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      ‘This isn’t an isolated incident’: Trump’s show of military force in LA was years in the making

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      Donald Trump is targeting Los Angeles, the biggest city in deep-blue California – a sprawling metropolis shaped by immigrant communities that the president described on Tuesday as a “trash heap” – with a show of force many years in the making. After his first term, Trump expressed regret for not taking a more heavy-handed approach to the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder by police. So when demonstrations against his immigration crackdown erupted last week in Los Angeles, he turned to the playbook he wished he had used then – federalizing the national guard and deploying hundreds of US marines to confront what Democratic officials insist was a manageable situation, escalated by a president who the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has warned is increasingly behaving like a “dictator”.It’s the made-for-TV clash Trump has been waiting for: visually gripping scenes of unrest in a Democratic-run city furious over his administration’s mass deportation agenda.“Chaos is exactly what Trump wanted, and now California is left to clean up the mess,” Newsom said on Twitter/X.Trump has said he “would have brought in the military immediately” if he could redo 2020. And, former defense secretary Mark Esper told NPR in 2022, Trump asked if protesters could be shot. “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump asked, according to Esper.The showdown in Los Angeles brings together longtime overlapping goals of the Trump regime: bringing state and local officials to heel; trying to tap as many resources as possible for his deportation program; and going after protesters who speak or act against him, all while stretching the boundaries of legality.Sending troops into an American city to stifle largely peaceful protests is a “test case” that, depending on how it plays out in Los Angeles, could be a strategy the administration replicates in other cities, said Sarah Mehta, the deputy director of government affairs at the ACLU.“This isn’t an isolated incident,” she said. “I think what we’re seeing in Los Angeles is this culmination of several weeks of incredibly aggressive immigration policing, the federal government asking the military to get further involved in immigration enforcement, including the transportation of unaccompanied children and attention and riot control, and then on top of that, again, these really targeted attacks against cities and states that are not going along with Trump’s aggressive deportation regime.”Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, said her city was being used as a proving ground for how the federal government might exert its authority over other local governments that resist the president’s agenda. “I feel like we are part of an experiment that we did not ask to be a part of,” she said, speaking at a press conference in downtown Los Angeles on Monday.While Trump sows chaos in the streets, the mayor said, the city’s immigrant communities were gripped by a “level of fear and terror” over the administration’s escalating enforcement efforts, with some undocumented workers staying home and mixed-status families afraid to attend school graduation ceremonies.In January, Trump returned to power with what he says is a popular mandate to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history. Amid growing frustration over the pace of removals, the White House is turning to increasingly forceful tactics, including stepped up raids on workplaces.On Friday, scattered protests broke out in response to a series of immigration sweeps, in some instances by federal agents wearing tactical gear, at businesses across the Los Angeles area. Newsom and Bass said local and state law enforcement were fully capable of handling the demonstrations, but as images of cars on fire and clashes with police spread online, the Trump administration ignored the state’s wishes and brought in the national guard – an extraordinary move that state officials said brought even more protesters into the street over the weekend. Then on Monday, a day of larger, mostly peaceful protests, Trump ordered additional national guard troops and hundreds of US marines to the city.“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again,” Trump vowed, in a speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday.Democratic cities, in particular, have long drawn Trump’s ire. On the campaign trail, he frequently pointed to liberal cities, painting them as hellscapes devoid of capable leadership that would be better run with him in White House. Speaking in Iowa in 2023, Trump said he would use federal troops to “get crime out of our cities”.“The next time I’m not waiting [for local approval]. We don’t have to wait any longer. We got to get crime out of our cities,” Trump said. He, and the conservative allies behind Project 2025, have pushed for withholding federal funds from states and cities that don’t aid federal immigration enforcement.Democrats expected him to make good on these threats. In August 2024, the New York Times reported that Trump’s allies spent the four years between his presidencies finding legal justifications for using the military in these situations, often in the immigration context, but sometimes against protesters.In a statement provided to the Guardian, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said: “President Trump has rightfully highlighted how poorly Democrat cities are run – including emboldening criminals, providing sanctuary to criminal illegal aliens, and putting Americans at risk. In LA, illegal aliens and violent criminal protesters spent the last several days attacking law enforcement, waving foreign flags, lighting cars on fire, and unleashing a state of outright anarchy. Anyone downplaying this behavior, or describing it as a ‘manageable situation’, is either an idiot or a propagandist for the Democrat party.”California, the biggest blue state in the country, has long been Trump’s favorite foil. On issue after issue – from climate to immigration to education – Trump cast the state as a hellscape “ruined” by “radical left” lunacy. In defending his national guard deployment, Trump decried Los Angeles a “once great American City” that “has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals”.Newsom and attorney general Rob Bonta on Monday sued Trump over what they said was an “unlawful” deployment of the national guard over the governor’s objections. Bonta noted that it was the state’s 24th legal action against the Trump administration in 20 weeks.Democrats say the timing of his crackdown on Los Angeles was no coincidence. Trump had just endured a days-long stretch of bad news: his political partnership with Elon Musk imploded, the US government returned a Maryland man wrongly deported after weeks of insisting they would not bring him back and the president’s “big, beautiful bill” stalled on Capitol Hill.“What’s happening in Los Angeles is straight out of the Trump playbook,” California senator Alex Padilla said, “manufacture a crisis and provoke violence to distract from terrible headlines.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSince January, Trump’s administration has targeted universities and college students on visas who had participated in pro-Palestinian activism. The crackdown comes as states have advanced a host of anti-protest bills in the last few years to expand criminal punishments for protesting.On Monday, Trump called for Newsom’s arrest – a move the governor called an “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”.“The President of the United States just called for the arrest of a sitting Governor,” Newsom said after Trump’s threat of arrest. “This is a line we cannot cross as a nation.”Trump was unable to identify a crime he thought Newsom had committed. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested Newsom should be “tarred and feathered”.The Trump administration has already gone after several elected officials who resist his administration’s crackdown. On Tuesday, congresswoman LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, was indicted on federal charges alleging she assaulted and interfered with immigration officers after a clash with law enforcement at a May protest outside of a detention facility in Newark. During the incident, the city’s mayor, Ras Baraka, was arrested, though charges against him were dropped. And a Wisconsin judge was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly helping a man evade immigration agents seeking his arrest in her courthouse.Stephen Miller, the hardline architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, used a simple term to describe the protests last week: “insurrection”.Miller, who was raised in the seaside city of Santa Monica on Los Angeles’s west side, called his home state “the largest sanctuary state in America”, underscoring its status as a trial balloon for other communities. He has described the militarized response in Los Angeles as a “fight to save civilization”.“When the rioters swarmed, you handed over your streets, willingly,” he retorted to Newsom on Monday. “You still refuse to arrest and prosecute the arsonists, seditionists and insurrectionists. This Administration is fighting to save the city and the citizens you have left to struggle and suffer.”Trump, who notably pardoned all those who were convicted for their roles in the insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, has been debating whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, the 18th-century law that would give him the power to activate the military or national guard to quell rebellion or unrest.For now, he is using a different legal justification, though the threat of the act looms. The right to peacefully assemble is guaranteed by the first amendment. Protests in LA have largely been peaceful, not amounting to an insurrection.Engaging the military is a tipping point, Mehta said, because it is “striking and terrifying” to see the president use every tool he can to punish his critics. But, she said, it also reveals the administration’s weakness – they have to use all of these tools to compel compliance.“They’re doing this because they need to make a show of force, and because people are resisting and people are pushing back,” Mehta said. “People are outraged, and they’re very angry about the way that their civil rights are being stripped away, and the aggressiveness with which immigration agents are responding to members of our community.”Mass “No Kings” protests are expected across the country in response to the multimillion dollar military parade Trump has planned in the country’s capitol for Saturday, his 79th birthday and the US army’s 250th anniversary. Organizers expect protests in more than 1,800 locations, though not in Washington DC. About 100 of the events have been added since Trump sent troops to Los Angeles.“Now, this military escalation only confirms what we’ve known: this government wants to rule by force, not serve the people,” the coalition behind the 14 June protests said in a statement.Speaking from the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said he wasn’t aware of any planned protests against the event, but claimed that any participants “hate our country”.Then, he issued a dark warning: “For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” More

