Afrasianet - Nihad Zaki - In the summer of 1992, Los Angeles , California, was on fire and fury. The city was shaken by the acquittal of police officers who tortured black motorcyclist Rodney King.
King did not die then, but the demonstrations turned into violent protests, in which dozens were killed and many buildings were destroyed, which prompted George H.W. Bush, then president, to call in thousands of National Guard soldiers, at the request of California state officials.
But after a generation, 33 years to be precise, and six successive presidents leading the United States, the National Guard is returning to the streets of Los Angeles, this time by direct order of the White House, not at the request of California Governor Gavin Newsom.
U.S. President Donald Trump has orderedabout two thousand National Guard troops to be sent to the city, recalling images from the past when federal forces were trying to crush civil rights symbolsin the sixties. Trump even went beyond that by ordering 700 Marines to Los Angeles to help the military and police control the protesters, and he was willing toTo arrest the state's governor, Newsom, after he threatened to sue his administration!
Are we facing a moment when federal power is being harnessed for electoral purposes in which the head of state is in conflict with a state governor, or is it just an extension of a long American struggle over the meaning of public order and the role of the state?
By following what is happening now in Los Angeles, and the speech of President Trump on the one hand, and his opponents, led by the governor of California, on the other, we can understand how the idea of using federal power on the American streets has evolved, and how America has changed profoundly: Americans' perceptions of the state, the limits – or lack thereof – of the executive power of the White House, and the fragility of American democracy itself.
What happened?
Since Friday evening, the city of Los Angeles has been witnessing a wave of protests marred by violence in some cases.
Tensions erupted after ICE officers launched a raid in various parts of the city, arresting 44 people for immigration violations, which sparked a wave of widespread protests in the city, which quickly developed into clashes between security officers and demonstrators, which later turned into violence during which police used stun grenades and tear gas canisters to disperse crowds of protesters who carried banners reading "Get ICE out of our communities."
By Saturday, Trump had signed a presidential memo ordering the deployment of two thousand U.S. National Guard units to the city against the backdrop of the protests, despite the governor's opposition to the decision, a measure that is rare except in extreme unrest. Indeed, National Guard troops were deployed in various locations in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, June 8.
The decision raised many questions at home about the balance between the power of the president and the powers of state governors, and raised many concerns and warnings about the possibility of the administration exploiting the protests to enact the Insurgency Act of 1807, which allows the US president to deploy military forces in major cities to bring order and curb insurrection, violence and major unrest, a measure that may portend more dangerous developments to come.
What "insurgency law" is Trump waving?
If a city or state refuses to take action to defend the lives and property of its citizens, I will deploy the U.S. military to solve the problem.
• Donald Trump – June 2020
In June 2020, during his first term, Donald Trump threatened to send the US military to the streets if state governors could not control their cities. This came in response to continued demonstrations across the United States following the killing of George Floyd , a black American by a white police officer from Minnesota, an event that sparked violent protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement demanding racial justice.
However, contrary to what Trump's "absolute" and "open" threat suggests, there are restrictions on the deployment of the U.S. military on the streets of countries to suppress civilian protests.
Under U.S. laws, the military is not allowed to deploy in cities or participate in local law enforcement operations without the permission of state governors, except in cases enshrined in a 19th-century law, known as the "Rebellion Act of 1807," signed by third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, one of the "founding fathers" of the United States.
This law allows the US president to intervene without the permission of state governors, and to take military forces to the streets in order to suppress internal disturbances and insurgencies in extreme emergencies and when the lives of citizens are threatened.
In order not to abuse that power, the Posey Comitatus Act of 1878 restricts the use of military intervention in state and local governments and separates the functions of military and police forces.
However, the Insurgency Act remained in place in situations of widespread unrest, so both laws could suspend each other depending on the circumstances and needs, giving the president the ability to deploy the military to cities if he assessed widespread insurrection or uncontrolled insurgencies.
For more than two centuries, the "Insurgency Act" has been enacted on several occasions to break up riots and restore order at intervals in history. The law was first used to suppress indigenous resistance, and later during the American Civil War , giving President Abraham Lincoln powers to send federal troops to the breakaway southern states.
The "Insurgency Act" was also used throughout the fifties and sixties, which witnessed a great movement of movements demanding civil rights for blacks, some of these cases came despite the opposition of the state governors themselves, but with the end of the sixties era and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which abolished legal discrimination against blacks in 1964, the Rebellion Act became an exceptional measure that is rarely enforced.
He last did so in 1992 (about 33 years ago), when California Governor Pete Wilson called for federal intervention after the Los Angeles riot failed to contain the riots that broke out, ironically, in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the white policeman accused of the murder of black Rodney King, who was killed as a result of torture and brutal beatings under US President George H.W. Bush.
Will the Los Angeles protests activate the "Insurgency Act" again?
The answer to the question above is that Trump and his administration officials are already waving that. President Donald Trump has ordered the deployment of two thousand National Guard troops to the city, while his Secretary of Defense, Pete Higgsyth, has gone further, suggesting that if violence and protests continue, 500 U.S. Marines are ready to move to Los Angeles at any moment, making the issue of enacting the Insurgency Act strongly on the table. Table.
