Even if you agreed with the Trump administration’s deployment of California National Guard troops and United States Marines to Los Angeles to protect federal buildings and federal ICE agents earlier this summer during the initial immigration raids, you’d also have to agree that’s not all they did here.
They engaged in domestic law enforcement operations, which the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 specifically enjoins federal troops from doing.
That’s why Northern District of California Judge Charles Breyer’s 52-page opinion issued this week finding that Trump’s order broke that law is so important. The Guard and the Marines were doing what they were not supposed to be doing. “There were indeed protests in Los Angeles,” Breyer writes, “and some individuals engaged in violence. Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law. Nevertheless, at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws.”
So now the 300 remaining Guard troops still deployed to L.A. — what are they doing here? what, literally, do they do all day? — are specifically prohibited from “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”
Wasteful security theater is bad enough, but when it’s done in violation of the law it’s even worse.
Breyer’s finding that the White House “willfully” violated Posse Comitatus is a win for the rule of law. But what will it mean to Trump’s threats to federalize law enforcement in what he calls the “hellholes” of Baltimore and Chicago?
National security expert Patrick Eddington, writing for the libertarian Cato Institute, says the ruling technically only applies to the administration’s deployment of troops in California. But, he writes, “his historical narrative and legal reasoning will no doubt be of interest to and potentially used by officials in Illinois and other states singled out by Trump and his officials as being insufficiently onboard with his immigration enforcement and so-called ‘crime control’ initiatives.”
That gives us hope the ruling’s clear logic will prevail all the way through the Supreme Court, if necessary, to finally quell this authoritarian instinct out of Washington, D.C.