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      The rise of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policy

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      With Los Angeles convulsed by confrontation between pro-migrant protesters and military units dispatched by Donald Trump, no figure apart from the president has loomed larger than Stephen Miller.As the man in the Oval Office, it is Trump who has absorbed the accusations of authoritarianism for usurping the powers of California’s government after deploying 4,000 national guard troops and 700 active marines on to the streets of a city that is home to more undocumented immigrants than any other in the US.Behind the scenes, however, this has been the apogee of Miller’s power – and an episode that illuminated his power in a White House where his influence far outstrips his misleadingly modest title of deputy chief of staff.Miller, 39, may have been the true catalyst for the volatile scenes that played out over several days in the city of his birth.As the long-term architect of Trump’s years-long effort to reinvent US immigration policy, he has pressed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to intensify efforts to arrest migrants as deportation figures fell far short of pre-election promises.At a meeting at Ice’s Washington headquarters last month, Miller ordered them to skip the usual practice of compiling lists of suspected illegal migrants and instead target Home Depot, where day laborers gather for short-term hire, and 7-Eleven stores, to carry out mass arrests, the Wall Street Journal reported.Ice would aim for a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day, he told Fox News – a figure exceeding previous estimates, based on assumptions that those with criminal records would be prioritised. It also seemed to raise the risk of mistakes and wrongful arrests.Accordingly, Ice has drastically stepped up its arrest rate – and broadened the profile of those targeted.The results have been plain to see. As demonstrators took to the streets, Miller promptly raised the stakes by accusing them of an “insurrection”.Amid the hullabaloo and expressions of outrage, Miller may allowed himself a quiet smile of satisfaction over sticking it to the city of his birth – in many ways emblematic of the progressive cultural trends despised by Trump’s “Make America great again” (Maga) followers but a place where his own hardline anti-immigrant views had long provoked derision.The son of affluent Jewish parents, Miller’s evolution into a race-baiting provocateur took shape in the upscale suburb of Santa Monica, where he gained notoriety as an incendiary agitator at the eponymous local high school.Video footage purportedly from the period and circulated on social media shows a bearded Miller stridently voicing his disdainful view of school janitorial staff“Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do this,” he shouts into a microphone.The gross statement seems to have been representative of a broader canvas of toxic ideas, with racism at its core.In Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, to date the only biography published on Miller, author Jean Guerrero recounts one episode from the future political operative’s adolescence, when he suddenly ditched a close friend, Jason Islas, on the grounds of his ethnicity.“The conversation was remarkably calm,” Islas, a Mexican American, is quoted saying. “He expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way.”An article he wrote as a 16-year-old for a local website expresses contempt for fellow students of Hispanic origin.“When I entered Santa Monica High School in ninth grade, I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills,” Miller wrote on the Surfsantamonica site. “There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.”The school, he added, was one where “Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome” – a view reflecting the then recentness of the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaida and also Miller’s increasing focus on Muslims.Miller’s indulgence in far-right ideas continued during his college years at Duke University in North Carolina, where he associated with white nationalist thinkers and groups.According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he worked with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which it defined as a “an anti-Muslim hate group”, and also with Richard Spencer, a white nationalist leader who popularized the term “alt-right” to describe groups that defined themselves through a white racial identity.View image in fullscreenAfter graduating, Miller moved to Washington to work in Congress, serving first as a press secretary to Michele Bachmann, then a Republican representative for Minnesota, before moving to work for Jeff Sessions, at the time a rightwing Alabama senator who later became Trump’s first attorney general.It was in the latter role that his reputation as an avatar of extreme anti-immigrant agitprop became established. In 2013, helped by Miller, Sessions torpedoed a bipartisan piece of legislation that was intended to pave the way for immigration for undocumented migrants.To help sink the bill, Miller used Breitbart News, a rightwing website then headed by Steve Bannon. It would prove to be a fateful connection.The Breitbart connection also shone further light on Miller’s views on race and immigration, as revealed in emails he sent to editors and reporters.They showed a preoccupation with the 1924 Immigration Act, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, which severely restricted immigration to the US from certain parts of the world on what observers say were racial and eugenics grounds. Hitler subsequently praised the legislation as a model for Germany in Mein Kampf.After Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015 – creating scandalizing headlines by demonizing Mexican immigrants as “drug dealers, criminals and rapists”, Miller took a leave of absence from Sessions’ Senate office to work for him.On the recommendation of Bannon, by then Trump’s campaign chief, he was installed as a speech writer, chiefly because of his focus on immigration, which had become the candidate’s own signature issue.It enabled Miller to showcase his ability to channel Trump’s inner self. The pair have politically inseparable ever since.Miller wrote Trump’s dystopian “American carnage” speech for his first inauguration in January 2017. As a senior policy adviser in the first Trump administration, it was Miller who was behind some of its most notorious policy initiatives. These included the so-called “Muslim ban” on travellers from seven majority-Muslim countries and the practice of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border.His growing notoriety as an anti-immigration extremist drew criticism from his own relatives. In 2018, his maternal uncle, David Glosser, branded him a “hypocrite” for ignoring the memory of his ancestors, who fled antisemitic pogroms in tsarist Russia.“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, wrote in Politico.Miller cared little for such sentimentality.After Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, Miller stuck with the former president – even while his political future initially looked doomed in the aftermath of the 6 January 2021 attack by his supporters on the US Capitol.Consequently, he grew ever more powerful in Trump’s inner circle. He may have earned extra kudos by declining to exploit their relationship to win lucrative consulting contracts, instead setting up a non-profit, the America First Legal foundation.Meanwhile, he immersed himself in studying how to overcome the hurdles that stymied Trump’s agenda during his first presidency.The outcome has been apparent in the blizzard of executive orders during the restored president’s first months back in the White House. Miller purposely sought to “flood the zone” in a manner that would overwhelm the capacity of the courts – or the media – to respond.No order was more quintessentially Miller’s than that issued on the day of Trump’s second inauguration on 20 January, which attempted to cancel birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants. The order was challenged in the courts and is now with the supreme court after the administration challenged the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions supporting a right that is guaranteed in the US constitution.Miller’s anti-immigrant zeal has at times exceeded even that of Trump. According to the New York Times, the president told a campaign meeting last year that if it was up to Miller, there would only be 100 million people living in the US – and all of them would look like Miller.The bond between the two men has grown to such an extent that Miller has been dubbed “the president’s id” in some circles.“He has been for a while. It’s just now he has the leverage and power to fully effectuate it,” an unnamed former Trump adviser told NBC. Others have called him “the most consequential” White House official since Dick Cheney, who exercised vast influence as vice-president under George W Bush.Critics cast Miller as the root of all evil in Trump’s White House. “Stephen Miller is responsible for all the bad things happening in the United States,” NBC quoted Ben Ray Luján, a Democratic senator for New Mexico, as saying.Miller’s exalted place at Trump’s side was illustrated during the recent Signalgate episode – as revealed by the Atlantic, whose editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently invited into a government chat group to discuss airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen, whose missile attacks on Israel threatened Suez canal shipping routes.When JD Vance questioned the strikes – asking whether Trump “is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe” – Miller unambiguously slapped the vice-president down.“As I heard it, the president was clear: green light,” Miller said, according to the transcript.The clearest testimony to Miller’s status has come from Trump himself. Asked by Kristen Welker, the moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, about speculation that Miller might become national security adviser, a usually influential White House post currently filled, albeit temporarily, by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after the previous incumbent, Mike Waltz, was fired.“Stephen is much higher on the totem pole than that,” Trump replied.The result is that Miller’s presence is detectable in all policy areas, including at the state department, where he succeeded in having his ally, Christopher Landau, installed as Rubio’s deputy.The goal is to control the flow of foreigners entering the United States, insiders have told the Guardian.At the state department, Landau has become an important liaison to officials in the consular affairs section, which has been put under the leadership of a conservative coterie of diplomats and reoriented toward policing migration.Officials from the state department have joined FBI agents on recent Ice raids aimed at tracking down unregistered migrants.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, laments that Miller’s rising star means he can “use the powers of the federal government to unleash his fascist worldview”.“[That view] has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump’s presidency,” said Setmayer, who now heads the Seneca Project, a women-led political action committee.“The demagoguery of immigration has long been at the centre of Donald Trump’s political rise, and Stephen Miller’s desire to make America whiter and less diverse, married with the power of the presidency without guardrails, is incredibly dangerous and should concern every American who believes in the rule of law.”Andrew Roth and David Smith contributed reporting More

