It started with ICE raids at Home Depots and other places undocumented immigrants might congregate to look for work.
Xochitl, a Guatemalan mother of two, was inside a McDonald’s that shares the parking lot with the Home Depot when she said she saw numerous agents running after men she sees every day but knows only by their nicknames. She said she momentarily froze but then began walking in the opposite direction of agents who were detaining food vendors on sidewalks.
“They were just grabbing people,” she said. “They don’t ask questions. They didn’t know if any of us were in any kind of immigration process.”
Anti-ICE protesters gathered, as they do in towns and cities all over America. (There’s a weekly protest outside a Massachusetts ICE facility one town over from mine. I haven’t attended yet, but I feel like I should.) Increasingly, ICE is targeting not the violent criminals Trump campaigned against (who never existed in the numbers he claimed), but the neighbors, friends, and co-workers of ordinary Americans.
By Friday, the situation had devolved into law enforcement officers using tear gas and protesters shooting fireworks at ICE. Who started the violence? Hard to say. In this video, a man describes an ICE raid causing a traffic jam. When agents began dragging people out of a local business, people stuck in the jam began taking videos on their phones. “We’re not there to protest. We were stuck at the light.” The tear gas, the man claims, was aimed at the people taking videos on their phones. “One of the agents, I hear them: ‘Go for the people with the phones’.”
Local officials thought the police response was appropriate to the size of the disturbance, but Trump evidently disagreed. Saturday, he federalized 2000 troops from the California National Guard and placed them under the command of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Using National Guard troops to control unrest is a well established practice, but usually the troops are requested by the governor. Here, Governor Newsom (and LA Mayor Karen Bass) opposed using the troops, but Trump sent them in anyway — something that hasn’t been done since 1965, when LBJ sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights workers.
Trump’s over-the-top response has created an additional reason to protest: the appearance of a military takeover as federalized troops are used against the citizens of a major American city. A weekly blog can’t cover breaking news, so I’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
The legal authority here is tricky. Jay Kuo breaks it down: Trump is invoking his authority under Title 10, which allows him to use National Guard troops to respond to “a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”. Characterizing spontaneous demonstrations as “rebellion” against the US government is a bit of a stretch, but it’s the kind of stretch the Trump administration has made before, like when it claimed illegal immigration is an “invasion” that justifies invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
But Title 10 doesn’t allow martial law.
So here’s the part that’s a bit hard to grasp at first. Title 10 permits the President to federalize the troops and put them under his command. But what they are permitted to do as military troops operating on domestic soil is still governed by other laws.
And one of those laws is the Posse Comitatus Act.
The PCA doesn’t allow federal troops to play the role of local law enforcement. All they can do is protect federal buildings and federal agents carrying out their duties.
The Insurrection Act makes an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, and so would be a step towards martial law. But so far Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act.
Now I’ll begin to speculate: It looks like Trump wants this confrontation, and is hoping the situation escalates. This will provide lots of violent video to show on Fox News, of blue-state citizens battling US troops. After a few days of that, he can justify invoking the Insurrection Act, turning LA into a military occupation zone.
It’s hard not to connect this directly provoked confrontation with the events scheduled for next Saturday. Trump has planned a North-Korea-style military parade in Washington. Ostensibly, the parade is to celebrate the 250th birthday of the US Army. But coincidentally, Saturday is also Trump’s own birthday.
Trump’s $45 million birthday party has incited plans for thousands of counter-protests around the country, under the theme “No Kings“. Whether he intends to meet these protests with state violence remains to be seen.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
This is all going to Reich Minister Miller’s plan. He and Cosplay Barbie send in their anonymous Gestapo agents to kidnap persons off the streets and rendition them without due process. It is the Gestapo that will decide, without judicial process or interference, who is to be kidnapped and what is to become of them.