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      Trump is waging war against his own citizens in Los Angeles | Judith Levine

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      On Monday, the Pentagon sent 700 active-duty marines to Los Angeles and doubled the number of national guard troops deployed there to 4,000, to quell protests Donald Trump said on Sunday were already “under control”, “still simmering … but not very much”.The same day, the US president used the word “insurrectionists” to describe demonstrators against the unprecedentedly large and fierce immigration deportation raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) that started on Friday in that city. The remark echoed his long-held desire to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which would authorize him to send the military anywhere in the country to put down dissent.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, sued the Trump administration, arguing that it is unconstitutional to use the armed forces inside the US, except in the most extreme situations.Put another way, the government is not allowed to wage war against its own citizens. But this is what it is doing.In its first months in office, the Trump administration enacted what could be called soft authoritarianism: rhetorical glorification of white masculinity and derision of frailty and difference; intimidation of liberal democratic institutions – universities, law firms, the press, and the arts; weaponization of the judicial system against Trump’s perceived foes.Laced through this non-violent aggression are real violence and reward for violence toward selective populations: the denial of life-saving medical care for transgender people and pregnant women in distress, in deference to the “personhood” of their fetuses; the pardon of the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and killed officers on 6 January 2021. And most prominent, the kidnap, deportation without due process, and rendition of immigrants to foreign gulags.But in the last week or so, a second phase has begun unfolding: the literal weaponization of the government to contain dissent. It is no hyperbole to call this, and the less visible mechanisms that reinforce it, fascism.This weekend in Los Angeles, protests broke out over Ice raids across the city, especially at workplaces including a clothing warehouse and Home Depot, where migrants muster for day labor. The raids were aimed at meeting an unattainable quota of 3,000 arrests a day. In this diverse city, which immigrants are rebuilding after the devastating fires, the outrage Ice provoked was inevitable.Some of the resistance was not peaceful – objects were thrown at cars, for instance – but the LA police got matters in hand. Still, over the objections of Newsom and LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, Trump deployed 300 national guard troops to the scene. They carried long guns and shields and fired “less-lethal munitions”, including flash-bangs, teargas and rubber bullets into the crowds; they also wielded their batons.At the same time as repressing citizens’ free speech, Ice is preventing elected officials from fulfilling their responsibility to oversee federal detention facilities in their jurisdictions. On Sunday, two US representatives from New York were denied entry to the federal building in downtown Manhattan where about 100 immigrants had been kept for days in small, short-term holding cells, some sleeping on bathroom floors. A month earlier, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested outside a federal detention center for attempting to do the same thing.Speaking on Friday with NBC News, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, would not rule out arresting Newsom or Bass if they interfered with the deportation raids. “I’ll say it about anybody,” he proclaimed. “You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It is a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.”Homan later walked back his threat to arrest Newsom, who had dared him to do so. Trump expressed no reservations. “I think it’s great,” he told the press.Like every authoritarian regime, this one justifies doing its “job” as a defense of public safety necessitated by lawlessness. “Despite what you may be hearing, the record checks show that we arrested illegal aliens with criminal histories including CHILD CRUELTY, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, DRUG TRAFFICKING, ASSAULT, ROBBERY, HUMAN SMUGGLING,” Homan posted on X. Did they? Ice always says it is arresting only criminals, but it conflates undocumented status with criminality. Yes, it is a felony to conceal or harbor an “alien” – but giving sanctuary, as churches have long done, was rarely penalized until now. Being in the US without documentation, meanwhile, is not a crime. It is a civil, administrative offence.Nor is it a crime to peacefully resist the government’s torment of one’s family and neighbors. “Our officers and agents continued to enforce immigration law in LA, despite the violent protesters,” Homan continued. Some news outlets have called the protests “riots”, a characterization that local observers, including the governor, the mayor and radio host Charlamagne the God, reject. They counter that the demonstrations were loud, angry and almost entirely nonviolent before the national guard arrived to escalate the tension.This sequence of events is not accidental. On Facebook, Katherine Franke, a tenured Columbia law school professor who was forced to resign after defending student protesters against the war on Gaza, recounted a recent conversation with “a prominent Democratic attorney general”. Asked where things were going, he predicted, on “good information”, Franke paraphrased, that in May or June the federal government would intensify the crackdowns to provoke resistance, “then use that provocation as a justification for declaring martial law”. The declaration, she continued, could free the administration not just to deploy troops but also to suspend elections or the writ of habeas