On Saturday, US President Donald Trump activated 2,000 members of the California National Guard to quell protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation efforts in Los Angeles, after small but highly visible demonstrations had popped up across the city in the days prior – with some instances of violence, opportunistic looting, and property damage. California Governor Gavin Newsom disputed that federal intervention was necessary and condemned Trump’s deployment decision as illegal and inflammatory, blaming it for stoking the protests.
Though the protests had largely petered out by then, on Tuesday the president dispatched an additional 2,000-plus National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to the area. Downtown LA had a quiet night on the back of a curfew, but anti-ICE (and, more broadly, anti-Trump) demonstrations have started to spread to other major cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, and Atlanta, with more planned in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Seattle. Texas Governor Greg Abbot has already called in the National Guard ahead of any potential unrest in his state.
Here are my eight key takeaways:
- Trump’s decision to send federal troops into Los Angeles was extreme. It marked the first time in 60 years that the National Guard had been deployed to a US state without the consent of its governor. The last such instance was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the Alabama Guard in defiance of Governor George Wallace, one of the nation’s leading segregationists, to protect civil rights demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr. from violence. Needless to say, federal supremacy over states’ rights is being asserted in a very different context, by a very different president, and in service of a very different goal today.
- It’s legal – for now. Trump’s deployment pushes the envelope politically, but as long as the troops limit their role to protecting federal personnel and facilities while refraining from taking law-enforcement actions (as they reportedly have thus far), it will stay within the bounds of presidential authority. That’s a key legal distinction, as the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act bars active-duty forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement unless the president invokes the 1807 Insurrection Act. That’s a step Trump hasn’t taken (yet at least), suggesting that he still sees as high a bar for it as he did during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
- The door is open to a more radical use of emergency powers. The counterpoint is that Trump referred to the LA protesters as a “violent insurrectionist mob” (he does know a little something about those) and on Tuesday refused to take the invocation of the Insurrection Act off the table. He also warned that any protesters at this weekend’s military parade in Washington, DC – peaceful or not – “will be met with very big force,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hinted at a desire to use military forces on domestic soil more extensively going forward. This pattern suggests that Trump’s threshold for activating emergency powers or using troops against Americans is lower than last time around, when he was repeatedly talked out of extreme steps by institutionalist advisors. I wouldn’t be shocked if the administration invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (aka IEEPA, the same law it used to levy reciprocal tariffs on Liberation Day) to freeze the assets of individual American citizens and organizations it accused of aiding and abetting “foreign invaders” (aka undocumented aliens). Or if it used the Communications Act to pressure internet platforms into throttling protest-related content. These scenarios may sound far-fetched, but so did the unilateral deployment of the National Guard and Marine Corps to Los Angeles less than 200 days into the first year of the Trump presidency. In his second term, Trump has proven willing to push the legal and political limits of executive power, against precedent and despite long odds of success.
- Trump’s LA deployment was designed to score political points, not restore peace. The City of Los Angeles was unaffected by the protests, which were confined to a handful of downtown city blocks. The Los Angeles Police Department had things under control (at least until Trump escalated the situation), and local officials saw no reason to request federal help. In fact, they warned that adding federal troops to the mix would risk heightening tensions and endanger public safety. But Trump wasn’t trying to solve a security problem – he was playing politics.
- Trump is eager to pick public fights over immigration. This is the one issue area where the president has had consistently positive approval ratings, save for a brief dip underwater caused by the administration’s mishandling of the Abrego Garcia case. For Trump, the political upside of doubling down on the migrant crackdown is twofold. First, it shifts attention toward his biggest strength and away from headlines that are more problematic for the administration, such as his failure to secure trade deals, his inability to end the Russia-Ukraine war, and his messy breakup with Elon Musk. Second, it forces Democrats into defending politically unsympathetic targets and positions, much like they did with Abrego Garcia (before the White House overplayed its hand) and Harvard University.
- The optics of the LA protests play straight into Trump’s hands. Images of burning Waymos and protestors flying Mexican flags lend credence to the White House’s false claim that undocumented immigrants are dangerous foreign invaders and their defenders are radical anti-American traitors, allowing the president to discredit opponents of mass deportations as threats to public order and safety. That only a small number of troublemakers were illegal aliens doesn’t matter; Trump is betting (correctly, in my view) those visuals will drive public opinion away from the demonstrators and toward more aggressive deportation policies.
- More deportations are coming. Trump has made measurable progress in curbing illegal border crossings, but so far, deportations have fallen far short of his campaign pledge (and even of deportations during Joe Biden’s last year in office). That’s not surprising; large-scale interior removals are much more politically, economically, and logistically fraught than border enforcement. But according to the Wall Street Journal, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently ordered ICE to step up its game, demanding that they stop targeting migrants with criminal records, asylum requests, and court petitions and instead “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens” at their jobs and schools. In other words, snag anyone who looks illegal, no probable cause (let alone warrant) needed. That approach was reportedly what sparked the LA protests last week. The backlash was instrumental to Miller’s goals: by signaling that Trump is making good on his deportation promise, standoffs with law enforcement can make deportations more popular and give Trump the political capital to ramp up more visible and disruptive workplace and neighborhood raids, particularly in Democratic-run cities. These operations will trigger more protests, which will in turn be met with more repression and stepped-up enforcement, and so on.
- On immigration, don’t bet on TACO. Trump faces fewer internal constraints in implementing his policy agenda on immigration than in any other area. Unless and until it starts dragging on his approval ratings, he is likely to double down: more aggressive raids, more confrontations with Democratic governors and mayors, more troop deployments to quell public protests. Mass deportations will disrupt local life in places like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. Backlash to aggressive enforcement tactics, family separations, and mistaken detentions will be the primary source of domestic unrest in the coming months, but Trump won’t back down. This is a fight the White House is happy to fight.
Trump's deployment of troops to Los Angeles was less about taking control of the streets and more about taking control of the narrative. The strategy is confrontational by design, with immigrants and Democrats as foils and civil unrest as a feature, not a bug. This playbook may work politically. But in the long term, the result will be more conflict: between cities and Washington, between red and blue, between civilians and the military, and between competing visions of American identity. The most politically divided and dysfunctional industrialized nation will only become more so.