Anyone remember that 2011 movie called Battle Los Angeles? It’s beginning to look a lot like that again, just with a different kind of aliens this time.
Earlier this week, immigration enforcement began arresting suspected undocumented immigrants, which triggered protests. Trump deployed National Guard troops and Marines to LA, despite strong objections from the CA governor and LA’s mayor. Trump can legally enforce immigration laws and declare a state of emergency, so he stands on pretty firm legal ground.
The use of military forces like the Marines should be setting off alarm bells because this is not in their job description. Putting Marines that are trained for combat, into a situation where they will interact with civilians and act as law enforcement, is risky to say the least.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these protests is the scale. With CA’s size and political leaning, larger turnouts would be expected. Despite this, Trump clearly has no issues pushing California’s buttons, especially if it means political gain for him.
Hey, all. Peter Zeihan coming to you from a hotel room where I’m about to give a presentation. I figured that with everything going on in California, I’d better say hello and let you know my $0.02 on what’s going on. Short version is that we have protests and a little bit of rioting in the Los Angeles area specifically.
What happened is, a few days ago, immigration enforcement went into communities and started rounding up people that they thought may or may not be illegal. There have been several hundred arrests, and that has triggered protests and action. That has prompted Donald Trump to send in about 4000 National Guard troops from local units, over the objection of the la mayor and the California governor.
And as of a few hours ago, 700 Marines have, joined them as well. So few things here to unpack. Step one. Does Donald Trump have the legal right to do this? Of course he does. Enforcing immigration laws is why Ice exists. So of course, Donald Trump can send in, their forces in order to root out what they see is an illegal community. Were these folks doing anything particularly bad? Not really.
One of the things that, the Trump administration has discovered is that if you want to treat immigration as a law enforcement issue, the step one is to investigate and figure out if someone’s actually breaking a law aside from being in the country illegally. That’s what Trump campaigned on. But that takes time. And, per agent, if you can get an arrest every few days, that’s actually pretty good.
And Trump wants to uproot people and hundreds of thousands moving into the millions. And so that just doesn’t get the numbers that Trump is after. So he’s going into places where illegal immigrants are known to congregate. In the case of this California case, they started at the Home Depot and went after the day laborers and then eventually went into the communities and places that were known to employ illegals.
And that’s how this all got started. Can Donald Trump declare a state of emergency and mobilize the national Guard over the objections of local authorities? That’s a bit more mixed, but probably yes. The federal government political leaders have the right to declare states of emergency and bypass some of the laws that we consider to be normal, especially if you’re dealing with someone who isn’t an American citizen.
So Governor Newsom and the LA mayor have both sued, and the initial court case will be heard, today when you’re seeing this on Thursday. But I really doubt it’s going to go their way. The courts generally give a very wide latitude to any administration when it comes to issues. Federal law enforcement, if there’s going to be a check on the president’s power in this specific instance, that’s probably going to have to come from Congress, because they’re the ones who determine when states of emergency can and cannot be declared.
And at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any appetite in Congress to challenge the president on this or any other issue. So this is probably going to work out just fine for Trump from a legal point of view. That, of course, leaves the practicalities. Honestly, if I were the one writing this headline, I’d be like only 17,000 people in California protest.
I mean, the protest movement in California has this high on self-righteousness and huge. And to consider that we are now in, I reemerge April, May in the fifth month of the Trump administration, and we haven’t seen widespread protests. That’s kind of surprising to me, especially in California. So the numbers of people involved here, the level of skullduggery or violence, if that’s what you’re after, is really very, very low by normal California standards, much less by the standards of what the Trump administration say triggered the first time around. So, this is very clearly, from my point of view, Trump trying to instigate an issue, California is on the opposite side of the political aisle from this administration. It is the most powerful economy in the country, and arguably the sixth or seventh most powerful one in the world. And Trump would love to take it down a notch. Now, will that work? Well, that’s really up to the rest of the country and Congress.
But I think it is worth pointing out that this has the potential to get really, really ugly. The military is designed to kill people. We discovered in the war on terror that we do not like it when our military is responsible for civilian control and law enforcement. They are not trained for it, and it’s only in the last 24 hours that the Marines have started to get trained on non-lethal munitions and things like riot shields.
So they’re being deployed with minimal training, but a lot of testosterone into an environment that is becoming deliberately volatile. That is not the sort of mix I feel great about now. Legally, unless it’s things get really out of hand, the military can’t be used for law enforcement, so they’re technically there to protect, say, federal sites. The Marines are not a protection force.
The Marines are go in there and kick some ass force. And so putting the military in this sort of position is really awkward for everybody. Now, the last time the California authorities requested government assistance for things like law enforcement was the Rodney King riots that dated back to, you know, the early 1990s. Anyone who participated in that has been long since left the federal bureaucracy.
And another thing to consider is that Donald Trump’s gutting of the federal bureaucracy goes up, and to include the military itself. So most of the people who would tell him that this is a horrendously bad idea have already been fired, and we’re all going to have to learn the hard way.