corpus.Trump seems to be affirming these predictions. “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” he told reporters. “If we see danger to our country and to our citizens [the response] will be very, very strong.” He nattered on about protesters spitting on police. “They spit, we hit,” said the poet-president, looking pleased with himself.While manufacturing peril, authoritarian regimes seek to manufacture consent, as Noam Chomsky put it – or, better, enthusiasm – for the exercise of their power. To do so, they stage mass rituals of adulation and spectacular displays of the military might at the beloved leader’s command. On the US army’s official Facebook page, the ad campaign for the 14 June military parade celebrating the army’s and Trump’s simultaneous birthdays is unceasing. Repeatedly refreshed is a video of him at his desk. “I am thrilled to invite everyone to an unforgettable celebration, one like you’ve never seen before,” he reads woodenly. “This is your army. This is your country. This is America250,” says the quietly awed narrator of another video. The first eight seconds of the one-minute spot feature Trump.But enthusiasm is not easily won, and trying to compel obedience through force creates backlash. Better to attain anticipatory consent through fear. This is where surveillance comes in. To complement the FBI, the National Security Agency and myriad state-level snitching mechanisms for everything from abortion to teaching Black history, the administration has, perhaps unintentionally, created a sophisticated spying apparatus at the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.The Heritage Foundation wrote the plan to reduce the administrative state to the size of a supply closet; thus, Doge was born. But Trump never cared about waste, fraud and abuse (he believes in them all). For him, the aim was to build a force of unswervingly loyal apparatchiks. In fact, as the Washington Post reports, the department is now scrambling to rehire federal employees. It turns out that things the government does, such as process tax filings and fly weather balloons, need people who know how to do them.But Doge is not obsolete. Now that the supreme court has turned over the nation’s personal data to Big Balls and the boys, and AI is connecting every dataset with every other dataset, it may have a more useful function: coordinating the surveillance state. Homeland security is already spidering through IRS data to locate undocumented immigrants through their tax filings ($96.7bn in federal, state and local taxes in 2024).While the shock troops do the dirty work and the marching bands inspire the masses, Doge may expand from enforcing fealty in the federal workforce to exacting it from everyone. Violence, propaganda and surveillance: the triumvirate makes fascism.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist, and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      Protests across US as anger grows over Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Protests against the Trump administration’s newly intensified immigration raids, centered on Los Angeles, spread across the country on Tuesday, with demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Omaha and Seattle.Thousands attended a protest against the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in New York City’s Foley Square.Some protesters held signs reading “Ice out of New York” and others chanted “Why are you in riot gear? I don’t see no riot here.”Shirley, a 29-year-old protester, condemned the Trump administration for targeting workers, which she called antithetical to the country’s essence.“I come from immigrant parents,” she said, with a large Mexican flag draped across her back. “It’s infuriating to see that this particular government is going into labor fields, taking people from construction sites, into industry, plants, into farms, and taking away what is the backbone of this country.“So I’m here today to remind everybody that the United States started as an immigrant country, and it’s a nation of immigrants, and I just want to make sure that I’m here for those who can’t be here today.”Councilmember Shahana Hanif of Brooklyn spoke before the large crowd in Foley Square. She criticized the Trump administration and New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, for the crackdown on immigrants.“Mayor Adams has made it clear that he doesn’t care about working class people,” she said. “He does not care about any one of us. He is collaborating with Trump to use tactics. He’s complicit.”She also expressed her desire to keep New York a sanctuary city, and called for more protections for international students.“Stop the attacks and assaults on our students!” she yelled, and was met with cheers from the crowd.Thousands also gathered outside an immigration court in Chicago, and then marched through downtown streets, drumming and chanting, “No more deportations!”View image in fullscreenAt one point, a car drove through the marchers, narrowly missing the anti-Ice protesters, according to WGN TV News, which broadcast video of the incident.In metro Atlanta, hundreds of people marched along Buford Highway in solidarity with Los Angeles, local 11 Alive News reported.Protesters marched in Omaha on Tuesday, chanting “Chinga la migra” (a Spanish phrase that roughly translates to the slogan “Fuck Ice” on placards waved by the marchers) after about 80 people were reportedly arrested in an immigration raid on a meat-packing plant.In Seattle, a small crowd of about 50 protesters gathered outside the Henry M Jackson federal building in downtown Seattle to show solidarity with protesters in Los Angeles, the Seattle Times reported.After a rally, the protesters barricaded driveways with e-bikes and e-scooters to block homeland security vehicles thought to be transporting detained immigrants.Large rallies also took place in Dallas and Austin on Monday, and up to 1,800 protests are planned nationwide on Saturday, to coincide with the military parade Donald Trump is throwing on his birthday in the nation’s capital. More

