Trump's National Guard deployment in L.A. is a move last seen in Civil Rights era
The last time a president deployed the National Guard without a request from a governor was an entirely different era in American history.
President Donald Trump's order of 2,000 National Guard troops to quell what his administration described as 'insurrectionists' in Los Angeles drew strenuous objections from California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
'It's very much outside our constitutional norms and traditions for the military to be deployed under federal control in the United States,' said Laura Dickinson, a George Washington University Law School professor who specializes in armed conflict. 'It's particularly rare when a governor objects.'
Sixty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson deployed the Alabama National Guard to protect a march led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, the state's capital, after George Wallace, Alabama's segregationist governor, declined to provide Guard protection.
The march followed 'Bloody Sunday' — March 7, 1965 — when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. They used clubs and gas canisters to force marchers, who had planned to walk to Montgomery, back to Selma. The marchers had been galvanized by the slaying of a young Black man from Alabama, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been shot as he attempted to prevent his mother from being further beaten by police.
The civil rights era also saw numerous other instances of the federalization of the National Guard — to protect Black students integrating Southern schools and to quell unrest.
On Sunday, the California National Guard began to arrive in Los Angeles after protests over wide-scale arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in recent days.
Dickinson noted that what the federalized Guard will be doing is 'unclear': Will the troops be doing direct law enforcement, or will they be in a supportive role? What are their rules of engagement, and will they use force? It's also unclear how much training they have received, she noted.
'If they were to use force, this really could risk politicizing the military, which historically has enjoyed broad bipartisan support,' Dickinson said. It could also, she said, bring liability concerns.
Newsom has called for calm, and, indeed, reports from Los Angeles suggested that the streets were quiet Sunday morning.
'Trump is sending 2,000 National Guard troops into LA County — not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis,' Newsom wrote on social media. 'He's hoping for chaos so he can justify more crackdowns, more fear, more control. Stay calm. Never use violence. Stay peaceful.'
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