Power Grab
History Doesn’t Support President Trump’s Deployment of Federal Troops in LA
This week, several conservatives have compared President Donald Trump’s recent deployment of US Marines and California National Guard troops to the use of federal force by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s and 1960s. While the Posse Comitatus Act (1878) broadly prevents the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic law, presidents do have some legal standing to use force. The Insurrection Act (1807) offers the boldest assertion of federal power, though in Los Angeles, President Trump has selected a more complicated path by using Title 10 of the U.S. Code.
According to the logic of President Trump’s defenders, he is simply invoking the same authority as some of his predecessors. The situation in Los Angeles, they say, meets the criteria of when force can be used. Why was it acceptable, these conservatives ask, for President Eisenhower to send federal troops to enforce integration at Little Rock Central High School in 1957, or for President Kennedy to do the same at the University of Mississippi in 1962, but not for President Trump to take similar action in 2025?
However, the comparison to presidents from the civil rights era does not work.
During the 1950s and 1960s, presidents sent in federal troops only when it became clear that state and local officials intentionally violated federal law and court rulings, such as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision to integrate schools. In those cases, governors were openly defying federal court orders and tolerating white violence against Black Americans who dared to demand their legitimate rights. When President Johnson sent federal forces to Alabama in 1965, it was only after Governor George Wallace had allowed state police and white mobs to attack protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Notably, all three presidents in the 1950s and 1960s were highly reluctant to take these steps. The Department of Justice under all three presidents delayed action for as long as possible, fearing that sending in troops was an unlawful extension of executive authority that would trigger a dangerous backlash. During Freedom Summer in 1964, for instance, one of the most significant sources of frustration for grassroots activists was the failure of the Johnson administration to use federal forces to protect them. It took severe racial conflict, as well as concerns that the Soviet Union was effectively using images of southern racism to promote communism in non-aligned nations, to propel the civil rights era presidents to act.
Trump’s legal authority in Los Angeles, on the other hand, is dubious. While there have been sporadic instances of violence and looting in Los Angeles, there is no evidence that the protesters’ actions there amount to an insurrection, rebellion, invasion, or significant domestic disturbance. Nor have California Governor Gavin Newsom or Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass refused to follow the law as the southern Democrats did in the 1950s and 1960s. And the mass mobilization on No-Kings Day was largely peaceful.
It would be more accurate to compare Trump’s actions to COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secret and often illegal program against domestic political movements during the 1950s and 1960s. COINTELPRO aimed to surveil and disrupt legitimate organizations and activist movements within the United States that centered around issues like race relations or the war in Vietnam.
For all the discussions about whether Trump stands to benefit politically from the situation in Los Angeles, the more important question is what his actions mean for our democracy. The answer is not good. The use of military force in Los Angeles is an example of an unwarranted and dangerous expansion of presidential power without constitutional justification.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the source of the national emergency came from the political establishment in the South that refused to abandon Jim Crow even after federal laws had changed. In contrast, today the president dangerously wields executive authority in ways that violate and threaten constitutional rights, with a Republican congressional majority sitting on its hands, convinced that protecting their political power is the best thing they can do.
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I'm consistently hearing from Republicans that California IS violating Federal laws by declaring itself a sanctuary state. Can you offer any argument I can use against such claims?