Don’t Be So Literal About What Counts as a Military Occupation

I want to return to a subject that I have alluded to in several recent articles. The U.S. Constitution, American law, and American civic culture all offer deep resistance to the use of the military in civilian spaces except in the most extreme circumstances. Even then, we rely almost exclusively on what are effectively state and part-time militias, which are incorporated into but nonetheless distinct from the U.S. federal military, at least largely based in the communities in which they are occasionally deployed. This issue came to the forefront early in the second Trump administration, with federalized National Guard troops deployed to various blue states and even “hostile” red states offering to at least deploy their guards to blue states. But the real game is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Patrol, and other increasingly large federal police forces within the Department of Homeland Security. And they are not military.

Over time, I realized I was too literal about it. From a legal and constitutional point of view, these are not military forces. These are civilian police agencies. But the aversion to military deployments in civilian areas is not simply a matter of technical designations, formal non-freedoms of military service, different legal codes, or emphasis on war. There is a substantial reality of the desire to threaten and dominate civilian spaces as if they were enemy territories, conquered rather than governed.