Militarized LA: troops here to stay as Trump doubles down on deployments | Los Angeles

SHortly before the presidential election last November, before anyone who could imagine challenging her political base “America First” and launching a bombing on Iran, Donald Trump offered an overview of the way and why he wanted to deploy the army on American soil.

He was, said the president, to face “the enemy inside”.

“We have very bad people. We have sick people. Radical left madmen,” he said in an interview with Fox News which caused a generalized conviction at the time. “I think it should be very easily managed by … the National Guard, or if it is really necessary, by the army, because they cannot let it happen.”

Trump did not specify what it was that he did not want to let happen-only that even if he promised to end the “wars forever” abroad, he considered the internal political opponents, perhaps as those who protested in massive number in Los Angeles and through the United States this month, as a national security threat worthy of a military response.

When thousands of demonstrators went down to the streets of Los Angeles earlier this month to protest against heavy immigration from his administration, workers’ sweeping in factories and car washes, he lost a short time to make fun of what he had promised.

The reality of Trump sending thousands of troops from the National Guard and the US Marines at the earliest this month did not match his rhetoric-but his shock may have been blurred by the big titles out of the Middle East. The troops have largely kept a low profile, their functions limited to the protection of federal buildings and, at least according to the administration, accompanying the agents of the application of immigration and other federal officials as their business progresses.

However, while dust is installed over two weeks of passionate street demonstrations and occasional vandalism and violence in downtown Los Angeles, the deployment continues to denigrate the political leaders of California, personalities from the National Democratic Party concerned about who could be the next, as well as many ordinary citizens and influential personalities in the army itself.

“The American army exists to defend the nation against foreign threats, and not for American police or intervene in political disputes at home,” said a group of general retired generals and admirals and former high -level pentagon officials in a statement, signaling how Trump has moved from the previous one.

The group, including a former army secretary, a former naval secretary, and Michael Hayden, an Air Force retirement general who led the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency under the presidents of the two parties, are part of a trial to reverse the deployment, who, according to them, “put both the members of the service and the civilians at risk of prejudice and violating the constitutional limits government ”.

Some observers have gone further, seeing a direct link between Trump’s desire to send troops to the streets of the American city and its decision to involve the United States in the growing conflict between Israel and Iran. “This kind of authoritarian aggression [rarely] Stay inside the country’s borders, “said Julia Iofe, a national security expert and the founding editor of Puck News, about the deployment of California on June 11.” I didn’t think I would be fair so early, “she wrote on Friday, while Trump’s war plans for Iran are accelerating.

The Trump administration has promised to maintain the troops in place for at least 60 days, to ensure – like Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, told a sub -comity of the house’s defense credits – “that these rioters, looters and thugs on the other side sitting that our police officers know that we are not going anywhere”.

The threat of a more muscular military confrontation with “the enemy inside” has also not disappeared, although one of the remaining questions is whether the soldiers or the many agencies under the control of the Department of Internal Security (DHS) – the application of immigration, the border patrol, the FBI – are more likely to take the lead.

Two days before the rallys of No Kings, Kristi Noem, the secretary of the DHS, was in Los Angeles and declared that the objective of the federal government was not only to maintain order in the streets, but “to release the city of the socialists and the heavy leadership that this governor and that this mayor placed on this country”. A few seconds after delivering these lines at a press conference, FBI agents under the authority of Noem have abused and handcuffed Alex Padilla, a California senator who interrupted him to ask a question.

Tom Homan, Trump’s “border tsar”, threatened to arrest the governor, Gavin Newsom, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, if they hinder immigration sweeping. At least two elected officials, the deputy for New Jersey, Lamonica McIiver and the New York controller, Brad Lander, were indeed arrested for presumed interference in immigration and customs application operations.

The military has so far remained away from these events which have repercussions, their role largely overshadowed by continuous immigration raids carried out by masked federal agents refusing to disclose their names or their budgetary figures, But constitutional experts and scholars say that their presence may destabilize what is already a volatile and politically loaded situation. “The risk of climbing, or someone who makes a mistake, is always present and in these fairly high situations,” said Chris Mirasola, a national security expert at the University of Houston Law Center. “The only deployment itself is climbing.”

By deciding to take charge of the California National Guard, on Newsom’s objections, Trump has ceased to invoke the insurgency law used by former presidents to help repress civilian troubles, more recently during the 1992 riots, when the navies rolled alongside the southern California police patrols in firefighters.

Rather, he has invoked a power rarely used to mobilize soldiers to “temporarily protect” federal property and personnel. Lyndon Johnson used the same protection power to guarantee the security of civil rights demonstrators in Alabama in 1965, in defiance of the State Segregationist Governor, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon used it in an unhappy attempt to ensure that the National Guard was not used since mail during a postal strike in 1970. But the Scholars have not been used since.

Mirasola said that he was a little perplexed, given the vehemence of Trump’s rhetoric on “violent crowds and insurrectionists”, which the president opted for this softer approach. “Maybe he just wanted the theater to get the military in the streets,” said Mirasola. “It is a way of doing it while preserving a space to continue to degenerate.”

It was also possible, he suggested, that Trump could not prevent his military commanders from taking a more aggressive approach. “The military establishment is extremely allergic to the Insurrection Act,” he said. “It is one of the few things in each officer.”

According to veterans and soldiers’ defense groups for soldiers deployed in Los Angeles, the army is also proud to be entirely apolitical and has no appetite to lead to a political conflict involving Trump or someone else. Perhaps for this reason, the National Guard and the Marines were barely visible in Los Angeles.

During the first major demonstration of the city center, on June 8, the Los Angeles police far removed from the demonstrators of the staging area of ​​the National Guard in a federal complex of the courthouse and parked its patrol cruisers in such a way that the guards could not go out and intervene.

Six days later, in the last stages of the No Kings demonstration, a hard core of demonstrators briefly faced a line of navies parked on the front steps of the downtown federal building. “Leave it!” The crowd sang, encouraging the navies to deploy anti-riot shields and to remove the demonstrators from the building. Los Angeles police quickly expressed a dispersion prescription, sent from police on horseback and pulled the fleeting of gaps to send most of the crowd.

Otherwise, the only reported incident involved a military veteran who inadvertently crossed a line of police band outside a federal building in West Los Angeles. One of Guard’s navies fought him on the ground and handcuffed him, but he was released shortly after and told journalists that he had been treated “very fairly”.

California continued the Trump administration during the military deployment and seemed to win an early victory before the court last week when a district judge said that the president had exceeded his authority and immediately needed to make control of the State National Guard. A call committee has since reversed this decision, however.

Part of the problem of California by asserting its case is that the National Guard has been pressed in non -traditional activities with an increasing frequency in recent years, undermining the concept of strict separation between military and civil activities.

Several states, under republican and democratic leaders, have written custody in the functions of border patrol despite serious moral problems among the troops and the opposition of military brass. New Mexico asked his national guard to work as a substitute teachers in the schools in sub-employment. Florida had them fulfilled as prison guards, and New York supported his guard to control the New York metro.

Supporters of the California trial maintain that none of these scenarios is appropriate. And the deployment of the National Guard for non-military purposes is even more inappropriate, they say, when this occurs an openly supporter goal on the objections of the Governor of the State. “The military should not be in the field of national police. This is not what they are formed,” said Beau Tremitiere, lawyer for Protect Democracy, a plea group supporting the trial.

“If the Americans were not aware of the risks posed by the national deployments politicized by the military before the events of Los Angeles, they are certainly now. Healthy and respectful civil-military relations are still another bulwark of American democracy that the president tries to erode. We are all predicted.”