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      Trump’s mobilization of troops in LA to cost Americans at least $134m, Hegseth says

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      Donald Trump’s decision to mobilize the US marines and national guard troops to Los Angeles is expected to cost taxpayers at least $134m and continue for a minimum of 60 days, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told lawmakers during a House hearing on Tuesday.A total of 2,700 military personnel – 700 marines and 2,000 national guard troops – were dispatched to the city on Monday, intensifying a federal presence that both Gavin Newsom, the California governor, and Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, have publicly opposed.“The current cost estimate for the deployment is $134m, which is largely just the cost of travel, housing and food,” said Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, special assistant to the secretary of defense, during a House subcommittee meeting.“We stated very publicly that it’s 60 days because we want to ensure that those rioters, looters and thugs on the other side assaulting our police officers know that we’re not going anywhere,” Hegseth added.During a hearing of the House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Pentagon that was meant to discuss Trump’s proposed budget, Hegseth defended Trump’s decision to deploy marines and national guard troops, telling lawmakers that the mobilization was necessary to assist with deportations and control rioters he claimed were in the country illegally.Democrats used the opportunity to press Hegseth, a former Fox News host who was one of the most controversial of Trump’s cabinet nominees, on the legality and cost of mobilizing military forces against civilians who last week began protesting arrests of suspected undocumented immigrants by Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (Ice).“What’s the justification for using the military for civilian law enforcement purposes in LA, and why are you sending war fighters to cities to interact with civilians?” asked the California Democratic congressman Pete Aguilar.“Every American citizen deserves to be live in a community that’s safe, and Ice agents need to be able to do their job. They’re being attacked for doing their job, which is deporting illegal criminals,” Hegseth replied.The Los Angeles police department chief of police, Jim McDonnell, said on Monday that the arrival of military forces complicated efforts to de-escalate tensions on the ground. “The possible arrival of federal military forces in Los Angeles – absent clear coordination – presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city,” McDonnell said in a statement.The protests erupted late last week following immigration raids that led to the arrests of more than 40 individuals. Demonstrations intensified over the weekend, with crowds blocking highways and setting fire to vehicles. Police have responded with teargas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades.Trump’s decision to send troops without state consent has resulted in Democrats accusing the administration of federal overreach. California officials have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that the federal mobilization violates state sovereignty.Trump again defended the mobilization on Tuesday, stating the troops will remain in place “until there’s no danger”. He reiterated his stance that sending troops was necessary to prevent a “horrible situation”.Trump also told reporters in the Oval Office that he had last spoken to Newsom “a day ago” about the protests in LA, but Newsom denied these claims, saying: “there was no call. Not even a voicemail,” in a social media post.“Americans should be alarmed that a President deploying Marines onto our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to,” Newsom wrote on X.During Tuesday’s hearing, Aguilar noted that the federal law Trump cited to bypass the governor allows such a decision to be made only in response to “invasion by a foreign nation, rebellion or dangerous rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States or [if] the president is unable … with regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”. He asked: “Which authority is triggered here to justify the use?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I don’t know. You just read it yourself so people can listen themselves, but it sounds like all three to me,” Hegseth shot back, before alleging that demonstrators engaging in violence were in the country illegally.“If you’ve got millions of illegals you don’t know where they’re coming from, they’re waving flags from foreign countries and assaulting police officers and law enforcement officers, that’s a problem.”The Minnesota Democratic congresswoman Betty McCollum asked Hegseth why it was necessary to deploy marines to LA when no such step was taken when Minneapolis experienced days of rioting following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.The secretary responded by attacking how the state’s governor, Tim Walz, handled the unrest, then said marines were being sent to LA because of comments made by its police chief. “The police chief said she was overwhelmed, so we helped,” Hegseth said.It was not immediately clear to whom Hegseth was referring.Democrats have criticized Hegseth repeatedly in recent months, particularly after he fired air force Gen Charles Q Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff, and later after he was revealed as one of the top Trump administration officials who discussed plans to bomb Yemen in a leaked group chat containing a reporter.But many Democrats, as well as all Republicans, avoided those topics in the hearing, instead asking Hegseth for details about his budgetary needs and his views on the military capabilities of foreign rivals such as Russia and China. The secretary is scheduled to be back at the Capitol on Wednesday for a hearing before a Senate appropriations subcommittee. More

