The Trump administration says that the US is being “invaded” and a rebellion or insurrection is thus jeopardising its very existence. Even by the standards of Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric these inflated claims are extraordinary. They are necessary, however, for the president to invoke emergency powers to federalise California’s National Guard and deploy 2,000 of its members against protesting Los Angeles citizens, contrary to the wishes of its commander, state governor Gavin Newsom.
The latter describes the deployment as “purposefully inflammatory” – it is the first time in 60 years that a president has mobilised the National Guard against the wishes of a state governor.
The president justified his move on Sunday with incendiary language: “A once great American city, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted that “this is a fight to save civilisation.” And vice president JD Vance said the spectacle of “foreign nationals with no legal right to be in the country waving foreign flags and assaulting law enforcement” could be defined as an invasion.
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Sufficient justification, it appears, for invoking Title 10 of the US Code on Armed Services which allows federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
That notional immediate threat to the security of the US has also previously been used by Trump to justify his right to deport migrants without congressional or court approval; multiple cases challenging his increasing, deliberate , autocratic stretching of the constitutional boundaries of presidential power are working their way through the legal system. Newsom says he will also test his latest actions in the courts.
In LA the deployment of the National Guard came after local police insisted that they had already restored order, and served only to provoke new protests in the city and elsewhere. Democratic governors across the US have also rallied against what they see as a serious violation of states’ rights and autonomy.
Trump clearly believes that the deployment will be strongly supported by an electorate which backs his flagship migrant deportation policy, and that it will send a warning signal about his ability to use the full weight of the federal state to enforce his agenda.
California, a predominantly Democratic state, had already been in his sights, its funding threatened for allowing trans athletes to compete in women’s sports, and its major rapid rail modernisation losing $4 billion in federal funding. The huge, wealthy state’s capacity to fight back has yet to be tested. It will be a key test of the limits of Trump’s authority to impose his malign immigration agenda.