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      JD Vance threatened to deport him. The ‘menswear guy’ is posting through it

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      Derek Guy was a relatively unknown menswear writer with 25,000 followers on Twitter in 2022. Now, in 2025, Guy has 1.3 million followers on the platform, now called X, where this week both the vice-president of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security posted threats to deport him from the US – the country he has called home since he was a baby.“Honestly didn’t expect this is what would happen when I joined a menswear forum 15 years ago,” Guy quipped on X on Monday. “Was originally trying to look nice for someone else’s wedding.”The threats targeted at Guy, a fashion writer known for lampooning the sartorial decisions of rightwing figures, including JD Vance, marked another alarming escalation in the White House’s ongoing project to mass deport millions of immigrants – raising the prospect of an administration wielding deportation as a weapon of retribution against its critics.But Guy’s story also laid bare the transformation of X. In a few short years, the platform has become a place where Maga and other far-right influencers not only rule the roost, but can see their trollish posts perhaps dictate policy. X may now be a sincerely dangerous place for some users to post their thoughts.It all started with Elon Musk. After taking over Twitter in 2022, the world’s richest man oversaw the implementation of an algorithmic “for you” tab that pushed content from a bizarre array of influencers on users. Through a fateful quirk in the algorithm, Guy was among the platform’s new main characters, his incisive commentary about men’s fashion suddenly ubiquitous on people’s feeds. Guy, who got his start years earlier commenting in menswear forums before launching a blog called Die, Workwear!, was suddenly being profiled in GQ and interviewed by Slate. Everyone started calling him the “menswear guy”.Musk later rechristened Twitter as X, further loosening moderation on the platform, and restoring the accounts of users previously banned for bigotry or harassment. X became even more of a far-right haven, with white supremacist and neo-Nazi accounts risen from the dead. Meanwhile Guy was frequently going viral, namely for posts teasing prominent Maga figures for their ill-fitting suits – bringing attention to the wrinkles on Trump’s trousers, and the “collar gaps” on Stephen Miller’s suit jackets.By 2025, of course, Trump and Miller were back in the White House, pursuing a campaign promise to “remigrate” millions of everyday people out of America. In recent weeks they appeared to ramp up this ethno-nationalist project, with disturbing footage emerging online of masked, heavily armed Ice and DHS agents abducting Latino people from schools and courthouses, or kidnapping them off the streets, often separating them from their children.Guy felt compelled to stand up and be counted.In a long post on X, he recounted his family’s harrowing story of escaping war in Vietnam, a journey that ended with his mom carrying him across the US border while he was still an infant. Guy revealed that he was one of millions of undocumented people living in the US.“The lack of legal immigration has totally shaped my life,” he wrote. “It has made every interaction with the law much scarier. It has shaped which opportunities I could or could not get. It has taken an emotional toll, as this legal issue hangs over your head like a black cloud.”He was sharing his story to “push back against the idea that all undocumented immigrants are MS-13 members”, he wrote. “I know many people in my position and they are all like your neighbors.”Guy’s post sent far-right influencers on X into a feeding frenzy. “JD Vance I know you’re reading this and you have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever,” a user named @growing_daniel wrote about Guy’s announcement. (@Growing_Daniel appears to be the founder of a tech startup called Abel, that uses artificial intelligence to help police write up crime reports.)Vance did see the post, replying with a gif of Jack Nicholson from the movie Anger Management, slowly nodding his head with an intense, menacing look. A short time later, the official account of the Department of Homeland Security joined the fray. The federal agency quote-tweeted a post from another far-right account, which noted Guy’s undocumented status, with a gif from the movie Spy Kids, showing a character with futuristic glasses that can zoom in on a subject from a great distance.The message to Guy was clear: we’re watching you. Vance and DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment about the posts.Prominent far-right figures were ecstatic. “IT’S HABBENING,” posted Jack Posobiec, a Maga operative with more than 3 million followers on X. Michael Knowles, the prominent Daily Wire pundit, posted a photo of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, wearing a blue-and-white sash over his suit jacket. “Hey @dieworkwear,” Knowles wrote to his one million followers, “what are your thoughts on this outfit?” The subtext of Knowles’s tweet was also clear: Bukele has partnered with the Trump administration to hold immigrants deported from America, with no due process, in El Salvador’s most notorious gulag.Guy was aghast at the response. “The cruelty in today’s politics feels horribly corrosive,” he wrote. “Bringing up that hard-working immigrant families — undocumented, yes, but not violent criminals — are being ripped apart based on immigration status doesn’t bring compassion or even pause, but gleeful cheers.”Longtime critics of X pointed to the deportation threats as evidence of the platform’s perils. “…It’s been turned into a political weapon for people who wish to use it to harm others,” noted journalist Charlie Warzel, the author of a recent Atlantic essay arguing for people to abandon X. “It’s not the marketplace of ideas – you do not have to participate in this project! very simple!”For now, Guy – who politely declined to comment to the Guardian about this week’s saga – is still on X, using all of this week’s attention for what he sees as good causes.“ICE raided a downtown LA garment warehouse, arresting fourteen garment workers,” he wrote. “Many of those detained were the primary breadwinner for young children and elderly relatives. Would you consider donating to help these families?”He also took time to taunt those calling for his deportation. When an account belonging to a luxury wristwatch dealer chastised him for “disrespecting” immigration laws, Guy responded with a one-thousand word history of how the flow of immigrants and refugees across borders over the past two centuries led to the creation of Rolex, among other luxury watch brands.He also replied directly to Vance’s post threatening to deport him. “i think i can outrun you in these clothes,” Guy wrote, posting a photo of the vice-president seated at a political conference, his ill-fitting suit pants riding up to his calves. “you are tweeting for likes. im tweeting to be mentioned in the National Archives and Records,” Guy added.Guy then told the vice-president where immigration agents could find him: “Here is my house,” the “menswear guy” wrote, posting an image of a Men’s Wearhouse storefront.