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      Trump is deliberately ratcheting up violence in Los Angeles | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Donald Trump was on his way to Camp David for a meeting with military leaders on Sunday when he was asked by reporters about possibly invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing direct military involvement in civilian law enforcement. Demonstrations against Trump’s draconian immigration arrests had been growing in Los Angeles, and some of them had turned violent. Trump’s answer? “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” he said.I know Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag”, to borrow the words of the Republican senator Rand Paul, and that this president governs using misdirection, evasion and (especially) exaggeration, but we should still be worried by this prospect he raises of sending “troops everywhere”.Already, Trump and his administration have taken the unprecedented steps of calling up thousands of national guard soldiers to Los Angeles against the wishes of the California governor, of deploying a battalion of hundreds of marines to “assist” law enforcement in Los Angeles, and of seeking to ban the use of masks by protesters while defending the use of masks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Needless to say, none of this would be happening if these times were normal.What makes this moment abnormal is not the fact that Los Angeles witnessed days of mostly peaceful protests against massive and destructive immigration arrests. We’ve seen such protests countless times before in this country. Nor is it the fact that pockets of such protests turned violent. That too is hardly an aberration in our national history. What makes these times abnormal is the administration’s deliberate escalation of the violence, a naked attempt to ratchet up conflict to justify the imposition of greater force and repression over the American people.The Steady State, a non-partisan coalition of more than 280 former national security professionals, has issued a warning over these events. “The use of federal military force in the absence of local or state requests, paired with contradictory mandates targeting protestors, is a hallmark of authoritarian drift,” the statement reads. “Our members – many of whom have served in fragile democracies abroad – have seen this pattern before. What begins as provocative posturing can rapidly metastasize into something far more dangerous.”The hypocrisy of this administration is simply unbearable. If you’re an actual insurrectionist, such as those who participated in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by destroying federal property and attacking law enforcement officers, you’ll receive a pardon or a commutation of your sentence. But if you join the protests against Ice raids in Los Angeles, you face military opposition.Then there’s Stephen Miller. The White House deputy chief of staff unironically posts on social media that “this is a fight to save civilization” with no apparent awareness that it is this administration that is destroying our way of life, only to replace it with something far more violent and sinister.Are we about to see Trump invoke the Insurrection Act? It’s certainly possible. On the White House lawn on Monday, Trump explicitly called the protesters in Los Angeles “insurrectionists”, perhaps preparing the rhetorical groundwork for invoking the act. And by invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump would be able to use the US military as a law enforcement entity inside the borders of the US – a danger to American liberty.The Insurrection Act has been used about 30 times throughout American history, with the last time being in Los Angeles in 1992. Then, the governor, Pete Wilson, asked the federal government for help as civil disturbances grew after the acquittal of four white police officers who brutally beat Rodney King, a Black man, during a traffic arrest. The only time a president has invoked the Insurrection Act against a governor’s wishes has been when Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama in 1965. But Johnson used the troops to protect civil rights protesters. Now, Trump may use the same act to punish immigration rights protesters.One part of the Insurrection Act allows the president to send troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws”. According to Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center, “[t]his provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law”.No doubt, Trump finds that provision to be enticing. What we’re discovering during this administration is how much of American law is written with so little precision. Custom and the belief in the separation of powers have traditionally reigned in the practice of the executive branch. Not so with Trump, who is dead set on grabbing as much power as quickly as possible, and all for himself as the leader of the executive branch. To think that this power grab won’t include exercising his control of the military by deploying “troops everywhere”, whether now or at another point in the future, is naive.Such a form of governance, with power concentrated in an individual, is certainly a form of tyranny. But tyranny, as Hannah Arendt reminds us in On Violence, is also “the most violent and least powerful of forms of government”. And while a government may have the means to inflict mass violence, it is ultimately the people who hold the power. These are the lessons we need to be studying, and implementing on our streets everywhere, while we still can.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘The language of authoritarianism’: how Trump and allies cast LA as a lawless city needing military intervention