When American patriots object, the next step is executed. American military is turned against American citizens, getting them accustomed to yet another blatant, lawless abuse of power by this corrupt administration, and escalating the conflict toward declaring martial law and suspending, at a minimum, federal elections, if not also any judicial proceeding that dares to question the absolute authority of the regime.
This is just a dress rehearsal, and a softening up of a complacent America that still pretends rule of law is what runs this country. Because this is exactly the path JV and Peter Thiel want to take this country, the only outcome that will spare us from the fascist dictatorship on the horizon is our nation’s military stepping forward and defending our country from all enemies, both foreign and domestic. This mobbed-up, completely corrupt criminal gang is exactly the type of domestic enemy our Founders had in mind.
To the extent that there’s an anti-interventionist streak in MAGA, this is why it’s there: they see foreign wars as a waste of resources that should be used to crush domestic enemies instead.
Fact: nearly half the adults in the US say they personally own a firearm, or live in a gun-protected household, and will in times of extreme crisis go to extraordinary measures too protect of their own families, friends, or person in the defense of whatever they perceive as a threat.
I.C.E. and their unlawful and unconstitutional conduct, Is such a threat. They pose a real danger, and not just to the immigrant communities targeted at this time, but to every person residing in the United States that does not fit his mold.
I am fairly sure he and his corrupt administration are chomping at the bit, for some major violence to erupt in LA or elsewhere. So he can manufacture a reason to invoke some form of martial law. Especially if he can target those deep blue states that annoyingly fight him constantly in the courts, as well as the thousands of angry people protesting in nearly every city, even in the deepest and reddest states his blatant misuse of the power of the presidency.
So if that’s what he’s waiting for, I believe he will soon get more then he and his cronies bargained for. He can’t treat people like cattle, encouraging his military to round up, those he deemed unworthy of a court appearance to defend themselves, then label them as unwanted, and ship off to God knows where, and not pay the piper.
Though, most citizens as well as those undocumented, pride themselves on being hard-working, law-abiding members of society. Faced with being black-bagged and dragged off the street for no real reason other than the color of their skin, name on a list, or lack of a piece of plastic in their wallet or purse, you can bet they will fight back, and he better remember.
In this country, many who own firearms are not armed with handguns or pee-shooters. They’re very dangerous souls who live outside the law, and are armed with real hardcore weapons. All courtesy of the Republicans, who fight so hard to make it easy for normal citizens in many states to acquire military-style hardware.
It is written, that evil struts among the unwary in the guise of righteousness? But carries within its breast a black heart filled with corruption, immorality, and destruction. So beware of this man who sits in his golden office surrounded by his golden idols.
His bloated ego refusing to accept the hard truth, that most people in the United States do not agree with his immigration black bag policies. Or the roughshod way he walks over the constitution and laws of the land as if they do not count for him or anyone who bows down before his imaginary throne.
It is clearly visible he cares nothing for the people of this country. Cares nothing for the economy, which he is in the process of destroying for his own personal benefit, and worse. Cares nothing for the children. He has no compassion for, if they go hungry at night or even denied their lunch at school.
So, what of Los Angeles with the military and now Marines patrolling the streets, shooting painful rubber bullets and tear gassing protesters. Most likely it is a prelude for what comes next. So he can feel justified when he sends his black shirted jack-booted goon squads out, after any one of us.
Especially those of us who are as of now in the minority like the LGBTQ+ community, inner city black communities, the poor disabled, and seniors, or even the working man and women, Doge finds expendable, and their jobs redundant. In order words, from here on out no one is safe, and no one will be safe until he is impeached and his corruption is exspunged from our oval Office.
Sorry, if I sound alarmist, and I will never condone violent protests, anymore than I condoned violence, in the 1970s when I marched against the Vietnam war. Has Martin Luther stated, violence only be gets violence, for it is only non-violence that produces lasting change. It is just I can’t be silent when I see a real dangerous confrontation, brewing amongst those who seek power over those who are oppressed.
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