      This article was updated on 14 June 2025 to correct that the movie the gif of Jack Nicholson was from was Anger Management, not The Departed. More

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      in US Politics

      We are no longer free. But we can win our freedom back

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      View image in fullscreenMost of us are no longer free.People are aware of this condition to varying degrees. Some, nostalgic for the world that was, reject “unfreedom” as an exaggerated description of our situation. Others, seeing reality clearly, nevertheless hide from the unnerving implications.Some people, a minority, experience the changes that have come to America in 2025 as liberation. They are free to say and do what they want with impunity and without shame. On the other side of the spectrum, many who are not free now also were not before, and they suffered no illusion that they were. Now, they might raise an eyebrow to the rest of us, asking if we now see what this country has long been for some people, much of the time.But for most in this country, unfreedom is a novel experience. What makes this condition confounding is that our unfreedom doesn’t yet look like it does in Russia or China – it is still partial. Most in this country can still enjoy a dinner out with friends, loudly deploring the current state of affairs. For most, authoritarianism has not snuffed out the pleasures, private or communal, of a spring morning in the park. In fact, most of us can still read about horrors while lying on the grass, soaking up the sun.The newly unfree live with cognitive dissonance. You hear of people like doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk and labor leader David Huerta innocently walking down the street or protesting outside an immigration detention center, or even presiding in their courtroom – being arrested, detained or abducted. Institutions founded on principles of free expression or the rule of law have quickly abandoned them to avoid financial losses. People hesitate to travel abroad for fear of what will happen when they try to return to the country they’ve called home. And now, we have 2,000 national guard troops and 700 marines sent to a city to repress protest against the wishes of the governor and mayor. After Los Angeles, more Americans are conscious of our growing unfreedom.When – if – you wake up to our shared condition of unfreedom, you face an existential choice. Do you act on what you know to be true, or do you hide? Too many corporate titans, university presidents and heads of major law firms are behaving as though they are powerless. Members of Congress admit that they are afraid to speak up. Judges talk openly about the threats they face to their safety.Those leading powerful institutions still have leverage. They still have power. We must call on them to unite and exercise it. Silence and hiding will offer no lasting reprieve.But regular people, everyday people, face a different challenge. In order to act, they must first discover their power – and learn how to use it.What should using that power look like? A dilemma for those awake to our growing unfreedom is that the tools we know how to use to change things no longer seem to work. Protests are crucial in raising awareness, but often don’t compel those in power to change course. Representatives are less responsive to our advocacy. The rules have changed. Reason, evidence and expertise don’t carry the day. Norms we once took for granted are gone.There are ways we can oppose authoritarianism, using techniques that haven’t been used at a scale for decades. These tools are our inheritance. They have been passed down for centuries, by abolitionist campaigners, labor organizers and anti-colonial leaders. Gandhi famously revived them in the early 20th century, inspiring many leaders in the US civil rights movement. The Black freedom struggle, this country’s leading democracy movement, has in turn inspired nearly every peaceful, people-powered movement around the world since. This is the lineage of strategic nonviolence to which we must now return. These are the tools we must rediscover.View image in fullscreenSue. Protest. Vote. Then, rinse and repeat. In recent years, pro-democracy advocates have faithfully followed that formula. These strategies have prevented many abuses. But they did not prevent an authoritarian movement from gaining strength. And they won’t be enough to prevent what we now face: the prospect of years of authoritarian rule, or something far worse.So what is to be done?Much depends on how quickly civil society can remake itself for this new era. We can learn from previous generations of change-makers in the US, and from contemporaries around the world today, who have won by deploying a booster formula for times such as these. It is simple:Disrupt. De-legitimize. And draw defectors.To be clear, the formula of sue, protest and vote remains absolutely necessary – but is not sufficient.Lawsuits curbed the worst excesses of Trump’s first term and have been among the few speed bumps slowing the current administration’s much more aggressive rampage against civil liberties and the rule of law. But we are already seeing open defiance of court orders.When Trump was asked whether he was obligated as president to uphold the constitution in the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, who had been wrongly deported from the US, he replied: “I don’t know.” While Ábrego García is now back on US soil, preventing this particular collision course, other contempt trials continue to play out and legal experts fear many more opportunities for Trump to even more brazenly defy the courts.History also suggests reasons to avoid placing too much hope in the courts, because they cannot always be counted on to save us. Consider Dred Scott v Sandford in 1857, when the supreme court ruled that Black Americans were not citizens; Plessy v Ferguson in 1896, upholding racial segregation; Korematsu v United States in 1944, allowing Japanese citizens to be interned in camps; or Trump v United States just last year, in which the court needlessly expanded the doctrine of presidential immunity. Lawsuits buy us essential time, but by themselves are not a sufficient safeguard of our freedoms.In fact, history further suggests that the courts move in concert with public opinion – and are often pushed by people who take bold action. The supreme court only affirmed same-sex marriage rights, for instance, after public support had increased following years of organizing and advocacy.Protests also play a vital role in building the confidence of those opposed to an authoritarian government’s policies. They help people see they are not alone. And they help embolden those in power who may be sympathetic to the opposition.But while protest remains an effective means of focusing pressure and raising awareness, protest alone can’t force authoritarian coalitions to change. Authoritarians revel in their power to defy dissidents – and can become violent in doing so, as we have seen in Los Angeles this week. Authoritarians have also learned to disregard many types of dissent. Erica Chenoweth, a leading scholar of protest, found that protest movements have recently become less effective in unseating despots around the world, due in part to authoritarians’ growing savvy in repressing them or waiting them out.Meanwhile, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and journalist Vincent Bevins have reported that mass protests facilitated by social media lack the power of protests of a previous era because they are not undergirded by organizations that can negotiate and adapt tactics as circumstances change. Mass protest is essential, but it is not a panacea.Voting is crucial. But rulings on everything from redistricting to campaign finance to voter suppression bills make clear that elements of the federal judiciary are all too happy to disenfranchise voters across the nation. And we cannot wait for communities to make their voices heard at the polls. What happens now will determine whether this country even has free and fair midterm elections.The situation is dire. But as we look to the other movements that have successfully defeated authoritarianism and achieved democratic