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      Donald Trump and his allies turned to a familiar script over the weekend, casting the sprawling city of Los Angeles in shades of fire and brimstone, a hub of dangerous lawlessness that required urgent military intervention in order to be contained.“Looking really bad in L.A.,” Trump posted on Truth Social in the very early hours of Monday morning. “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”But contrary to the Trump administration’s characterization of an entire city in tumult, the demonstrations were actually confined to very small areas and life generally went on as usual across much of the city.Protests began on Friday outside the federal building in downtown LA following reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents were conducting raids nearby. The protests later spread to the cities of Paramount and Compton in response to reported and rumored raids there too, and demonstrators faced off with local and state authorities armed with “less-lethal munitions” and tear gas.By Sunday, despite objections from local officials, Trump made the unusual move of asserting control over California’s national guard and deployed 300 soldiers to support Ice (nearly 2,000 troops were mobilized in total).As a pretext to this action, the Trump administration had characterized the protests as a broader threat to the nation. On X, White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called LA “occupied territory”. “We’ve been saying for years this is a fight to save civilization. Anyone with eyes can see that now.”Trump posted on Truth Social: “A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals. Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations – But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve.”FBI director, Kash Patel, wrote on X that LA was “under siege by marauding criminals”.Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and scholar on fascist and authoritarian movements, says the rhetoric coming from the Trump administration is “an authoritarian trick”.“You create a sense of existential fear that social anarchy is spreading, that criminal gangs are taking over. This is the language of authoritarianism all over the world,” said Ben-Ghiat.“What is the only recourse to violent mobs and agitators? Using all the force of the state. Thus we have the vision of the national guard, armed to the teeth. It’s like a war zone. That’s on purpose, it’s habituating Americans to see those armed forces as being in combat on the streets of American cities.”Ben-Ghiat pointed specifically to a post on X by defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.“The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil,” Hegseth wrote. “A dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK.”Ben-Ghiat said Hegseth employed “the classic authoritarian thing, of setting up an excuse, which is that the internal enemy, illegal criminal aliens, is working together with an external enemy, the cartels and foreign terrorists, and using that to go after a third party, of protesters, regular people, who came out to show solidarity”.In his post, Hegseth added that active duty marines at Camp Pendleton were on “high alert” and would also be mobilized “if violence continues. On Monday, the Pentagon said it had mobilized approximately 700 marines. CNN reported that the government was still ironing out “rules of engagement” for encountering protesters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe protests turned violent when federal immigration authorities used flash bang grenades and tear gas against demonstrators, per reporting in the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, fiery and chaotic scenes played out in downtown LA, Compton and Paramount. Dozens of people were arrested for an array of crimes, including an alleged tossing of a molotov cocktail towards Iceofficers. Protesters shut down a freeway, several self-driving vehicles were torched and dumpsters were set alight, and there were scattered reports of looting.Still, as mayor Karen Bass noted on CNN on Monday, on “a few streets downtown, it looks horrible”, but there was “not citywide civil unrest”.Local officials said that the addition of troops, who were seen standing shoulder to shoulder on Sunday holding wooden bats, long guns and shields, to the already fraught situation only made things worse. Bass described the decision to involve the national guard as a “chaotic escalation”; Governor Gavin Newsom called it “inflammatory”.Newsom said on Monday that he will sue the Trump administration; attorney general Rob Bonta later previewed that lawsuit by telling the public that the Trump administration “trampled” on the states sovereignty by bypassing the governor.“This was not inevitable,” Bonta said of the demonstrations that built over the weekend following immigration raids across LA, adding: “There was no risk of rebellion, no threat of foreign invasion, no inability for the federal government to enforce federal laws.”The inclusion of the national guard functioned as a show of force against a powerful blue state that Trump – and his allies – have cast as an existential threat to the rest of America, in part on account of its “sanctuary status”, meaning local officials don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.“Simply put, the government of the State of California aided, abetted and conspired to facilitate the invasion of the United States,” Stephen Miller wrote on X.As Trump and his allies fomented chaos on the streets, Maga-world personalities and some Republican officials added to the mayhem by sharing misinformation online. Senator Ted Cruz and Infowars’s Alex Jones reshared a video, originally posted by conservative commentator James Woods, of a burning LAPD car during a protest in 2020, claiming it was from the current LA unrest.Prominent accounts also shared a video from last year of a flash mob attack on a convenience store clerk, claiming that violent protesters were currently assaulting a small business owner. An account called US Homeland Security News, which has almost 400,000 followers, posted an image of a stack of bricks with the caption: “Alert: Soros funded organizations have ordered hundreds of pallets of bricks to be placed near ICE facilities to be used by Democrat militants against ICE agents and staff!! It’s Civil War!!” The image, which was also used to spread false information about Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, was taken at a building supply company in Malaysia.Trump has also repeatedly suggested that some of the individuals involved in the protest were “paid”, invoking a popular rightwing conspiracy about dark money bankrolling liberal causes.This, too, is another tactic out of the authoritarian playbook, according to Ben-Ghiat.“If there are any protests against the autocrat, you have to discredit them by saying they are crisis actors, they are foreign infiltrators,” Ben-Ghiat said. “You have to discredit them in the public eye.”Officials in LA are bracing for further protests. The Los Angeles police department received backup from at least a dozen police forces in southern California, according to the Los Angeles Times. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said on Monday that he thinks it’s “highly likely” that all 2,000 of the national guard soldiers who were mobilized will be deployed to LA.The weekend’s unrest also casts a potential shadow over Trump’s military parade slated for this Thursday in Washington DC. Opponents of that event are organizing protests across the US under the banner of “No Kings”. More

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      ‘Demoralizing’: Venezuelans experience confusion and fear amid Trump travel ban

