This past weekend, the Defense Department confirmed that it is actively planning to send several thousand National Guard troops, and possibly also active-duty military, into Chicago in September. This follows on from Trump’s extraordinary decision in early June to move thousands of troops into Los Angeles, and his decision this month to deploy thousands of National Guard soldiers, both from D.C. and from Republican states around the country into the nation’s capital.
There are, essentially, two ways that Trump can constitutionally deploy soldiers into a city or state without local approval: he can federalize a state’s National Guard—as he did with a portion of California’s troops—in the face of an emergency; or he can declare that active duty military are needed to put down an insurrection and thus bypass the Posse Comitatus Act and its prohibition on the use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.
Trump will likely be within the letter of the law if he deploys troops into Chicago using these tools—especially given recent Supreme Court interpretations of presidential power that side with the notion of expansive, even unbridled, Executive authority. But he will be, again, a million miles outside the spirit of the law. The very fact that the Pentagon is planning, a month out, about how to deploy troops into Chicago shows that this isn’t about a genuine national emergency or an insurrection. If it were, those troops would be on the ground right now. Instead, craven officials desperate to curry favor with an increasingly authoritarian political leadership are carefully plotting out a route toward deployment. This is all about imposing raw federal power and force upon a city and state political leadership that has been uncompromising in their opposition to Trump’s increasingly violent and lawless takeover of cities and ICE’s increasingly secret police-like activities in going after immigrants and other non-citizens.
There is a none-too-subtle pattern as to which cities Trump has decided to occupy militarily: Los Angeles, DC, and Chicago are all run by African American mayors, and California and Illinois are both governed by powerful, politically ambitious, Democratic governors. Oakland and Baltimore, which Trump has also suggested ought to be sorted out by military intervention, similarly fit this profile. So, too, does New York City, which Trump has also suggested might need the military’s helping hand—even though Mayor Adams has assiduously curried Trump’s favor since the Justice Department dropped its corruption charges against him in exchange for him largely embracing Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
By contrast, there have been no moves to send the military into St. Louis, which has one of the highest murder rates in the country—but also has a white mayor and is in a Republican-run state. There have been no whispers of the feds using the military to tackle violent crime in the five states with the highest murder rates in the country: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Missouri—all Republican-led states—as well as Democratic-run New Mexico (where, in April, the Democratic governor did deploy a small contingent of national guard to bolster the police in Albuquerque). There hasn’t been any effort to add a military footprint to the law enforcement response in other Republican states, such as Tennessee, West Virginia and Ohio, several of the cities of which have higher crime rates than does Washington, D.C.
For all you small-government afficionados out there, pay attention to what is happening. You have long feared Big Government using the military against domestic opponents. By and large, that didn’t happen in the past. Today, it is being normalized by the Republican Party and its MAGA commander-in-chief. Where are your voices of outrage?
You have also long feared the weaponization of the Justice Department and other levers of power. Well, let’s hone in on Kilmar Abrego Garcia for a minute. A reminder: back in the spring, Garcia was deported to the CECOT supermax prison in El Salvador, despite a court ruling barring his removal to El Salvador. He spent months in El Salvadoran prisons, where he was reputedly brutalized on a regular basis, while the Trump administration disingenuously claimed it had no power to require the El Salvadorans to return him Stateside. When, after months of increasingly explicit orders from outraged judges that he be returned, he was finally brought back to the US, the Justice Department promptly charged Garcia with participating in a people-smuggling racket in Tennessee—a charge that the local federal prosecutor thought was so transparently manufactured, so clearly retributive, that he resigned rather than preside over the case.
Now, nearly six months after Garcia’s ordeal first started, the government seems on the verge of giving up on the people-smuggling charges and has released Garcia back to his family. But, following his refusal to accept a deal to plead guilty and be deported to Costa Rica, late last week news surfaced that the government now intends to remove him to Uganda.
None of this is normal. All of this is transparently totalitarian. You don’t like Big Government overreach? Hell, I’m with you one hundred percent of the way. So, Mr and Mrs MAGA, when are you going to step up and say that these actions are wrong? When are you going to tell your guy that right-wing terror tactics are just as illegitimate as any other terror tactics? When are you going to finally muster the courage, and the decency, to say “Enough”?