breakthroughs, it’s useful to maintain perspective. Movements in places like South Africa, Brazil and the Jim Crow south succeeded under conditions far worse than those we face today – when the right to vote and to protest did not exist, when courts were uniformly hostile, when the media and other major institutions were captured. How can it be possible to prevail under such conditions?View image in fullscreenRev James Lawson came into the Los Angeles community center and greeted everyone personally. Some two decades later, I still remember how intently he listened to the two dozen immigrant-rights organizers who had come seeking advice on how we might achieve a federal path to citizenship for undocumented people living in the US. We described a strategy focused on mass mobilization, skillful advocacy with policymakers, and expert communications to frame the problem and solution.His response was kind but firm. Our strategy wouldn’t work, he said. We were playing by the rules of someone else’s game. This Black American leader had seen the full truth of this country – the horrors as well as the heroism – and from that experience learned some hard truths. He wanted to share them with this group of mostly first-generation immigrants, many of whom still believed what we read in textbooks about how change happens. If we wanted to succeed, he said, we would have to engage in nonviolent disruption at a scale big enough to force a moral and economic crisis that would bring about change.We weren’t ready or able to take Rev Lawson’s advice then. We pursued a strategy that achieved some important gains in policy, but were unsuccessful in our efforts to pass federal immigration reform.Maybe we are ready to listen to him now.Rev Lawson knew more about disruption than perhaps any living American. He was, as Dr Martin Luther King Jr called him, the “leading nonviolence theorist in the world”. In the 1950s and 60s, he trained thousands of civil rights leaders and marchers, including John Lewis, to meet violence with love and dignity. He worked closely with the Little Rock Nine, who led the desegregation of an Arkansas high school, helping them muster the courage to remain composed as they walked into school amid a barrage of violent hate. He prepared the brave participants in Nashville’s sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters. He was instrumental in organizing the freedom rides in protest of the defiance of the ruling ordering the desegregation of buses.I’d first met Rev Lawson over a decade before that meeting, as part of a small training on principles of nonviolence that he held for organizers in Los Angeles. I had studied Gandhi and the ideas he’d developed during the Indian independence struggle. I was part of the Aids movement, and I’d witnessed a lot of death and government-sponsored cruelty. I thought I knew the material, but what Rev Lawson taught me in our first meeting shook me to the core.I had expected a master class in tactics. How do you plan a sit-in? How do you get press attention? What police tactics can you anticipate? Where do you have lawyers waiting? Instead, Rev Lawson devoted the first few hours of the training inviting us into deep introspection. He opened a dialogue about love, and asked if we loved our opponents. My attitude was well-captured by Tina Turner: “what’s love got to do with it?”While I had viewed nonviolence as a strategy, Rev Lawson understood nonviolence as a way of life. He believed the principles and techniques he taught couldn’t work without this depth of commitment. You couldn’t win defectors to your side without taking the moral high ground, and you couldn’t convincingly fake love for any length of time.We spent the next few hours of the training on building discipline. How do you conduct yourself facing unimaginable pressure and violence? I remember him inches from my face, calling me names and threatening me, trying to provoke a reaction. At the end, he assessed our performance. Did we manifest love, even to our opponents? Did we maintain the composure under fire that he demanded? With a glance, he let me know that I had done much better with discipline than with love. I’d been resolutely nonviolent, but was obviously smoldering inside.Rev Lawson was teaching us the art and science of nonviolent disruption. This is the hidden electric current that has powered the great episodes of American progress. WEB Du Bois explained that it was enslaved people themselves, and not white northerners, who broke the back of the plantation economy and won their own freedom by engaging in a loosely coordinated “general strike” that fatally damaged the southern cause. In more recent decades, the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott of 1965 and strikes by teachers in 2018 and autoworkers in 2024 are iconic examples of nonviolent disruption that delivered results.Disruption differs from protest in a key sense. Where protests are designed to capture attention, Rev Lawson constantly reminded us that disruption is not always loud and noisy. Sometimes it involves sitting where you’re not supposed to, not buying what you usually do, or not showing up for work. The point is that disruption must exact real economic or political costs on authoritarians and their collaborators.During the early days of the administration, we have already seen such methods yield results. Take the ongoing boycott of Target over its diversity, equity and inclusion policy rollback, which has depressed the chain’s foot traffic and stock price, or the widespread disavowal of Tesla, resulting in a worldwide sales crisis for Elon Musk’s once-trendy automaker. Or look at the Los Angeles unified school district’s refusal to give federal immigration authorities access to the city’s schools.These acts of non-cooperation create friction, and friction slows the consolidation of authoritarianism. Each act of non-cooperation, of disruption, inspires others to use the power they have to throw sand in the gears.It’s an encouraging start. But there is more that must be done to revive the tools Rev Lawson, who died in 2024, left us for times such as these. I am inspired by an organization called Free DC, which is leading the way in revitalizing the lineage of nonviolence for this generation by training and organizing thousands of people across our nation’s capital to stand up for the capital city’s right to home rule, defend workers at federal agencies and protect immigrants. It is a fitting place to begin; Washington DC is still a colony and it is reeling from the firings of thousands of its residents, government workers, without cause.To meet the moment, it will be crucial to scale the work of organizations like FreeDC across the nation and train tens of thousands more in the proud nonviolent tradition that Rev Lawson and his fellow civil rights pioneers left us.View image in fullscreenThousands of people have descended on town hall meetings around the country opposing cuts to Medicaid, which provides essential healthcare and elder care to nearly 80 million people. Some of those showing up are members of unions, community groups and disability groups. Others are people who have never taken action before for whom Congress’s decision is a matter of life and death. Camilla Hudson came to Washington DC to defend Medicaid because she has an autoimmune disease that requires expensive treatments. She explained that without prescription drug coverage, “it’s terrifying … I would have to leave the US because I will die here.”These people may have voted for Trump, for Harris or not at all in 2024. Medicaid is even more important to people in red states than blue states. Most of them would not show up to a rally to defend the rule of law, but they are highly motivated by an issue that hits close to home. The activism is having a huge impact as some unlikely voices in Congress – who have been otherwise loath to break from the administration – openly declare their opposition to cuts.Meanwhile, thousands of people around the country have mobilized to protect their immigrant co-workers, co-parishioners and neighbors. The upswelling of support in Los Angeles, for example, includes union members, people of faith and relatives of immigrants who were not active before the recent raids.This is what it