Not even a full week ago (though it feels like weeks), immigration enforcement agents in Paramount, in LA County, raided a local Home Depot, prompting acute backlash in the immigrant-heavy city that sparked demonstrations that eventually spread to downtown LA, some of which featured clashes between protesters and police and sporadic violence like cars being burned. In short order, the Trump administration — smelling the opportunity of emergency — federalized the California National Guard over Gov. Gavin Newsom’s objections and then deployed active-duty Marines to the streets.
As we watch this madness unfold on the other coast, the natural question is: when’s our turn? Mayor Eric Adams’ apparent coziness with the Trump administration has left us in a sort of uneasy stalemate where, yes, ICE agents have been indiscriminately arresting people at our immigration courts downtown and trying to break through the resulting protests — as my colleagues at Hell Gate recently reported, this appeared to have entailed using a fake emergency to get unwitting FDNY personnel to clear a path for them to move detainees. At the same time, we have avoided some of the larger-scale, more clearly authorized raids that have taken place elsewhere. This weird truce seems to be breaking, though, as NBC News reported that ICE is preparing to surge tactical teams to multiple blue jurisdictions, including New York.
So, what everyone is wondering is, what is our plan here? I spoke to a state legislator this week who told me that these conversations are already taking place in Albany, but there really are no good options. I think there is a pretty good argument to be made that Trump‘s deployment of the National Guard was straightforwardly unlawful. That’s an argument Newsom is actively making in court, along with the even more obvious notion that it is fully illegal for the federal government to be using active duty military to conduct domestic law enforcement (which I think it is inarguably doing with having troops assist ICE personnel as they make arrests). It’s all a bit technical, but the basic premise is that the law that allows the president to federalize the Guard runs through cooperation with governors — cooperation that Trump does not have. Separately, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of active duty military of any kind for domestic enforcement. That litigation, though, is unlikely to be fully resolved anytime soon, and will probably rocket its way right up to the Supreme Court.
I think the real question for local leaders is how local police react, and more specifically, whether they act as a force multiplier for this attempted federal takeover or step back and do only what they have to to prevent out-and-out criminal activity. This is especially salient because Trump never seems to have understood, and certainly doesn’t seem to currently care about, the distinction between legally-protected protest and speech, and unprotected violence and property damage. Just this week, ahead of his birthday military parade, Trump said protests would be met with “very big force,” making no distinction between peaceful and violent demonstrations. And in case you haven’t heard, this Saturday, on Trump’s 79th birthday, the military will hold a huge military procession trampling down Constitution Avenue, featuring tanks, thousands of troops, and other military hardware.
One of the most salient criticisms that I have seen of local leaders in LA is that they are playing Trump‘s own game by trying to demonstrate that they can crack down more effectively than the feds can. Mayor Karen Bass imposed a curfew for parts of downtown — a move that plays into the narrative that things are out of control, even as most on-the-ground accounts point to the most heated demonstrations being confined to a tiny area and the majority of protesters marching peacefully. That really is one of the main takeaways getting lost in all the media shuffle: the vast majority of people in LA are going to work, going out to dinner, generally living their normal lives even as people like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller insist that the city is practically overrun with “Third World” hordes, barely a step above breaking out “blood and soil” language.
I hate to say it, but the most effective leader on the ground now is Newsom, who has pretty uniformly responded to Trump‘s overreach and provocations by telling him to pound sand. Trump immigration coordinator Tom Homan has raised the prospect of having Newsom arrested — an idea that Trump has now endorsed; and let’s just take a moment here to emphasize how absolutely bananas everything has gotten when the president musing about arresting an oppositional sitting governor of the country’s largest state barely makes news. But Newsom has told them to basically come and slap the cuffs on. You could say that this is maneuvering in service to the larger political aspirations that Newsom has clearly always harbored, but who cares? That’s politics; politicians and leaders do things all the time for reasons both of safeguarding their constituents and raising their own political profile. If Newsom has come to realize that trying to appease Trump is folly and it will be an extremely politically popular thing in the Democratic party to be seen unabashedly going toe to toe with him, then so be it.
I want to talk for a second about something kind of uncomfortable, which I’ve been having some discussions around with both my editorial board and others in the political sphere: At some point, political leaders are going to be left with no good options, and there are some red lines that will seem a lot more crossable. Barring some online tankies and other fringe figures, nobody really wants a forced showdown between localities and the federal government — something that slides closer to an all-out civil war. Still, with people like Miller talking about suspension of Habeas Corpus and troops literally on the streets now, I wonder what hushed conversations are happening in Sacramento, Albany, and other statehouses about the ability to directly constrain federal operations. Newsom and others have also floated potential cudgels that states and localities could wield against Trump, including the withholding of taxes to the federal government. All of this is, of course, untested and extreme, and leaves us in some uncharted territory.
I can’t really say what happens next, and anyone who tells you they can is quite frankly lying. I will say that while this is all very novel for us here in the United States, none of this is particularly unprecedented globally, so we have some sense of where things go from here. If Trump finds that he is successfully able to deploy the military for pacification of protest and domestic enforcement, there’s absolutely no reason to think that he won’t keep further escalating in his effort to wrangle the entire country under his direct control to strenuously enforce his personal governing vision (or, rather, the governing vision of the many ideologues in his administration, given that Trump himself seems to be mainly interested in getting even richer and basking in the trappings of the office).
That said, I don’t think it’s really going to work. My sense is that they are overplaying their hand and that will become apparent soon enough. The clearest path to that is Trump giving some type of order to the military and the military simply refusing to follow it. The big fear is that this will be an order to arrest or even open fire on demonstrators, but it doesn’t have to be anything quite as high-level. As I’ve said before, a lot of the Trump administration‘s power is maintaining the impression that they are firmly in charge and cannot be opposed. That kind of crack in the veneer would take a lot of air out of their authoritarian sails. We’ll have to see, but one thing is certain: we are living through history.
