Test Case for Martial Law? What Trump Might Really Be Doing In Los Angeles.

Think it can't happen here? Think again. This is where we might be heading for certain neighborhoods in the United States with high minority populations.

Federal soldiers in military camouflage firing stun grenades and pepper spray in recent days against protestors in Los Angeles.

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I can still use my voice to battle injustice. This platform is one of the few ways I can generate income since Chevron wiped out my bank accounts in retaliation for our victory in the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. If possible, please consider a paid subscription. If not, read on. —Steven)

It appears to me that Trump is taking domestic repression to an entirely new and frightening level in Los Angeles. I believe one of his ultimate goals is to see whether he can get away with imposing martial law and curfews on certain urban areas of the United States.

What is increasingly clear is that Trump and his Stephen Miller-led immigration attack team are using LA to incite violence as a performative display of authoritarian power. Trump can’t impose martial law unless there is sufficient “violence” to convince enough of the American public it can be justified. Trump’s tactics must be considered in this context. His recent moves strongly suggest he wants the violence to escalate so he has more options to project power.

Anti-ICE protestors in Los Angeles over the weekend.

Here are some of the key points from Los Angeles as I see them.

Trump’s masked ICE agents began raiding work places all over LA last week to carry out warrantless (and therefore largely illegal) arrests of so-called immigrants. (I say “so-called” because every non-Indigenous person here is either an immigrant or comes at some point from an immigrant family.) That’s an outrage in and of itself, but there’s much more. When people in the affected communities of LA understandably took to the streets to protest the attacks on immigrants, federal agents fired pepper spray, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades to provoke the very angry reaction they can be cited to justify even greater repression (multiple journalists from the @latimes reported that law enforcement were the aggressors). These federal agencies include ICE, the United States Marshals Service, and agents from the Department of Homeland Security Investigations. None of these agencies are trained in managing domestic protests.

Local police — meaning mostly the Los Angeles Police Department — usually are the entities dealing with these types of street-level protests but they had much of their authority usurped by Trump’s hyper-aggressive federal agents. Trump also took the extreme step of “federalizing” the California National Guard which allows him to send 2,000 heavily armed wartime soldiers dressed in camouflage into LA’s streets (see pictures); he’s also threatening to send 500 Marines into the city. No US President since Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965 has ever federalized a state national guard without the permission of the state’s governor. (Johnson did it over the protest of segregationist Governor George Wallace in Alabama to protect civil rights protestors who were marching from Selma to Montgomery.)

Soldiers from the California National Guard outside a detention center in Los Angeles where immigrants arrested without warrants are being held.

It’s virtually unheard of for a President to take over a state national guard — which is a reserve force of the US Army — without a formal request from the state’s Governor. Yet California Governor Gavin Newsom has condemned Trump’s move and is suing him over it. But if the Trump-Miller anti-immigrant crusade keeps going in the same direction, I believe Trump’s next step will be to try to invoke an obscure statute from 1807 called the Insurrection Act (see here for an explanation) to turn the actual US army into a policing force that can be unleashed against US citizens. This has long been on his authoritarian wish list. In my view, this easily could lead to martial law, curfews, and shoot to kill orders in certain neighborhoods. He’s already called for Governor Newsom’s arrest.

National Guard soldiers sent by Trump to the streets of LA.

Trump is using federal law enforcement to try to create a spectacle of violence that can be used to justify turning the US military against the people. LA Mayor Karen Bass said it best: “These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city.” Whether this happens depends on a number of factors, including whether enough people hit the streets to oppose Trump during the national No Kings protest scheduled for the President’s birthday on June 14.

Trump and his ICE agents need to be forced to respect the law. That depends to a great degree on us and our courts. 👊👊👊

-Steven