Higgseth likened the Los Angeles protests in a post on his page on the social networking site "X", as "a foreign invasion facilitated by criminal gangs and international terrorist organizations," which poses a great danger to US national security, as he put it, statements in which he justified the issue of deploying National Guard forces without reference to the governor of the state, saying that attacks by "rebels and mobs" on federal law enforcement officers hinder the US administration from carrying out its work to push "criminals" from "irregular" immigrants out of the country.
Trump administration officials are therefore portraying the events as a violent attack on federal immigration officials, according to Politico. Trump himself has accused the Los Angeles crowd of protesters of being "violent rebel gangs" seeking to spread chaos and obstruct security forces from their duties to deport irregular immigrants and law enforcement.
The same tune was followed by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and the leading candidate for national security adviser, who posted a video on his official X page showing a cut from the Los Angeles protests, calling it a "violent rebellion."
Vice President J.D. Vance was not much different , calling the protesters "foreign rebels," saying they were waving foreign flags and assaulting law enforcement, as if Los Angeles had been invaded by immigrants. Administration officials apparently exploited the photo of a masked protester riding a motorcycle waving a Mexican flag and worked to disseminate it widely to show protesters against deportations as rioters who lack loyalty to the United States. They face law enforcement officers waving foreign flags.
Renowned American historian and journalist Victor Davis Hanson, known for his support of Trump, played the chord and criticized Democratic voices for the rights of irregular immigrants, saying in a New York Post op-ed that Democrats "stand up to defend anyone the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement intending to deport without scrutinizing their criminal record." Hanson claimed there were nearly 500,000 irregular migrants with criminal records, which he likened to "landmines about to explode."
Moreover, Hanson attributed recent events in the United States to the legacy of the open borders policy pursued by the previous administration of President Joe Biden , and based his criticism on estimates indicating the entry of between 10 and 12 million irregular migrants under Biden, in addition to the number of irregular immigrants already in the United States, which ranges from 12 to 20 million, stressing that these policies will destabilize the United States. For generations to come, he commented: "The Donald Trump administration must deport nearly 8,000 immigrants a day throughout his 4-year presidency, in order to reverse the disastrous results that the Biden administration brought about during the previous presidential term."
But the administration's use of immigration to justify large-scale security dealings, which in the view of many amounts to "repression," provokes much controversy and divergent views.
According to former Yale Law School dean and former State Department legal adviser Harold Hongyo Koh, the facts on the ground of what is happening in Los Angeles on the ground reveal that Donald Trump's claims of widespread unrest are "an attempt to search for an excuse to intervene."
The law professor confirms in his statements to the newspaper "Los Angeles Times", that American political events are hardly separated from each other, starting with the tariff crisis, to the Harvard University crisis, where the US president canceled the university's powers to register international students as a punitive measure, all of these indicators illustrate "the US president's desire to confirm allegations of national security threats and the state of emergency, which gives him the ability to activate exceptional powers that are rarely resorted to, and adopt readings "Too extensive laws have been enacted for other limited purposes, and trying to use them to penetrate places where they face resistance."
How legal is it to deploy National Guard troops against the will of the state governor?
One of the things that alarmed Democratic officials (and Trump's opponents in general) and prompted them to warn against the administration's actions was the administration's deployment of National Guard troops without consulting the governor.
Peter Castor, a professor of American history and cultural studies at Washington University in St. Louis, said such extraordinary measures raise an urgent question about the powers the president used to counter the Los Angeles protests, and the legality of Trump's call-up of National Guard troops in this way, even though local authorities have repeatedly declared that they can contain the situation without interference.
In his analysis of the situation, Michael Wheeler, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, compared Donald Trump's position in the face of the Black Lives Matter protests demanding racial justice in 2020, which spread almost throughout the US states, to his current position on the Los Angeles protests against the deportation policies of irregular immigrants, noting that the US president in his first term was calmer and more restrained, which is evidenced by his decline. He then refused to carry out his threats to enact the Rebellion Act of 1807, which gave him a mandate to deploy the military to major American cities.
By contrast, it took Trump more aggressively than ever to use his executive powers, this time it took him more than 24 hours to issue a historic decision to deploy the National Guard while ignoring opposition from Governor Gavin Newsom, which the author described as an "arbitrary measure" that the United States witnessed only during the period of civil rights unrest in the sixties.
Politico commented that the deployment of National Guard troops against the governor's will is unusual and has not happened since March 1965, when US President Lyndon B. Johnson bypassed Alabama Governor George Wallace and deployed federal troops to protect civil rights marches, fearing that local authorities would fail to protect peaceful protests themselves.
However, senior Trump administration officials have defended the measure, most notably Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noem, who accused the California governor of being the main reason for the worsening of the situation, after he made a series of wrong decisions that forced the US president to intervene to protect society before the situation worsened.