means to de-legitimize – and it goes hand in hand with disruption. De-legitimization, the process of driving down public support for authoritarian policies, recognizes that an administration with policies polling in the 20s or low 30s will be less able to execute its agenda or prevail in the courts than a government whose policies are supported broadly by the public.The goal is to win over everyday people through organizing, helping them understand the connections between the challenges they’re facing and the harmful actions of the administration. This process will ideally help people identify authoritarian strategies, allowing them to better resist propaganda. If done well, organizing can also serve to strengthen citizens’ commitment to democratic principles by offering them an experience of democracy in practice each day, rather than as a quadrennial abstraction.To this end, the administration’s “flood the zone” attacks on so many cornerstones of American life offer not only the biggest organizing imperative, but also the biggest organizing opportunity of our lifetimes. We must harness the power of the many millions of Americans who now feel under threat, including older Americans, veterans, the US-citizen children and spouses of immigrants, the parents of disabled and trans kids, and the large number of people who would be affected by cuts to Medicaid, including patients and medical workers. To name a few.Unexpected constituencies are raising their voices. Take scientists, who have long sought to protect their research by staying away from politics. Recognizing that the administration’s actions are not only undermining their own work but destroying the scientific enterprise for a generation, they are speaking out and even organizing marches of their own.Perhaps the greatest organizing challenge facing the pro-democracy coalition in the US will be bridging between the largely middle-class constituency that is fired up about attacks on the rule of law and the largely working-class base that is focused on kitchen table issues – not on a system that hasn’t been working for them. Without the latter group, the coalition will not be big enough to succeed.We must not be seen to be working to restore a broken system, but rather to transform it through a new vision, with accompanying policy goals. That may include, for example, campaigns for workers’ rights to help dissolve the unnatural bond between billionaires and some blue-collar voters that fuels the authoritarian coalition.We must develop and demonstrate alternatives that people will believe in.View image in fullscreenDisruption and de-legitimization lead to the third key objective: drawing defectors. These efforts must be targeted across the ideological spectrum and they must be achieved at two levels: that of institutions and individuals. Authoritarians rely on support, whether passive or active, from key pillars of society: corporations, churches, police and media outlets, among others. Under pressure, institutions like law firms and Columbia University shamefully moved from neutrality to active collaboration with authoritarianism.It does not have to be this way. Harvard’s recent decision to challenge the administration in court is an example of institutional defection, moving from the sidelines to active opposition. It did not happen by accident. Harvard’s action was the culmination of a massive behind-the-scenes organizing campaign of faculty, students, donors and alumni. Similar efforts are taking place across law firms, foundations and other universities.Employees have considerable leverage when it comes to winning defections at scale among businesses, faith institutions, tech companies, the military and law enforcement. They can push their institutions to not “obey in advance” and instead openly resist authoritarianism. Many individuals across the country who are concerned about the advance of authoritarianism forget the power they can wield over the institutions they are a part of. Now is the time to use it.It is also necessary to win defections at the level of everyday people. Consider the example of Women of Welcome, a group of evangelicals who educate and engage other Christians on issues related to immigrants and refugees. This group recently led a delegation of evangelical women to the southern US border to provide aid to asylum seekers and listen to their stories. They are not progressives – but they are taking a strong public stand for immigrants and recruiting their neighbors in communities that have been broadly receptive to the Trump administration’s xenophobic appeals.In seeking to build a pro-democracy coalition, members of the opposition must resist the impulse to write off, shame or expel those with whom they have disagreed in the past and may still disagree on many important issues. The imperative of defeating authoritarianism must supersede internecine fights or purity tests. It is essential to talk to everyone.Embodying the moral character taught by civil rights leaders like Rev Lawson – acting nonviolently and showing love to those on the other side – will be vital in creating the kind of attractive, welcoming gateway for defectors to join the movement. Doing so will help to create a pro-democracy majority that extends beyond our traditional allies in the progressive movement.I may finally grasp what Rev Lawson meant when he said that love is our secret weapon. When a mom and her three school-aged children were detained by Ice in the small upstate New York town of Sackets Harbor (ironically, the home of Tom Homan, the administration’s immigration enforcement “czar”), public school teachers and administrators swung into action, engaging in aggressive advocacy. These educators may or may not have been politically engaged before, but their care for their students moved them to take a stand, speak up and choose opposition over collaboration. They won – the mom and kids are free as a result of their courage.View image in fullscreenWe face considerable obstacles in trying to prevent the consolidation of authoritarianism in the United States. But the truth is that they are smaller than those encountered by prior generations. The freedom rides, orchestrated in part by Rev Lawson, are now iconic, but we forget the violence that riders encountered in the process. Following the successful Birmingham campaign to win desegregation in 1963, four little Black girls were killed in the 16th Street Baptist church bombing. The next year, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were the victims of a deadly KKK conspiracy in Mississippi.Yes, the physical threats to judges, politicians, election officials and citizens in the United States are real. Yes, immigrants have been taken off the streets and held without due process. Fortunately, as worrying as this week’s troop deployment to California should be to all of us, we still have a precious window of time to organize and dissent openly. We can take hope from cases around the world when everyday people have made that choice in large numbers.U-turns happen. Scholars have found that 73% of episodes of authoritarian breakthrough around the world in the last 30 years have been followed by democratic revivals. Sometimes, those revivals bring about an even stronger democracy than what came before. But U-turns aren’t self-executing. And the time to act is limited – comparable cases like India and Hungary suggest that if authoritarianism is not effectively challenged in the first couple of years, it can deepen and become the new normal for a decade or more.Our aspiration cannot be to return to the before times. The rotten fruit of authoritarianism grew in the soil of obscene inequality and insufficiently democratic institutions. We must therefore not only oppose autocracy, but propose something better – democratic alternatives that are ready to go if we can awaken from this nightmare.Rev Lawson and his contemporaries did not promise an easy path. Millions of us will have to reckon honestly with our current reality. We will need to make the choice to act. We will need to contribute our time, talent and money strategically. We will have to tap deep reservoirs of courage and love we didn’t know we had. Rev Lawson’s key teaching was hopeful: if we do those things, we can get free.

