Canceling the Fourth of July

The LA Protests and the Immigration Police State

So what exactly are these guys saving us from?

I ended my recent overview of our brief little Quasi-War with Iran by noting that the most disturbing thing about the whole story is Trump’s use of the military without consulting Congress. But this is nothing compared to his palpable lust to use the military domestically to pacify cities and states run by his political opponents.

This is something he has been itching to do since the summer of 2020, in response to protests and riots after the callous police killing of George Floyd. Trump has an admiration for dictators and strongmen, and he has declared the necessity of “dominating the streets”—not just making the streets safe or non-violent, but controlling them to prevent mass protest. In 2020, he notoriously used police to violently suppress peaceful protests in Lafayette Square near the White House.

Now he is using protests in Los Angeles as an excuse to send in, not just the National Guard, but the US Marines—and he is promising “troops everywhere.”

Let’s take a look at this trial balloon for domestic military occupation.

First, let’s stipulate a rule whose operation we have seen before: Every new assertion of power by Trump is a response to weakness and loss.

In this case, part of the context is the failure of his military parade on June 14—ostensibly for the 250th anniversary of the United States Army but expanded as a celebration of Trump’s 79th birthday. This turns out to be an old obsession of Trump’s. As a 13-year-old juvenile delinquent, he was sent off by his father to military school, where he thrived as a martinet and particularly loved leading parades.

But the whole thing turned out to be kind of a dud, poorly attended and oddly quiet. In this regard, Trump’s reflexes as a showman failed him. He held an event in a venue so large—Constitution Avenue, which runs all along one side of the Capitol Mall—that it would have taken a crowd of millions to fill it.

You know what did get a crowd of millions? The “No Kings” anti-Trump protests across the country planned for the same day. Attendance was estimated at between 4-6 million, with a festive atmosphere. The distribution of the protests is what was most interesting, because it wasn’t just in a few big Democratic strongholds. For example, about 300 people turned out in Louisa, Virginia, in the middle of a rural county of the same name between Charlottesville and Richmond, where people voted for Trump last year by a large margin. It’s not far from me, so I showed up there a bit late, after the crowd had begun to die down. But it was still far bigger than I would have expected. G. Elliot Morris, a rising new impresario of “data-driven” journalism, estimates that while anti-Trump protests are getting less media coverage than they did in his first term, they are actually larger and much more numerous in his second term. He has graphs and everything.

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The Ethics of Protest

A few years back, I spoke about the ethics of protest, and my basic thesis was that the form of protest that is morally appropriate depends on the seriousness of the grievance one is protesting about. On one end of the spectrum is writing, speaking, and gathering peacefully to show your numbers and enthusiasm—always a compelling message to send to your political leaders—and this is always appropriate. That’s what the No Kings protests were like.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, violent protest can only be justified in response to the most extreme attacks on liberty, as a warning or prelude before a revolution. In the middle are boycotts and strikes, then at a higher level, protests that block roads and disrupt ordinary life, and at higher level still is civil disobedience: deliberate but still non-violent interference with unjust laws in an attempt to highlight their injustice.

That brings us to the protests in Los Angeles, the ones for which Trump called out the troops. For the most part, they fell into this last category, as a form of mass resistance and civil disobedience to disrupt the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations.

Let’s look at how these protests started. The first salvo was the local response to an ICE immigration raid in San Diego.

Days before President Donald Trump unleashed federal immigration agents to raid sites spanning from California’s biggest cities to its agricultural heartland, sparking protests in LA and elsewhere, San Diego’s quaint South Park neighborhood was targeted. Two popular Italian restaurants were swarmed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on May 30, prompting a remarkable response from neighbors who rallied to the scene and forced a retreat under shouts of “shame.”

See the video of that protest here. I describe this as “civil disobedience,” but it’s really just on the very edge of civil disobedience. The protesters do not forcibly interfere with ICE agents, but they gather in a crowd that is clearly intended to inhibit the immigration officers in conducting their raid.

I should also add that this is arguably not even civil disobedience, because ICE raids have often been conducted in a way that itself pushes the edge of legality, with officers wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves—they claim it is to protect their officers against threats, but the claim is bogus—as well as refusing to show warrants when requested, and engaging in a massive show of armed force in cases that used to be conducted using the apparatus of civil law. Where immigration officials used to simply send someone a notice saying that his visa had expired and setting a period of time in which to leave the country, they are now sending armed men to grab people off the street without notice and put them in jail indefinitely.

So yes, this is the sort of thing that deserves popular protest and civil disobedience aimed at passively disrupting the excessive enforcement of unjust laws.

This set the pattern for protests in LA.