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      As the sun rose over Caracas, Yasmin Quintero, a grandmother, was already in line at the city’s airport, trying to board the next available flight to Bogotá, Colombia.She had originally planned to travel from Medellín to Florida on 12 June to visit her son, a US citizen, and help care for her granddaughter.But once her family learned about the Trump administration’s travel ban on citizens from 12 countries – including Venezuela – they moved her trip forward, forfeiting the original tickets.“The prices more than doubled in less than two hours,” she said. Now, Quintero was facing three connecting flights to reach her family – and she had lost hundreds of dollars in the process.The new ban went into effect at 12am ET on Monday, more than eight years after Donald Trump’s first travel ban sparked chaos, confusion and months of legal battles.The proclamation, which Trump signed on 4 June, “fully” restricts the nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the US. But restrictions were also imposed on nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.The US state department later clarified that travelers with visas issued before 8 June would “generally be permitted to travel and will be inspected by CBP [Customs and Border Protection] in alignment with current law and regulation, if no other boarding concerns are identified”.But by then, the vaguely worded presidential proclamation had already sparked panic: in Caracas, all flights to countries connecting to the US sold out as Venezuelans with valid visas rushed to reach the US before the ban came into effect.On Friday morning, Sonia Méndez de Zapata anxiously urged her son Ignacio to proceed straight to security after check-in. Ignacio, who is studying engineering in North Carolina, had returned home in late May to spend the summer with his family. But student visas are also affected by the new restrictions, and as soon as the news broke he cut short his visit after just 10 days back home.The family arrived at Simón Bolívar international airport at least four hours ahead of his flight to Curaçao, the first leg of a hastily rearranged itinerary. “He would lose his life if he stays here,” Méndez de Zapata said, expressing concern about the lack of opportunities for young people in Venezuela.For others, the announcement shattered long-held routines. Sara Fishmann, a consultant who has travelled to the US regularly for over three decades, said it was the first time she felt anxious about entering the country. The US, she said, had become a natural gathering place for her dispersed family.“Now I’m scared it will no longer be a place where we can reunite,” she said. “I don’t even know who we’re the victims of any more. It feels like all of them – the politicians.”Members of the Venezuelan diaspora – now nearly 8 million strong – have also felt the impact of the decision. Among them is Iván Lira, who lost his job at a US-funded NGO in March after the suspension of USAID operations in Venezuela. Lira, who now lives in Bogotá, was supposed to be the best man at his cousin’s wedding in the US on 20 June.“Not being able to attend would be demoralizing,” Lira said. “We’re practically brothers. Not being there on such an important day – one that will be remembered forever – would be painful.”He described the prevailing mood among Venezuelans as one of desperation. “It’s a decision that stigmatizes Venezuelan people,” Lira added.The US justified Venezuela’s inclusion in the ban on the grounds that the government of Nicolás Maduro has long refused to accept deported nationals.Opposition politicians – who have looked to Washington to support their efforts against Maduro – remained silent on the travel ban until 6 June, when the opposition figurehead María Corina Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, published a statement via X urging the US government to revise the travel restrictions, arguing that Venezuelans are victims of a “criminal regime” and forced into mass displacement. Machado reposted it on X but did not comment further.Machado – who enjoys broad support among US officials and politicians – has long been seen as a leading figure in the fight for democracy in Venezuela.Francis García, who has lived in Argentina for over seven years, knows the weight of the Venezuelan passport all too well. She frequently travels to the US to see her long-distance partner. But during her most recent trip, she was subjected to aggressive questioning at the border.“Being Venezuelan, nothing is ever simple,” García said. “You leave the country, but it doesn’t matter. I left hoping things would get easier – but they never do.”Meanwhile, as travelers scrambled to leave, Simón Bolívar international airport swelled with police officers accompanying passengers on the latest flight under the government’s “Return to the Homeland” plan – a voluntary repatriation scheme framed as “self-deportation”. More

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      Los Angeles protests: California governor says marines ‘not political pawns’ as Donald Trump deploys more National Guard troops – live

