10 hours ago
Trump sends in troops in make-or-break moment for his immigration crackdown
Donald Trump's first presidency ended with city centres turned to blackened ghost towns.
They looked not unlike Los Angeles on Sunday morning, where rioters had left graffiti and the ashes of burned cars in protest
Five years ago it was a different cause. The US endured a long, hot summer of riots after police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, kneeling on his neck as he protested that he could not breathe.
'Looks so familiar,' Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference and a confidant of the US president, posted on social media. 'It's almost as if we saw the same tactics with a different radical topic and diff logo wear.'
In 2020, Mr Trump threatened to take matters into his own hands if the country's governors did not stamp out violence, promising to deploy armed forces to quell the violence.
Several states took heed and used their own authority to deploy their National Guard forces.
This time around, as his immigration service takes a new, tougher tack in rounding up illegal immigrants, the president has not waited. With Los Angeles on fire, and protests growing in New York, he issued his presidential memorandum on Saturday night, in an effort to snuff out the violence before it could spread further.
'In the wake of this violence, California's feckless Democrat leaders have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens,' is how Karoline Leavitt, Mr Trump's press secretary announced it.
'That is why President Trump has signed a Presidential Memorandum deploying 2,000 National Guardsmen to address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester.'
One of the difficulties in 2020 was navigating the legal limits on presidents deploying troops on their own soil.
Then Mr Trump floated using the nuclear option and invoking the Insurrection Act.
It was last used in 1992, when George HW Bush used it to send troops into Los Angeles to control rioting at the request of California's governor after four white police officers were acquitted of beating up Rodney King, a black motorist.
Using it without the consent of the state governor brings a whole other level of political jeopardy.
Trump 2.0 has had time to find alternative tools. For four years his lawyers and advisers have planned for their return to power, legal-proofing policies that came unstuck in the courts first time round.
So on Saturday night, they apparently used a different course of action and a little-known provision with Title 10 of the US Code on Armed Forces. It allows the deployment of National Guard forces if 'there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.' It has not been used since 1965.
The stakes this time are high.
Mr Trump's opponents have struggled to cope with his 'flood the zone' strategy, unleashing executive orders, presidential proclamations and Truth Social posts at a torrential rate.
The result is that Democrats in Congress and on the street have failed to coalesce into a united opposition.
That could be changing with raids on factories, food trucks and the parking lots where foreign workers congregate to pick up a day's work on building sites. They offer a focal point in an already febrile debate over immigration, the freedom to protest, and the limits of presidential power.
Los Angeles was calm overnight on Saturday, but more protests are expected on Sunday afternoon. Immigration groups in New York also have events lined up on Sunday and Monday.
Against that backdrop, Mr Trump and his government of loyalists is gambling that sending in troops will end the trouble before it can spread and prevent months of riots, not create an even bigger conflagration.
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