What Legal Authority Allows Deployment of Marines Against Civilians
Donald Trump’s penchant for declaring “emergencies” that grant him special power has finally launched a real emergency, sending armed, federal troops into city streets, even moving to deploy 700 Marines from Twenty-Nine Palms Marines into downtown Los Angeles.
Since January, Trump has declared at least eight national emergencies in immigration, economics, energy, all of which open new legal powers to the U.S. president to forgo Congress and that have brought him into direct conflict with the courts.
Trump chose an obscure reading of “rebellion” against his mass deportation to find legal justification to step over California officials to deploy National Guardsmen this week to stop what he sees as interference with ICE raids on day labor sites, neighborhoods, businesses and other sites where undocumented migrants may be found. He stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act under emergency powers that allow deployment of armed active troops, with all the usual personal ugliness he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could muster, they are quite upfront about the need to “liberate Los Angeles” from any perceived uprising.
But what legal authority allows deployment of Marines against civilians is unclear, as are the rules of engagement, the exact roles they will take on, and who is issuing the orders. How are Marines, trained for “lethality” supposed to act against protesters and rock-throwers?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass see it as overstepping of their own authority and overkill in any need for crowd control, and Newsom promises court action to restrict troop deployments. Indeed, protests intensified after Guardsmen showed up, and Trump made clear he was acting without consent of local officials.
Deployment of troops has elevated attention on federal tactics in Trump’s deportation and moved the conflicts over deportation tactics into its own legal, moral and political war. Whether Trump — who ironically has ordered a $50 million military parade in his own honor in Washington next weekend — is creating a discernible emergency from which he then exerts the power to quash street violence with armed, active military troops. It is an open question whether these deployments should be seen as seeking some solutions or to prompt more unrest to justify the deployment itself as an expression of Trump power.
As a New York Times editorial said, Trump’s deployment decision was “ahistoric and based on false pretenses and is already creating the very chaos it was purportedly designed to prevent.”
Trump’s posts have been belligerent and pointed at California’s Democratic leaders as failures because there are protests of any kind to the random campaign to grab and deport migrants — and only then look for any justification of criminal charges.
‘Emergency’ Declarations and Powers
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, Trump’s use of emergency declarations has topped any other president’s. Trump has declared 21 national emergencies across his two terms so far, amounting to 35 percent of all national emergencies declared by the four presidents since 2001.
Using such declarations, Trump has granted himself powers to override Congress about the imposition of global tariffs and to change federal spending already approved by Congress, to close whole agencies, including those distributing foreign aid, and move rapidly towards opening new areas for oil or gas drilling without having to stop for environmental reviews or agency approvals.
As others have moved to challenge these kind of emergency powers, Trump and his Justice Department have relied on Supreme Court “emergency” appeals to skip normally scheduled hearings about the substance of disputed effects of his decisions. Last week, the Supreme Court took exactly that shortcut once again in allowing DOGE investigators access to private data files in Social Security, a ruling that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called out in a dissent that basically asked where’s the emergency?
These emergency declarations have led to some weird results. Some coal and gas production plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania that were scheduled to close because they were going out of business were ordered to remain open — at the cost of tens of millions — to comply with Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency, according to reporting in The New York Times. The costs to keep the plants open are expected to fall on consumers. Experts have said there’s little evidence of a national energy emergency, and 15 states have sued to challenge President Trump’s declaration, which was issued the day he took office.
Their lawsuit contends that emergency powers circumvent review processes that protect public health and safety. Because there is no emergency, they argue, the administration has no legal authority to grant any emergency permits, and the order is invalid.
Power and Dissent
We should be looking at these emergency declarations for what they are — a grab to consolidate power in the White House and to squash any dissent that may arise.
The Washington Post has reporting that says the White House started producing its stacks of emergency orders even before the inauguration and has them ready to be signed as circumstances allow. The
travel ban on individuals from more than a dozen countries that kicked in yesterday supposedly in response to the attack on Jewish marchers in Colorado last week had been readied months ago. According to unnamed staffers, Trump was always going to implement a travel ban.
The announcement was an example of how the Trump administration has been using executive orders and emergency declarations to drive its chosen narrative, push the president’s priorities and sometimes change the subject when news coverage focuses on topics that Trump officials prefer to downplay.
The use of the military — and Homeland Security’s masked, unmarked pseudo-military lookalikes — as part of the deportation campaign is generating special concern because under anything resembling normalcy, the military are barred from domestic law enforcement.
Trump invoked a rarely used provision of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows for the federal deployment of the National Guard if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.” Unless you are Trump, no such rebellion is now underway, though there is plenty of unhappiness about the tactics being used.
As the governor’s spokesman and others have noted, Americans in cities routinely cause more property damage after their sports teams win or lose than we are seeing in Los Angeles. The last time this presidential authority was used over a governor’s objections was when John F. Kennedy overruled the governor of Alabama and sent troops to desegregate the University of Alabama in 1963.
Trump believes in law enforcement as the answer, regardless of problem. The military offers the biggest, baddest set of enforcement possible anywhere. What the rest of us may see as legitimate protest against bad immigration policies or tactics, Trump sees as provocation.
Let’s be clear: Whether on college campuses, day labor gathering points, schools or courts, Trump’s goal is to stamp out disagreement with whatever he wants done. He is showing us he is willing to use armed, active-duty troops to do so.
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