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      The governor of California has said US marines are “not political pawns”, as Trump vows to send the elite soldiers in to LA.Gavin Newsom posted on X: “U.S. Marines serve a valuable purpose for this country — defending democracy. They are not political pawns.“The Secretary of Defense is illegally deploying them onto American streets so Trump can have a talking point at his parade this weekend.“It’s a blatant abuse of power”, Newsom added. “We will sue to stop this.” The state of California has lodged suit against the Trump administration.An association of Korean Americans in Los Angeles has criticised Donald Trump Jr., the son of the U.S. president, for “reckless” comments on social media and urged him not to exploit a riot that devastated their community 33 years ago.The Korean American Federation of Los Angeles also said an operation by the U.S. administration to round up suspected undocumented immigrants lacked “due legal procedures”.Donald Trump Jr. posted a photograph of a man with a rifle on a rooftop on X with a message: “Make Rooftop Koreans Great Again!” referring to actions by the Korean American community during the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles.The federation in separate statements expressed concern over the developments in Los Angeles over the last week and said their businesses were seriously affected by the crackdown and arrests.“While the unrest has not yet subsided, Donald Trump Jr. … showed the recklessness of posting a post on X on Sunday, June 8, mocking the current unrest by mentioning the ‘Rooftop Korean’ from the LA riots 33 years ago,” it said in a statement on Monday Los Angeles time.“As the eldest son of the current president and an influencer with approximately 15 million followers, his actions could pose a huge risk in these icy times, and we strongly urge the past trauma of the Korean people be never, ever exploited for any purpose.”Hundreds of deputies have been mobilised in Los Angeles County as law enforcement try to respond to widespread protests, the state governor Gavin Newsom’s office has said.The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, in coordination with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), has formally requested mutual aid assistance from law enforcement agencies within and outside of Los Angeles County to support LAPD.It has approved the mobilisation of 20 deputies from San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department; 83 deputies from Orange County Sheriff’s Department; 32 deputies from Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department; 44 deputies from Ventura County Sheriff’s Department and 80 officers from municipal police agencies within Los Angeles CountyTo bring further support to the region, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has already provided more than 200 deputies to support the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).The protests so far have resulted in a few dozen arrests and some property damage.“What is happening effects every American, everyone who wants to live free, regardless of how long their family has lived here,” said Marzita Cerrato, 42, a first-generation immigrant whose parents are from Mexico and Honduras.Protests also sprung up in at least nine other US cities overnight, including New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, according to local news outlets.In Austin, Texas, police fired nonlethal munitions and detained several people as they clashed with a crowd of several hundred protesters.US officials said the marines were being deployed to protect federal property and personnel, including immigration agents. A convoy of 10 to 15 buses with blacked-out windows and escorted by sheriff’s vehicles, left the base at Twentynine Palms in the desert east of Los Angeles late Monday and headed toward the city, stopping around 1am (9am BST) at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, about 20 miles (35 km) south of downtown Los Angeles.Despite their presence, there has been limited engagement so far between the Guard and protesters while local law enforcement implements crowd control.Homeland Security said its Immigration and Customs Enforcement division had arrested 2,000 immigration offenders per day in recent days, far above the 311 daily average in fiscal year 2024 under former President Joe Biden.“We conducted more operations today than we did the day before and tomorrow we are going to double those efforts again,” Noem told Fox News’ “Hannity.” “The more that they protest and commit acts of violence against law enforcement officers, the harder ICE is going to come after them.”Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass opposed the clampdown, telling MSNBC: “This is a city of immigrants.”Other protests took shape overnight across LA County. Outside a clothing warehouse, relatives of detained workers demanded at a news conference that their loved ones be released.The family of Jacob Vasquez, 35, who was detained Friday at the warehouse, where he worked, said they had yet to receive any information about him.“Jacob is a family man and the sole breadwinner of his household,” Vasquez’s brother, Gabriel, told the crowd. He asked that his last name not be used, fearing being targeted by authorities.Los Angeles police chief Jim McDonnell said in a statement he was confident in the police department’s ability to handle large-scale demonstrations and that the Marines’ arrival without coordinating with the police department would present a “significant logistical and operational challenge” for them.Monday’s demonstrations were far less raucous, with thousands peacefully attending a rally at City Hall and hundreds protesting outside a federal complex that includes a detention center where some immigrants are being held after workplace raids across the city.Australia’s prime minister on Tuesday denounced the “horrific” shooting of a rubber bullet at an Australian television reporter covering unrest in Los Angeles.Australian 9News reporter Lauren Tomasi was hit in the leg by a rubber bullet on Sunday while reporting on live television. Her employer said she was sore but unharmed.“She is going ok. She is pretty resilient, I have got to say, but that footage was horrific,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters after speaking to Tomasi.Albanese said the reporter could reasonably have expected not to be “targeted” with a rubber bullet while doing her job in Los Angeles. The footage showed she was “clearly identified” as a member of the media, with “no ambiguity”, he said.“We don’t find it acceptable that it occurred, and we think the role of the media is particularly important.”Albanese said his government had raised the incident with the US administration but he would not comment on any future discussion with US President Donald Trump.The governor of California has said US marines are “not political pawns”, as Trump vows to send the elite soldiers in to LA.Gavin Newsom posted on X: “U.S. Marines serve a valuable purpose for this country — defending democracy. They are not political pawns.“The Secretary of Defense is illegally deploying them onto American streets so Trump can have a talking point at his parade this weekend.“It’s a blatant abuse of power”, Newsom added. “We will sue to stop this.” The state of California has lodged suit against the Trump administration.Grammy Award-winning rapper Doechii used her acceptance speech at the Black Entertainment Television (BET) Awards to sharply criticise Trump’s handling of the protests.Collecting the award for best female hip-hop artist, she accused the president of “creating fear and chaos” in his response to demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, which sparked days of protest across the city.“I do want to address what’s happening right now, outside the building,” she said.“These are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities. In the name of law and order, Trump is using military forces to stop a protest, and I want you all to consider what kind of government it appears to be, when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us.”Remarkable images have emerged from last night’s protests in Los Angeles as Trump’s administration vowed to intensify immigration raids.The Los Angeles District Attorney has said the county does not need the national guard and the marines, saying there are “more than enough” local police to deal with rioting.Nathan J. Hochman said: “We in Los Angeles county have tens of thousands of police officers, whether they are with the LA police department, the LA sherriff’s department, or there are 45 other law enforcement agencies in LA county.“We have more than enough law enforcement officers to deal with the civil unrest thats occurred so far”, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.“It doesn’t mean that the federal government can’t protect federal facilities with either the national guard or, if they choose, additional soldiers – that’s their choice.“But as far as the civil unrest in LA, that is something that, though obviously very significant, it is something we are taking extremely seriously and we are able to deal with.“We do not need the additional forces that the national guard and the marines present”, he added. “Unless the civil unrest gets farther out of control – and that could happen – we are not at the point where local law enforcement is beyond its means to deal with the situation.”Good morning, Donald Trump has deployed more National Guard troops and marines to Los Angeles as protests in the city go into their fourth day. Here is what has happened overnight:

      California said the deployment of the National Guard by Republican President Trump’s administration was illegal and violated the state’s sovereignty and federal law, according to a court filing of its lawsuit against the US government.

      The US military is to temporarily deploy about 700 Marines to LA until more National Guard troops can arrive, marking another escalation in Trump’s response to street protests over his aggressive immigration policies. Marines were expected to reach Los Angeles on Monday night (LA time) or Tuesday morning.

      Even as protests against raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stretched into a fourth day Monday in LA, city workers began a cleanup of graffiti and other weekend damage across the city.

      The Trump administration vowed to intensify migrant raids, with US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pledging to carry out even more operations to round up suspected immigration violators, extending a crackdown that provoked the protests. More