      Deepak Bhargava has been an organizer and campaigner for 30 years and is the co-author of Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World. He currently serves as the president of the Freedom Together Foundation and the Movement Action Fund More

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      Mahmoud Khalil: US judge denies release of detained Palestinian activist

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      A federal judge declined to order the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a setback for the former Columbia University student days after a major ruling against the Trump administration’s efforts to keep him detained.Khalil, a green-card holder who has not been charged with a crime, is one of the most high-profile people targeted by the US government’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activism. Despite key rulings in his favor, Khalil has been detained since March, missing the birth of his son.His advocates were hopeful earlier in the week that he was close to walking free. On Wednesday, Judge Michael E Farbiarz ruled the Trump administration could no longer detain Khalil on the basis of claims that he posed a threat to US foreign policy. The federal judge in New Jersey said efforts to deport him based on those grounds were likely unconstitutional.Farbiarz had given the US government until Friday morning to appeal against the order, which the Trump administration did not do. Khalil’s lawyers then argued he must be released immediately, but the government said it would keep him detained in a remote detention facility in Louisiana. The administration argued it was authorized to continue detaining him based on alternative grounds – its allegations that he lied on his green-card application.On Friday, Farbiarz said Khalil’s lawyers had failed to present enough evidence that detention based on the green-card claims was unlawful, suggesting attorneys for the 30-year-old activist could seek bail from a Louisiana immigration judge.Khalil’s have strongly rejected the government’s assertions about problems with his green-card application, arguing the claims were a pretext to keep him detained.“Mahmoud Khalil was detained in retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” Amy Greer, one of his attorneys, said in a statement on Friday evening.“The government is now using cruel, transparent delay tactics to keep him away from his wife and newborn son ahead of their first Father’s Day as a family. Instead of celebrating together, he is languishing in [immigration] detention as punishment for his advocacy on behalf of his fellow Palestinians. It is unjust, it is shocking, and it is disgraceful.”Khalil has previously disputed the notion that he omitted information on his application.In a filing last week, he maintained he was never employed by or served as an “officer” of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, as the administration claims, but completed an internship approved by the university as part of his graduate studies.Khalil said he also stopped working for the British embassy in Beirut in December 2022, when he moved to the US, despite the administration’s claims that he had worked in the embassy’s Syria office longer.The Friday ruling prolonging his detention came the same day a group of celebrity fathers filmed a video reading Khalil’s letter to his newborn son. The Father’s Day campaign, published by the American Civil Liberties Union, called for Khalil’s freedom and included actors Mark Ruffalo, Mahershala Ali, Arian Moayed and Alex Winter.Earlier in the week, when there was a ruling in Khalil’s favor, Dr Noor Abdalla, his wife, released a statement, saying: “True justice would mean Mahmoud was never taken away from us in the first place, that no Palestinian father, from New York to Gaza, would have to endure the painful separation of prison walls like Mahmoud has. I will not rest until Mahmoud is free.”Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has previously claimed Khalil must be expelled because his continued presence would harm American foreign policy, an effort that civil rights advocates said was a blatant crackdown on lawful free speech. More

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      What the foreign flags at the LA protests really mean

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      At the White House on Wednesday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters Donald Trump’s decision to dispatch the military to Los Angeles had been triggered by something he’d seen: “images of foreign flags being waved” during protests over federal immigration raids.Leavitt did not specify which images the president had been so disturbed by, but the fact that some protesters denouncing his immigration crackdown have waved Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadorian flags, or hybrid flags that combine those banners with the American flag, has been taken as an affront by supporters of his mass deportation campaign.The architect of that policy, Stephen Miller, has complained bitterly about flag-waving protesters on the streets of his Los Angeles hometown, and shared video of demonstrators on social media with the comment: “Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory.”Trump himself even claimed, during his deeply partisan speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, that his deployment of active-duty marines to the city was justified because of the protesters he called “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.But observers with a more nuanced understanding of the Los Angeles communities being targeted in these raids, and of the nation’s history as a refuge for immigrants, suggest that the flags are not intended to signal allegiance to any foreign government but rather to signal solidarity with immigrants from those places and, for Americans with roots in those countries, to express pride in their heritage.Lalo Alcaraz, a Mexican American satirist and editorial cartoonist, who coined the term “self-deportation” in the 1990s as part of an elaborate prank in response to the anti-immigrant policies of then California governor Pete Wilson, said that the protesters carrying those flags in LA are not immigrants themselves, but “the younger generation that are American citizens and that have pride in their immigrant parents”. Their parents, he said, “are hard-working good people who come from other countries – Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador. This is why they proudly wave those flags.”“Of course they’re proud of their roots, and honestly, what has the American flag done for them but persecute their families?” Alcaraz added. “They are promised that there is a right way to immigrate, that there will be a pathway to citizenship, but this promise has been ignored because corporations make profits off the low wages and hard work of these immigrants, and want to keep them in limbo because it’s easier to control them.”That sentiment was echoed by a protester named Jesus, who told NPR during a protest this week that he waved the Mexican flag because “I’m proud of my Mexican heritage, you know? Even though it was several generations ago, my family members were immigrants.”As NPR’s Adrian Florido pointed out, the large number of flags from other parts of the Americas at these protests contrasted sharply with what was seen in the same place two decades ago.View image in fullscreenIn 2006, when huge marches brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of LA to protest against Republicans in Congress introducing a restrictive immigration bill that would close off paths to citizenship and build fences along the border, organizers urged the demonstrators to wave American flags.“Apparently taking stock of complaints about the number of Mexican flags in previous demonstrations, organizers made sure that the vast majority of marchers Monday carried American flags,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2006 on the massive May Day march that year. Images from that rally showed that Mexican flags were vastly outnumbered in a sea of American flags.Others have pointed out that, for Americans with European roots, waving the flags of their ancestors, from Ireland or Italy, for example, is considered uncontroversial.“The reason Mexicans and Mexican Americans wave the Mexican flag is the same reason the Irish wave the Irish flag,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote on Friday. “Not because they want to go back there, but because they are proud of their Heritage and want to stand up for people with their ancestry.”“When you persecute a minority, it makes them more aware of their identity and differences from the majority, slowing assimilation,” he added. “In other words, the Trump agenda is bad for the very thing Trumpists claim to want.”In that light, it is worth recalling that charges of dual loyalty were once hurled at Irish and Italian immigrants, too. Less than a century ago, in fact, American citizens from Irish and Italian families were viewed with hatred and suspicion by native-born, white Protestants.To take one example, when 1,000 robed members of the Ku Klux Klan rioted at the 1927 Memorial Day parade in Queens, and seven men were arrested, one of their chief targets was New York’s Irish American-led police force, which tried to prevent them from marching. One of those men was the current president’s father, Fred Trump. (A report from the time in a Brooklyn newspaper said that “a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so” against Trump was quickly dismissed.)The deep vein of hatred Italian immigrants faced was even a motivating factor in the the first Columbus Day proclamation, issued by Benjamin Harrison in 1892. The then US president hoped to gain support from new Italian American voters, but he was also trying to absolve the country of the stain from a deadly anti-Italian riot the year before in New Orleans, in which 11 Italian immigrants had been falsely accused of murder and were lynched by a mob.One of Trump’s first acts on returning to office this year was to issue a proclamation that Columbus Day would be celebrated during his administration without any acknowledgement of the Indigenous people who suffered so much in the centuries after his voyage to this hemisphere. More

