ICE Riots In Los Angeles

Trump declares war on America.

IT’S AN EMERGENCY!

Except … it’s not.

As we brace for whatever incendiary provocation the Trump administration stages next, it’s crucial to keep in mind that there is no crisis — or at least there wasn’t until the government created one. California is not overrun by rioters. Civil disobedience is not rebellion.

What happened this weekend is that ICE deliberately entered a densely packed urban area strapped for battle. The putative justification was the need to snatch up a few day laborers and garment workers to satisfy Stephen Miller’s “kidnapping quotas for brown people.” (God bless Kat Abughazaleh!) But the heavy weapons and militarized garb gave away the game. Trump’s troops were there to provoke an angry response from the Angelinos who despise them.

And in that sense, it was a rousing success. On Saturday, largely peaceful crowds blocked roads and shouted epithets at the storm troopers, while a handful of protesters threw rocks and water bottles. In one instance, a crowd formed a human chain around a garment factory where ICE was conducting a raid, trapping the agents inside until more troops arrived to extract them.

The ICE thugs fired tear gas and “non-lethal” projectiles, and a handful of people tossed a few bottles and rocks at their heavily-armored vehicles. Later a few dozen masked protesters defaced the front of an ICE facility as hundreds of members of the press filmed. The LAPD declared a riot and ordered the crowd to disburse, which it more or less did on Saturday night.

“Insurrection,” Miller tweeted, in between endless posts ominously pointing out that some protesters carried Mexican flags.

But the White House’s response was not to invoke the Insurrection Act. Or at least not yet. Instead the president called out the National Guard to “temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property.”

As justification, he cited 10 USC § 12406, which empowers the president to summon state militias in cases of foreign invasion or “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

“To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” he blustered.

Photo from US Northern Command Twitter

As multiple scholars have pointed out, there’s a big difference between § 12406 and the Insurrection Act. The 2,000 members of the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team dispatched to Los Angeles will be federalized, making them soldiers under the command of the federal government. But they will still be soldiers, barred from domestic policing under the Posse Comitatus Act, including participating in immigrant raids.

The Insurrection Act is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act which allows soldiers to go beyond protecting law enforcement. Such an invocation would allow these soldiers to become policemen, effectively transforming American streets into a war zone patrolled by troops trained for battle, not domestic law enforcement.

Which is not to say § 12406 is no big deal! Obviously interposing troops between ICE goons and the furious citizens they’re attempting to intimidate is a massive escalation. And doing it against the wishes of the state’s leaders is a gross violation of state sovereignty.

“This is the wrong mission and will erode public trust,” Governor Gavin Newsom warned Saturday.

“The protests that happened last night in L.A. were relatively minor, about 100 protesters. Los Angeles has been completely peaceful all day long,” LA Mayor Karen Bass told the LA Times, calling the government’s response “posturing.”

The question is whether this is posturing for its own sake, or whether the Trump administration is positioning itself to actually invoke the Insurrection Act. Is the government’s goal here to provoke these confrontations as an excuse to escalate and allow the president to unleash the military on American cities?

Unfortunately the tea leaves are not good.

On Saturday Trump congratulated the National Guard for restoring order before they were even on the ground.

Sunday he barfed out more nonsense about “violent, insurrectionist mobs … swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations” and instructed his cabinet “to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.”

Meanwhile JD Vance is calling the protesters “insurrectionists carrying foreign flags.”

“So now we have foreign nationals with no legal right to be in the country waving foreign flags and assaulting law enforcement. If only we had a good word for that...” he tweeted ominously, promising that “The president will deploy the national guard to quell these protests, and any person who violates the law or obstructs law enforcement will be aggressively prosecuted.”

Protests, like flags, are protected by the First Amendment. And even if the president had invoked the Insurrection Act, it would be illegal for guardsmen to “quell” it. But Governor Newsom warns that Trump and his goons are laying a trap for Californians.

Which … THEY ARE. And also, what the hell are people supposed to do when jackbooted thugs start kidnapping people? Ask Columbia University how it works out when you try to buy peace with the regime.

On Sunday afternoon Newsom published a letter imploring the administration to rescind its invocation of § 12406, noting that the law requires that orders federalizing the guard “shall be issued through the governors of the States.”

“In dynamic and fluid situations such as the one in Los Angeles State and local authorities are the most appropriate ones to evaluate the need for resources to safeguard life and property,” he wrote. “Indeed the decision to deploy the National Guard without appropriate training or orders risks seriously escalating the situation.”

But Californians are good and mad about ICE thugs coming into their neighborhoods and grabbing working people with families and jobs and roots in the community. And so the protest continued Sunday. With line dancing!

God bless all these beautiful, ungovernable people!

And also … the media is perfectly willing to play endless loops of the same 300 people in a city of 10 million scrapping with the cops, bolstering Trump’s wildly inaccurate claim that the city of Los Angeles has been overrun.

Ignore the CNN reporter’s stupid commentary about an “escalation” in reference to the cops beating the shit out of a guy who had the temerity to kick a teargas canister away from a line of unarmed protesters. The vast majority of protesters are peaceful, unlike the LAPD, which appears to have reverted to form in its (largely successful) effort to keep protesters away from ICE facilities. Note that this protest is on the 101 freeway, not in front of a detention center.

And still, no matter how much brutality local cops inflict, Trump is 100 percent going to point to this footage and claim that he has no choice but to send the military to invade California and restore order.

It’s what he does. He pulls the fire bell, shouts “EMERGENCY!” and then breaks the law. He invented a non-existent invasion by Venezuela to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA). He pretends that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) gives him authority to raise and lower tariffs at will to combat the “emergency” trade imbalance. In his first term, he claimed a border “emergency” as justification to steal money allocated for military housing and use it to build his stupid border wall.

But unlike lawsuits challenging the Trump administration under AEA, IEEPA, and the Impoundment Control Act, legal challenges to an invocation of the Insurrection Act are likely to fail in court. That’s because in 1827, the Supreme Court ruled that “the authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen belongs exclusively to the President, and that his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.” This Supreme Court will say the same.

There is no win here. There never was. They wanted to provoke this fight as an excuse to invade a US state. And now that fight is upon us.