Washington – When racial justice demonstrated cities through America to the depths of the pandemic, President Trump, then during his first mandate, demonstrated a deduction. The threats to invoke the Insurrection Act and federalize the National Guard have never materialized.
This time, it took less than 24 hours of isolated demonstrations in the County of Los Angeles for Trump, more aggressive than ever in its use of executive power, for Place a historical order.
“The federal government will intervene and solve the problem,” he said on social networks on Saturday evening, issuing an executive action that has not been seen since civil disorders seized the nation in the 1960s.
It was the last expression of an unleashed president from conventional parameters on his power, carefree with the rights of the States or the proportionality of his actions. And the targeting of a democratic city in a democratic state was, according to the vice-president, an intentional ploy to do a political lesson in Los Angeles.
“The immediate question is the legality of the president who draws in the National Guard, and this is another clear example of the president using the whole force of the government in response to the Resistance,” said Peter Kastor, president of the History Department of the University of Washington in St. Louis. “This testifies to the quantity of gloves in its second term.”
The pace of climbing and the reluctance of the federal government to rely on the cooperative authorities of the application of local laws raise questions about the intentions of the administration by answering the demonstrators. The administration jumped several stages in an established scale of response options, such as improving the American marshal service and federal protection services to protect prisons and federal goods, before asking the State if a deployment of the National Guard could be justified.
Harold Koh, a former dean of the Yale Law School, where he is now a professor, said that on the ground in a calm Los Angeles are proof that Trump’s generalized disorder claims are “a pretext for the search for justification”.
“What is happening aside, where it is fixed – the prices, Harvard, immigration – is to assert the allegations of emergency threats and national security to trigger extraordinary powers which are rarely, if not, invoked,” said Koh, “to give extremely extensive readings to laws that have been carried out for other purposes.”
Local officials were clear that they did not want or needed federal help. And they fear that Trump’s heavy response may degenerate what was a series of isolated clashes and old composed of a few hundred people in a larger challenge of application of the law that could hike in the city.
“We tried to speak to the administration and tell them that there was absolutely no need to have troops on the ground here in Los Angeles – the demonstrations that occurred last night in Los Angeles were relatively minor, a hundred demonstrators,” said the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass. “So it’s useless.”
The historic deployment of the president caused a fury among local Democrats who warned against a States rights. Trump’s acquisition of the California National Guard, said Governor Gavin Newsom, was invited to “not because there is a shortage of application of the law, but because they want a show.”
“Don’t give them one,” he said.
Vice-President JD Vance, calling for “insurrectionist” anti-glossy demonstrators, praised the political decline, declaring on X that “half of the American political leadership decided that the application of the borders was bad”.
Its use of the term “insurrectionists – echo by other members of the administration, including Stephen Miller, the chief advisor of the president on immigration – suggests that the administration could seek to invoke the law on insurrection, a powerful tool which could allow the president to suspend Comitatus act posseA law of 1878 which prohibited the use of federal police in state and local matters.
But the vice-president’s remarks also underline the political motivations behind the action on Saturday. The last time Trump faced a decision to call for the National Guard to repress the insurrectionists – January 6, 2021 – he refused to do so.
“The morning of January 6 was a protest rally. The afternoon of January 6 was an attack on a federal building, the Capitol,” said Kastor. “He did not call the National Guard at this time of crisis, but he will do it now. In this case, they are people who supported him. Here are people who oppose him.”
‘Zero tolerance’
The demonstrations against ice agents on Friday and Saturday were limited in scale and location. Friday afternoon, several dozen people protested against the flash raids outside the metropolitan detention center, with a little conflict with agents and to vandalize the building. The Los Angeles police department authorized the so-called less lethal ammunition against a small group of “violent demonstrators” after the concrete was thrown into an officer. The demonstration disbursed at midnight.
On Saturday, outside a Home deposit in Paramount, the demonstrators chanted “Ice returns home” and “no justice, no peace”. Some demonstrators have shouted to the Sheriff deputies of the County of Los Angeles, and a series of flash-bang grenades has been deployed.
“What are you doing!” A man shouted.
Times journalists have seen federal agents of several cycles of flash grenades and pepper balls against the demonstrators.
Despite the limited scale of violence on Saturday evening, the Trump administration adopted the visuals of a city in chaos forcing the federal application of the law and the order.
“The Trump administration has a zero tolerance policy for criminal behavior and violence, especially when this violence is addressed to law enforcement agents who are trying to do their job,” the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday evening. “These criminals will be arrested and quickly brought to justice. The commander-in-chief will ensure that the laws of the United States will be executed completely and completely. ”
Secretary of defense Pete HegsethIn a statement on Saturday, said the administration was ready to go further, deploying American navies in active service in the second largest city in the country. “It’s a disturbed behavior”, Newsom responded.
Trump’s Trump’s decision to call the National Guard, using an authority rarely used called Title 10does not have a clear historical precedent. President Lyndon Johnson cited title 10 in 1965 to protect civil rights walkers during demonstrations in Selma, Alberta, but made concern that the local police refuse to do so themselves.
On the other hand, this weekend, the Sheriff’s Department of the County of Los Angeles said that it was fully co-opted with the Federal police. “We are planning long -term civilian disorders and collaborating with our partners responsible for the application of laws,” the ministry said in a statement.
The 2,000 guards called for the duty are double the number which was awarded by the local authorities to respond to much wider demonstrations that broke out in Los Angeles following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Tom Homan, the president’s border tsar, told Fox News on Saturday evening that the administration was “already ahead of the match” in its planning of a deployment of the National Guard.
“It is a question of enforcing the law, and again, we are not going to apologize for having done it,” he said. “We intensify.”
The troops of the National Guard began to arrive in Los Angeles on Sunday morning, moving into federal buildings in the county of the.
“If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, cannot do their job”, “,” Trump wrote On its social media platform, “then the federal government will intervene and solve the problem.”