Editorial: Law must prevail over force — There's no invasion of LA except for federal troops
Despite what President Donald Trump and his border czar Tom Homan claim, the only invasion of Los Angeles is by the illegally mobilized National Guard and Marines, brought into the city against the will of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The anti-ICE protests in L.A. were being contained and handled by local law enforcement, the robust LAPD and even larger Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And today Newsom's lawsuit has a hearing in federal courts to end the military deployments even as the governor is facing idle threats of arrest from Homan and Trump himself.
There is a thick stack of red lines that the administration has crossed just in the last few days. Troops in the streets? Check. Those troops conducting domestic law enforcement in clear violation of the law? Check; we are already seeing images of National Guard soldiers actively backing masked federal agents up as these round people up, reportedly soon joined by the Marines.
In a speech, Newsom said: 'Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.' Trump openly admires foreign strongmen who put down dissent. Here he gets to try it out here at home. There is no emergency, other than the one that Trump has manufactured.
But for a few spots here and there, 99% of L.A. is going about their daily live without incident. Trump is using apocalyptic language and deploying the troops not because he wants the situation to de-escalate but precisely because he wants very badly for there to be escalation, as that gives him additional latitude to crack down.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, long Trump's preeminent anti-immigrant zealot, has given the game away yet again with his descriptions of what's so wrong with L.A. that federal troops need to be brought in to fix it, moaning on Twitter that 'huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations,' by which he really just means they're full of nonwhite people.
This whole effort can best be understood as more akin to an occupation than an attempt to preserve order that the L.A. authorities are perfectly capable of maintaining themselves.
Other cities, New York included, need to prepare given reports that ICE is surging special units to Seattle, Chicago, Philly, northern Virginia and New York as large protests are planned for this weekend against the ICE raids and Saturday's D.C. military parade on Trump's birthday.
Knowing that there are nationwide protests planned against his procession, Trump has said that protesters will be met with 'very big force,' not bothering to distinguish between constitutionally protected speech and violence, because he neither understands nor cares about such distinctions.
We hope that the courts will ignore the DOJ's mealy-mouthed defenses and act fast to state the obvious, which is that Trump is way overreaching his federal powers, and we hope that such rulings are expeditiously enforced, unlike the administration's track record so far of defying federal judges. For our service members who may be called upon to enact Trump's designs, we will remind you that your oath is not to the president, but to the Constitution. There are some lines that cannot be uncrossed.
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