' request for comment. That silence does not help the task force's public standing, even if operational protocol may explain it.

Johnson's shooting marks the third fatal encounter involving task force personnel since May. Two earlier shootings involved federal agents rather than National Guard troops, and both remain under TBI investigation. Whether these incidents reflect systemic problems or the inherent friction of aggressive law enforcement in a high-crime city is precisely what the investigations should determine.

The administration's broader approach to staffing and directing federal enforcement operations has drawn scrutiny from multiple directions, but the core question in Memphis is narrower: did two guardsmen follow their rules of engagement when a reportedly armed man turned a weapon toward them during a foot chase at four in the morning?

State Sen. Lamar acknowledged the murkiness. "From what I've seen and I've heard, there are more questions than answers right now, or opinions," she said.

That is a fair summary. And it is exactly why TBI's investigation matters more than the political reactions already stacking up around it.

Let the facts lead

Memphis has real crime. The task force has produced real results, 10,000 arrests and 1,708 firearms seized do not materialize from a program that is merely symbolic. A 40 percent year-over-year reduction in citywide crime is not nothing. Those numbers belong in the same conversation as the shooting of Tyrin Johnson.

If the guardsmen acted within their authority when a man with a gun turned it toward them, that is a lawful use of force in defense of their lives, tragic, but lawful. If they did not, the TBI investigation should say so, and accountability should follow.

What Memphis does not need is a rush to treat every use of force as proof that the task force itself is illegitimate. The ACLU's framing, that outside law enforcement "destabilizes" communities, sounds principled until you remember what those communities looked like before anyone showed up to help.

The facts of this shooting deserve a thorough, transparent investigation. They do not deserve to be conscripted into a political campaign to dismantle the one initiative that has actually moved Memphis's crime numbers in the right direction.