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      Detainees at New Jersey immigration center revolt as chaos unravels

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      Unrest and protests have erupted in and around a controversial immigration detention center in New Jersey, with police and federal officials clashing with protesters after detainees reportedly pushed down a wall in revolt at the conditions they are being held in.About 50 detainees pushed down a wall in the dormitory room of the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, on Thursday night, according to an immigration lawyer representing one of the men held there.“It’s about the food, and some of the detainees were getting aggressive and it turned violent,” the lawyer, Mustafa Cetin, told NJ Advance Media. “Based on what he told me it was an outer wall, not very strong, and they were able to push it down.”Following the uprising, a crowd of protesters gathered at the facility and videos posted on social media show them blocking vehicles being driven by law enforcement officials and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents who sought to quell the disturbance.Amid the chaos, there were reports that four inmates were unaccounted for on Friday morning. A group called NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice said that there were “reports of gas, pepper spray, and a possible fire” inside the center.On Friday afternoon, the US Department of Homeland Security said that authorities are looking for four detainees who escaped from the federal detention center and additional resources were bring brought in to look for them, the Associated Press reported.Delaney Hall is run by a private prison company called GEO Group, which holds a $60m contract with the Trump administration to hold as many as 1,000 people at a time within the facility and has a controversial history over conditions at centers.The center reopened following a refurbishment last month but has faced controversy, with local politicians claiming that it doesn’t hold the correct work permits and certificate of occupancy, posing safety risks. GEO Group has denied this.Shortly after its reopening, LaMonica McIver, a Democratic representative, was arrested after joining an oversight visit of the center. On Wednesday, McIver was indicted and charged with assaulting and interfering with immigration officers, charges which she has called “a brazen attempt at political intimidation”.Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, was also arrested at the site in that incident, for trespassing, but those charges have been dropped.“We are concerned about reports of what has transpired at Delaney Hall this evening, ranging from withholding food and poor treatment, to uprising and escaped detainees,” Baraka said in a statement about the latest unrest at the center.He added: “This entire situation lacks sufficient oversight of every basic detail, including local zoning laws and fundamental constitutional rights.”Ice has yet to comment on the situation at Delaney Hall. The clashes follow protests in several US cities over the detention of migrants and others by the Trump administration, most notably in Los Angeles, where Trump has deployed the military, a extremely rare and controversial move that is being challenged in court by the state of California. More

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      How would recent events in America appear if they happened elsewhere? | Moira Donegan

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      At times the gesture can seem like a cliche, but I like to imagine, for the sake of perspective, how political developments in the United States would be covered by the media if they were happening in any other country. I imagine that Thursday’s events in Los Angeles might be spoken of like this:A prominent opposition leader was attacked by regime security forces on Thursday in the presence of the national security tsar, as he voiced opposition to the federal military occupation of the US’s second-largest city following street demonstrations against the regime’s mass deportation efforts.Alex Padilla, a senator from California, was pushed against a wall, removed from the room, and then tackled to the ground and handcuffed, reportedly by Secret Service and FBI agents, at a press conference in LA by Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. He was trying to ask a question about the deployment of marines and national guard forces to LA in his capacity as Angelenos’ elected representative. Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, was later released; Noem, speaking to reporters after the incident, said both that she knew the senator and that agents tackled and detained him because neither she nor they knew who he was. In a video of the attack, Padilla can be heard identifying himself as a senator as Noem’s security forces begin to grab and shove him.Seconds later, after he has been pushed out of the room, Padilla can be heard yelling to the men attacking him: “Hands off!” The video cuts out after a man steps in front of the camera to block the shot, and tells the person filming, “there is no recording allowed here, per FBI rights,” something of an odd statement to make at a press conference. Several federal court decisions have upheld the right to record law enforcement.The violence toward a sitting senator is yet another escalation of the administration’s dramatic assertions of extra-constitutional authority, and another item in their ongoing assertion of the illegitimacy of dissent, even from elected leaders. In responding with violence toward the senator’s question, Noem, her security forces and by extension the Trump administration more broadly, are signaling that they will treat opposition, even from elected officials, as insubordination.They do not see senators as equals to be negotiated with or spoken to in good faith, because they do not believe that any of the people’s representatives – and certainly not a Democrat – has any authority that they need to respect. Padilla, like the people of Los Angeles and the people of the United States, was not treated by the Trump administration as a citizen, but as a subject.The attack on Padilla by security forces, and the viral video of him being tackled to the ground and handcuffed by armed men, has threatened to overshadow the content of Noem’s press conference, which underscored in rhetoric this same sense of absolute authority and contempt for dissent that the attack on the senator demonstrated with action.Noem was in Los Angeles to tout the administration’s military escalation against citizens there, who have taken to the streets as part of a growing protest movement against Trump’s mass deportation scheme, which has led to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) kidnapping of many Angelenos and left families, colleagues, neighbors and friends bereft of their beloved community members.The protests have been largely peaceful – Ice and police have initiated violence against some demonstrators – but the Trump administration has taken them as an opportunity to crush dissent with force. The deployment of the California national guard – in violation of a law that requires the administration to secure cooperation from the governor – and the transfer of 700 marines to the city has marked a new willingness of the Trump administration to use military force against citizens who oppose its policies.But to the Trump administration, the Americans who have taken to the streets to voice their opposition to Trump policies are no Americans at all. “We are not going away,” Noem said of the military occupation of Los Angeles. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists.” By this, she meant the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, and California governor, Gavin Newsom, who are not socialists but Democrats.The term – “liberate” – evokes the US’s imperialist adventures abroad, in which such rhetoric was used to provide rhetorical cover for the toppling of foreign regimes, many of them democratically elected. The people’s elected representatives – be it Newsom or Bass or Padilla – are not figures they need to be “liberated” from. That is, not unless you consider the only legitimate “people” to be Trump supporters, and the only legitimate governance to be Republican governance.Trump, as he expands his authoritarian ambitions and uses more and more violence to pursue them, has made his own will into the sum total of “the will of the people”. All those other people – the ones marching in the streets, and trying to stop the kidnappings of their neighbors – don’t count.A few hours after Noem’s goons attacked Padilla, a federal district court judge ordered the Trump administration to relinquish control over the California national guard, agreeing with California that the guard had been illegally seized when Trump assumed control of the armed units without Newsom’s consent. “That’s the difference between a constitutional government and King George,” said district judge Charles Breyer in a hearing on the case earlier that day. “It’s not that the leader can simply say something and then it becomes it.”The judge was pointing to the constitutional order, to the rule of law, to the guarantees, once taken for granted, that the president has limits on his power. He gave the Trump administration about 18 hours to hand control of the national guard back to the state of California. It was not immediately clear whether they would comply. Hours later, an appeals court placed a temporary block on Breyer’s order, returning control of the California national guard to Trump. So much for us having a “law and order” president.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Newsom calls Trump a ‘stone cold liar’ as LA protests against Ice raids continue

