SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to conduct the biggest deportation program of illegal immigrants in American history. He has a mandate to do just that.
The man he appointed to be deputy director of the FBI, former Fox News conspiracy peddler Dan Bongino, warned the Los Angeles protesters on the weekend that they would be arrested for obstructing deportations: “You bring chaos, and we’ll bring handcuffs.”
Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:
But does Trump have a mandate to start a war on American soil? “The deportation wars begin,” ran the headline on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial. The confrontation on the streets of LA are not episodic or random. They are likely the opening scenes of a new phase in US history.
The problem is not the principle of deporting illegal immigrants. That’s the law. All administrations have followed it, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The problem is the manner in which Trump is doing it. With an enthusiasm verging on bloodlust.
A series of federal sweeps to detain some 100 immigrants over the preceding week brought small numbers of protesters, in their hundreds, to the streets of America’s second most populous city.
It was exactly the sort of situation that the police exist to manage. The LA police had a field team on the streets 38 minutes after the first request was received, according to its chief, Jim McDonnell. Only 12 people were arrested on day one in protests which largely were peaceful.
Protesters confront police near the metropolitan detention centre of downtown Los Angeles on Sunday.Credit: AP
The city’s elected mayor, Democrat Karen Bass, says that the chaos actually was made in Washington: “President Trump deployed the National Guard into Los Angeles. Deploying federalised troops on the heels of these [immigration] raids is a chaotic escalation.” What can 2000 National Guard troopers achieve that the 8000 officers of the local police force can’t?
A spectacle. A political spectacle as Trump dispatched the troopers over the head of the governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, who asked the president to withdraw them in vain. And a street spectacle. Build it and they will come. And the crowds came as Trump whipped up the rhetoric and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, threatened to order US Marines onto the streets of LA.
Trump inflamed the scene. “Violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents,” he wrote. He was determined to “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.”
It’s a Trump political attack on the Democrat stronghold through the proxy of deportation and immigration. Asked if he would order the arrest of Californian officials who tried to interfere with the immigrant round-up, Trump replied: “Officials who stand in the way of law and order, yea, they will face judges.” Newsom’s response: “Arrest me, let’s go.”
And Trump a little later: “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” he told reporters.
Despite the pleas of the governor and the mayor to ask that protesters remain peaceful, by Monday afternoon (Australian time) the streets had turned decidedly violent.
“This violence I’ve seen is disgusting. It’s escalated now,” said LAPD’s McDonnell. “We are overwhelmed as far as the number of people out there engaged in this type of activity.”
The Trump provocation worked. He’s been spoiling for a fight. For years. In his first term, he asked the country’s most senior military officer to shoot unarmed civilian protesters in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, refused.
In 2020, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to justify ordering the military to shoot civilians. According to a book by former Wall Street Journal and now New York Times reporter Michael Bender, Milley pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the president who led the Union in the Civil War, and told Trump: “That guy had an insurrection. What we have, Mr President, is a protest.”
A protester confronts National Guard soldiers outside a federal building during a demonstration in LA on Sunday.Credit: Bloomberg
Trump stayed his hand then; he’s intent on playing now. “Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” he wrote on Monday afternoon (Australian time). Hegseth said that 500 Marines were preparing to deploy.
Soldiers who had enlisted, trained and, in many cases, fought to protect the US, its Constitution and its people from foreign enemies, were to be brought into action against civilians on the streets of a major US city. Which had been calm just three days earlier.
There’s been much commentary on Trump’s use of a particular legal authority to support sending in the militia and also the military, which he justifies because the protests “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the government”.
But perhaps the most telling point of Trump’s executive order is its unconditional breadth. It is not specific to Los Angeles or to California. It is generic. It could be applied to the entire country. And it is not limited in duration. The length of any deployment is at the discretion of the defence secretary.
Trump gave himself the scope to deploy the militia and/or the military “where protests against these [federal] functions are occurring or are likely to occur”. Likely to occur? He once claimed to be a very stable genius, but now, apparently, he is also clairvoyant.
In addition, says his order, “the secretary of defence may employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion”.
It’s not difficult to see how this could be used as the basis for an authoritarian takeover attempt of the US. Asked a couple of weeks ago whether it was his job to uphold the US Constitution, Trump answered: “I don’t know.”
His deportation program will prove harmful to investment, growth and stability. The US economy has always relied on millions of undocumented immigrants to do the low-wage work that locals will not touch. As LA Mayor Bass says: “You can’t terrify the workforce and expect the job to get done.”
Trump’s power grab, his wanton authorisation of the use of armed force on American soil and his autocratic tendencies all suggest that the FBI’s Bongino was only half right. More accurately, “We bring the chaos and we bring the handcuffs.”
Peter Hartcher is international editor.
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