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- Federalization of California’s National Guard risks violent confrontation with protesters and civilians in Los Angeles.
- Administration frames migrants as an “invasion,” justifying military-style suppression of largely peaceful community protests.
- Local leaders and civil rights groups condemn the move as unnecessary provocation and an abuse of federal power.
- Author warns this escalation is a test for centralized authoritarian power that threatens American democracy.
Federalizing the National Guard in response to ICE protests risks bloodshed—which is exactly what this administration wants.
LAPD clear the street outside the Metropolitan Detention Center as demonstrators gather in response to ICE raids in Los Angeles.
(Jason Armond / Getty)
On Saturday evening, two days into a series of brutal ICE raids of Los Angeles workplaces, which have generated forceful community protests—which ICE agents and other law enforcement officers have attempted to quash with stun grenades—Trump used Title X of the United States codes to federalize 2,000 members of California’s National Guard.
The announcement of this move was made on Fox News by the thuggish border czar Tom Homan, and the Pentagon immediately began readying a mass deployment into the streets of LA. It’s a virtually unprecedented action. California’s National Guard was federalized briefly during the Rodney King riots, in 1992, but that was with the blessing of then-Governor Pete Wilson and occurred when large parts of the city were aflame—conditions that clearly do not apply today. Prior to that, the last time a state National Guard was federalized was in 1957, when Eisenhower took over the Arkansas National Guard in order to protect African American school children attempting to attend a newly integrated school, and Alabama in 1965 by LBJ to protect civil rights marchers in Selma. But the Arkansas episodes were both part of an effort to expand American democracy; Trump’s move, by contrast, is aimed at snuffing out the light of popular protest and civil rights.
California Governor Newsom swiftly tweeted out opposition to the move, as did LA Mayor Karen Bass. Both called the act a deliberate provocation. The ACLU also came out in opposition to the deployment, as did immigrants’ rights groups in the state.
“We’re in close coordination with local law enforcement,” Newsom’s director of communications, Izzy Gardon, told me late Saturday evening. “There’s no unmet need.” Even if there were, he continued, federal agencies could have simply requested mutual assistance from state and local law enforcement. Instead, they immediately reached for the nuclear option and federalized the National Guard. “It’s unnecessary. If anyone has seen LA protests before, [the current anti-ICE protests are] small on that scale. This is Trump purposefully inflaming and escalating what’s happening on the ground…. This is a few hundred folks who are for the most part calling out the federal government for arresting hard-working Californians who were at the wrong Home Depot at the wrong time and place.” Gardon believes that “the president’s testing the bounds of every single preconceived norm and the foundation of the laws of the country—on so many fronts.”
Newsom’s office seems to acknowledge, however, that under Title X the state’s options to resist this move are limited. So night fell in Los Angeles with a Damocletian sword hanging over the city. Deploying the military, with the overwhelming firepower it has at its disposal, risks the massacre of civilians over the coming days and weeks. Trump’s order states that the federal deployment would last 60 days or longer and that any act, not just of violence but of “protest,” seeking to impede immigration officers would be considered a “form of rebellion.”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and the architect of Trump’s “lockdown America” strategy, declared that the government could either “deport the invaders, or surrender to insurrection.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued fire-and-brimstone statements about the forces poised to be deployed against protesters, as did Vice President JD Vance, senior FBI figures, and an array of other administration officials. By late evening, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had tweeted out a truly chilling warning that he was ready to activate US Marines from Camp Pendleton to join the invasion of LA.
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The Miller-led rationale for the escalation in California is wrong on every front: The scale of America’s undocumented population may represent a bipartisan failure to meaningfully reform the immigration process over the past generation, but it does not by any credible definition of the word constitute an “invasion.” America’s undocumented are not organized as a military force, do not respond to a single set of political or military leaders, and do not have either the ambitions or the ability to displace the ruling class in the US or to conquer large swaths of territory. Most of them are simply hard-working, keep-your-nose-to-the-ground individuals, trying to protect their families and looking for ways to survive in an increasingly unsympathetic world. The men and women working in garment factories in LA and in restaurants in San Diego who have borne the brunt of ICE raids over the past week, plus the few hundred community members who have protested ICE’s brutal snatch-and-grab strategies—including SEIU local president David Huerta, injured in the clashes and now in federal custody—do not constitute a meaningful “insurrection.”
“This is a real abuse of power and a real red line that has been crossed—for absolutely no reason,” says Eva Bitran, director of immigrants’ rights for the ACLU Southern California office. “Trump benefits from a narrative of chaos, and so he sows chaos to benefit his political ambition.” If Miller’s lunatic definition stands, then pretty much any political protest, no matter how small and no matter how nonviolent, no matter how outmatched by local law enforcement, now justifies military intervention by the federal government.
And that, of course, is exactly what Trump really wants—and, with the craven, fascist-minded Hegseth in charge of the military, that is what he likely will be able to get.
The gangster president, having been convicted on nearly three dozen felony charges, having faced scores more felony charges, having been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil lawsuit, and having been twice impeached, has long been itching for this fight. He wants to show that he is an above-and-outside-the-law strongman. He seems desperate for a fight and eager for a body count.
In 2020, as the protests against George Floyd’s murder got underway around the country, Trump tweeted a quote from a notorious segregationist sheriff, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He didn’t get his way then; he’s determined to get it now. He is making it clear that he sees Los Angeles as a test case for his notion that he has the right to do anything—including shedding the blood of US citizens and residents at the hands of US soldiers—in order to impose his vision on the country. “If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday evening.
In a statement released shortly after the news broke, the ACLU’s Southern California office labeled the deployment “a declaration of war on all Californians.” But, beyond that, it is a declaration of war on the very concept of American democracy. If Los Angeles falls, if Trump and Hegseth succeed in unleashing the US military against civilians in a city of LA’s significance, the door is kicked open to invite full-fledged fascism. Los Angeles’s fate, and the fate of immigrants who call the city home, as well as their supporters who are caught in the federal vise, is America’s fate.
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Protests have long been planned nationwide for this coming Saturday, June 14, to coincide with the obscene military parade that Trump has slated for DC. Now, more than ever, it is vital that Americans turn out, not just in run-of-the-mill numbers, but in the tens of millions, in all 50 states, in cities large and small, to stand up to this administration. It is time to start talking about peaceful civil disobedience. It is time to start thinking about a National Moratorium Day, the withholding of work and cooperation in the face of gangster government. It is time for political leaders of good conscience to level with the American public about the full extent of this fascist power grab.
Newsom’s tweets are a start, but they aren’t nearly enough. He needs to go on prime-time TV and explain the stakes. He has the clout and he has the platform, and it’s time that he uses it. Schumer and Jeffries need to do the same. So, too, does every blue-state governor and every blue-city mayor.
Trump is using the protests in LA as his equivalent of the burning of the Reichstag—a ginned-up emergency used to deploy dictatorial powers, which once deployed won’t be voluntarily withdrawn.
It is happening here and it is happening now. We are witnessing, in real time, the implosion of American democracy. What are we going to do about it?
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