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      Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, has called Donald Trump a “stone cold liar”, condemned the federal deployment of troops in Los Angeles as “theater” and “madness” and even questioned the president’s mental fitness, as protests over immigration raids in the city continue.Trump federalized 2,000 of California’s national guard on Saturday, with a US president acting over the objections of a state governor in this way for the first time in more than half a century. It followed the outbreak of protests over a series of sweeping immigration raids in the LA area, with Newsom criticizing Trump’s actions as illegal overreach, unconstitutional and “provocation”.Now US marines are being added to this force to back up arrests by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency, in tactics Newsom said have been used to “disappear” people unlawfully in these raids rather than confront the protesters who have destroyed property around an Ice facility in downtown Los Angeles.Newsom, a Democrat, said that Trump never raised with him the federalizing of the national guard before it occurred, when the two spoke by phone last Friday, despite the president’s claims to the contrary. “He lied, stone cold liar,” the governor told the New York Times podcast the Daily on Thursday morning in an interview.Of the subsequent rare commanding of the national guard troops by the president, rather than the governor, Newsom told the Daily: “It came completely out of left field.”The federalized national guard have been taken from their duties on the border and working in California’s forests to clear undergrowth to prevent wildfires and have had to be protected by police as protesters were specifically angry at them being deployed by the president, Newsom said.“That is how ridiculous this whole thing is,” he said. “This is theater, it’s madness, it’s unconstitutional, it’s immoral. It puts people’s lives at risk, these people are being used as pawns.”Newsom said that “looting is unacceptable” but that more than 1,600 police were dealing with the situation and his greater concern was the “thuggish behavior” of the Trump administration in ordering the military on to the streets of a US city. Several members of the federalized national guard have told friends and family they are deeply unhappy about the deployment.“This sends fear and chills up the spines of law-abiding citizens,” said Newsom, who has warned that other states and US democracy itself is under threat from the presidential overreach. “That is a red line crossed, it is a serious and profound moment in American history.”Newsom told local media that Trump’s age seemed to be affecting him.He claimed to the Times that the president can’t recall the phone conversation they had on Friday and that “he’s not all there”, echoing comments first made by the governor on Monday that Trump, who turns 79 on Saturday, is “incapable of even a train of thought” and that he has “lost it”.Trump has said that he wants to “liberate” Los Angeles from protesters and has escalated a feud with Newsom, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, by even suggesting the governor himself could be arrested. Los Angeles was calmer on Wednesday evening than at the weekend and the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, has emphasized in local appearances how small an area has been affected by any trouble, with a limited area under curfew and no looting experienced there overnight into Thursday.However, as protests continue, several hundred further arrests were made late on Wednesday.Newsom also said in the interview broadcast, published on Thursday, that his 15-year-old daughter came home from school crying at the prospect of him being arrested. “I said that doesn’t matter, what matters is the military on the streets,” he said. “I will handle that, I will be fine. I am worried about you, I’m worried about this country, I’m worried about everything we’ve taken for granted and fought so hard for disappearing overnight.”At a press conference on Thursday, Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, suggested without evidence that the protesters could be “funded” by “NGOs out there, unions, other individuals” and said Newsom had not returned her calls. Security guards forcibly removed Alex Padilla, a California senator, from the press conference as he attempted to ask Noem a question.In a statement after his removal, Padilla’s office said he was in Los Angeles “exercising his duty to perform congressional oversight of the federal government’s operations”.“He tried to ask the Secretary a question, and was forcibly removed by federal agents, forced to the ground and handcuffed. He is not currently detained, and we are working to get additional information,” the statement said.The protests have spread to other cities including New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Seattle and Spokane in Washington state, Austin and San Antonio in Texas. Meanwhile immigration “enforcement activity” has extended to California’s agricultural heartland, where many farm workers are undocumented people.Los Angeles area mayors on Wednesday called on the Trump administration with withdraw troops and stop the raids that have caused widespread fear in immigrant communities.“I’m asking you, please listen to me, stop terrorizing our residents,” said Jessica Ancona, the mayor of El Monte, who said she was struck by rubber bullets during a recent raid in the city.On Wednesday, Trump was both booed and cheered while attending a performance of Les Misérables in Washington at the Kennedy Center in the capital, which he took over after returning to the White House. Trump said that the actions in Los Angeles were necessary. “If I didn’t act quickly on that, Los Angeles would be burning to the ground right now,” Trump said. More