Tom Homan, nicknamed the "Border Caesar" and responsible for immigration and customs in the Trump administration, was more radical, calling for California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to be prosecuted for mismanagement and inaction to contain protests and violence, which was agreed by Cash Patel, the Trump administration 's FBI director.
The stances are in line with Trump's own criticism of Newsom and Bass, describing their administration in a post on the social networking site Truth Social as incompetent to deal with crises.
What comes after the possible activation of the "insurgency law"?
The accelerating escalation of recent events raises several questions about the Trump administration's intentions in dealing with protesters, as the administration has passed several stages in the sequence of options in place to respond in such cases. Michael Wheelner of the Los Angeles Times notes local officials' concern that the Trump administration's "violent" response could exacerbate clashes and unrest that began with a few hundred people and could end with a greater challenge to law enforcement, threatening the city's stability.
Indeed, what was interesting was that the Donald Trump administration hinted in April at the possibility of activating the Insurgency Act of 1807 in order to tighten full American control over the country's southern border to curb irregular immigration, a slogan that was one of the main pillars of Trump's election campaign.
At the time, the administration has already declared a state of emergency at the border, and President Trump has given Defense Secretary Pete Higseth and Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noem 90 days to determine whether the situation warrants intervention and invoking the Insurgency Act.
The issue of activating the Rebellion Act of 1807 usually raises concerns for officials and experts specialized in constitutional law, especially about the way the military will deal with civilians in the event of extreme unrest, as Elizabeth Gotten, senior director of the Program for Freedom and National Security at New York University's Brennan Center, said that the use of the Rebellion Act, although it is "arbitrary and shocking to American society," is not excluded, especially with the US administration resorting to "the use of strange and unpalatable laws aimed at The most prominent example of this was the activation of the Foreign Enemies Act of 1798, which the US president summoned to arrest what the current US administration describes as "Venezuelan gangsters", weeks before the issue of activating the Rebellion Act was raised.
Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who studies civil-military relations, noted that the use of U.S. military forces to suppress peaceful protests in cities is deeply troubling and could take a dangerous turn that would inflame tensions and weaken ties between the military and civil society, saying that this could negatively affect military forces in the future.
More broadly, the situation in the wake of the protests in Los Angeles turned into a direct confrontation between Republicans and Democrats, as the American journalist specializing in political affairs, Dustin Gardiner, published an article in the newspaper "Politico", in which he hinted that the balance of the game has changed in California, which is one of the strongholds of Democrats, who have avoided discussing immigration policies and the file of irregular migrants over the past months, due to the thorny role played by Donald Trump's victory in the battle. The 2024 election, which is why they plunged into sub-issues, until the Los Angeles clashes came back to the forefront.
Following his inauguration as president in January, Trump ordered the establishment of a facility at Guantanamo Bay that could accommodate nearly 30,000 people to detain "irregular migrants."
In the past few months, the Trump administration has cracked down on immigration policies, including deporting tens of thousands of immigrants, canceling former President Joe Biden's administration's "Diversity, Equality and Inclusion" program aimed at achieving diversity and equality (racial and gender) in government institutions and agencies, and canceling the CBP One mobile app. Once used to facilitate asylum applications, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection app has been criticized by Republicans for facilitating irregular immigration without vetting asylum claims.
Gardiner says Democrats downplayed Trump's immigration policies in the first months of his second term, but the recent "harsh treatment" of immigrants has also pushed them to escalate, which for the party as a whole is a marked shift from the posture that followed Trump's victory last November. Senior Democratic officials have opposed the Trump administration's measures to suppress the protests as provocative measures that will increase public tension and put protesters in Los City. Angeles is in direct confrontation with National Guard troops.
For example, Scott Peters, a Democrat in San Diego, described the way the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) treated migrant workers in his city as "extremely violent and cruel," and explained how 20 masked officers attacked an upscale Italian restaurant, handcuffed workers to the astonishment of those present, arrested 4 irregular immigrants, and threw stun grenades to disperse crowds that had gathered outside to protest.
Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom described the US government's decision to deploy two thousand National Guard personnel in Los Angeles as an "incendiary and showmanship" move, saying in a public statement issued Sunday, June 8 / June from the governor's office: "The governor of the state is the supreme commander of the National Guard in his state," considering President Donald Trump's deployment of National Guard troops without consulting or approving the governor of the state "abuse of power."
Newsom said that this rapid development of events portends a dangerous escalation, and Karen Bass, Mayor of Los Angeles, agrees with him, saying that the deployment of National Guard troops will not make the city safer, and California Representative Nanette Barragan stressed in a statement to CNN, that President Trump's intervention will only exacerbate tensions, especially in light of growing public anger over the strict enforcement of anti-immigration laws.
In an escalatory move, Newsom recently threatened to withhold state tax payments, which exceed $80 billion, from the federal government if the situation continues, which the US Treasury secretary called a "tax evasion crime." These interactions and counter-interactions portend a dangerous escalation in the situation on the ground in the coming days and weeks unless Trump and his administration officials find a formula to contain the escalation on the ground, which threatens to turn into a broader political escalation between the federal government and California (and possibly other Democratic states). and between Democrats and Republicans in general.