Sending the National Guard to LA is not about stopping rioting

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

DONALD TRUMP is making good on his threats. During his presidential campaign and first few months in office the president and his advisers suggested that they would retaliate against cities that resist the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. On June 7th Mr Trump ordered at least 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell protests that had taken place across the region for two days following several immigration raids, and the disorder that followed. The move is ostensibly meant to restore peace. But it is also a thinly-veiled message to Democratic-run places that retribution awaits those who would stand between immigrants and the administration's deportation machine.
Federal immigration agents swept several locations across Los Angeles County this weekend, looking for unauthorised migrants, and arrested more than 40 people. Roughly a third of county residents are immigrants. Crowds angry about the raids gathered in Paramount and Compton, two neighbouring cities roughly 16 miles south of Los Angeles, and outside of a federal building in downtown LA that houses a detention centre where migrants were being kept. Armed officers spewed tear gas at coughing protesters and tossed flash-bang grenades. Some protesters threw rocks at federal agents as they drove by. Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, issued a statement warning locals against rioting. 'Everyone has the right to peacefully protest,' she wrote, 'but let me be clear: violence and destruction are unacceptable.'
As of Saturday night the clashes were relatively contained, and local officials had given no indication that they needed help from the federal government. Gavin Newsom, California's Democratic governor, posted on X that 'there is currently no unmet need' and wrote that the deployment of National Guard troops is 'purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions'.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, seemed to revel in antagonising California. Stephen Miller, Mr Trump's deputy chief-of-staff and an immigration hard-liner, called the protests a 'violent insurrection'. The defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, threatened to send in Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton (Mr Trump's orders having said that 'the Secretary of Defense may employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary'). Members of the administration insist that the raids were targeting criminals, and portray protesters as radical leftists who want to prevent the deportation of dangerous people. For context, data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement suggests that half of migrants arrested since October 1st were charged with or convicted of a criminal offence.
The administration had flirted with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, a break-glass law from 1807 that allows the president to use the army to put down a domestic uprising. Instead of pushing that red button, Mr Trump is arguing that the protests amount to 'a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States', which lets him deploy National Guard troops for federal purposes. The memorandum announcing their deployment said the troops would only be used to temporarily protect federal agents and property. Anything more than that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, a law from 1878 that prohibits the military's involvement in domestic law enforcement.
But sending in the National Guard without a governor's consent is extremely rare. The most recent comparable example comes from 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson federalised the Alabama National Guard to protect civil-rights marchers from segregationists.
The tension between local and federal officials over the deployment, and the reaction of Angelenos to unwanted federal troops on their streets, has the potential to escalate. Mr Hegseth's threat to send in Marines is rash. The last time a president invoked the Insurrection Act was in 1992, when California's governor Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush for help calming riots in Los Angeles after the acquittal of police who had beaten Rodney King, a black motorist. A report from 1997 found that active-duty troops coordinated poorly with local police and were not well-equipped to handle things like crowd control.
The protests could spread. Los Angeles is not the only place to experience immigration raids, and members of the administration have loudly decried the sanctuary policies of liberal cities such as Chicago, Boston and Denver. 'We're arresting really bad people out there', Bill Essayli, the US Attorney for the Central District of California, insisted to CBS News. 'That's what the American people voted for.'
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