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homeland security
Trump in Los Angeles Is Exactly What We Have Been Warning About
This is a critical moment in U.S. history, and it demands that we stand strong in our opposition to the administration’s reckless and unlawful use of military force.
Jun 11, 2025
For years, we have warned against the danger of an unchecked president turning the military against American civilians.
In an extraordinary show of force, President Trump has federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard and deployed 300 of them, in addition to deploying 700 Marines, to quell protests in the Los Angeles area. All over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Why this abrupt, camera-ready escalation? White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted a video of a peaceful protest parade. “If we don’t fix this, we don’t have a country,” he shuddered. “Pass the BBB” — the budget bill now facing turbulence in Congress.
Trump’s administration is spoiling for a fight. It pops out emergency declarations like a Pez dispenser. It is also relying on flimsy legal justifications, as my colleagues have pointed out.
Presidents have deployed troops to control civil unrest only 30 times before in U.S. history. The Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. Soldiers are trained to defeat an enemy, not to de-escalate protests.
The situation in Los Angeles is bad. What might come next could be worse.
The last time that a president sent in the Guard without a clear request from a state’s governor was 1965, when troops were used to protect the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. (And even in that case, George Wallace waffled.)
To be clear, violent protests are not acceptable or productive. The federal government should be unobstructed in carrying out its lawful duties. Of course, the specter of masked ICE agents lurking in the lobbies of immigration courts, as has happened here in New York City, is itself willfully provocative.
In fact, in Los Angeles, protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful. The LAPD — hardly a department of pushovers — has been adamant that it has the situation under control. Not surprisingly, the troops have only fanned the protests. Newsom formally requested that the administration rescind the deployment, saying that it is “inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed.”
The situation in Los Angeles is bad. What might come next could be worse.
Trump’s executive order authorizes deployment of the Guard “at locations where protests against [ICE] functions are occurring or are likely to occur.” Where might that be? “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” Trump declared.
As my colleague Elizabeth Goitein notes, “No president has ever federalized the National Guard for purposes of responding to potential future civil unrest anywhere in the country. Preemptive deployment is literally the opposite of deployment as a last resort. It would be a shocking abuse of power and the law.”
The most powerful repressive tool would be the Insurrection Act — a law that lets presidents deploy troops to suppress a rebellion or insurrection or curb domestic violence in extreme scenarios. Trump threatened to invoke it against Democratic-run cities during his 2024 campaign.
The Insurrection Act is, unfortunately, a mess of a law. Key words such as “rebellion” and “insurrection” are left undefined. Courts have given presidents a wide berth. Trump winked at this law by calling the protesters “insurrectionists.”
He has so far chosen to rely on a different law — one that has never been used to quell civil unrest without an accompanying Insurrection Act invocation. The administration claims that it is invoking this law only to protect federal personnel and property. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has requested that soldiers be authorized to detain and search protesters, functions normally prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act.
It’s clear that Trump wants to use this showdown to expand enforcement powers.
The week before he stages a strongman-style military parade along the National Mall — complete with tanks, missiles, and military aircraft — Trump has claimed the right to preemptively authorize deployment of the military all across America.
That should be chilling to most Americans, who have enjoyed a firm line between police and the military as an essential component of our democracy. The deployment of the military against civilians should only be used in the most extreme cases as a last resort. Otherwise, as Elizabeth Goitein notes, “an army turned inward can quickly become an instrument of tyranny.”
Experts have already identified worst-case scenarios. George W. Bush administration official David Frum has sounded the alarm on the possibility of Trump using the military to influence the 2026 election.
If you want to learn more about all of this, here are reports we’ve published in the last few years on emergency powers, the Insurrection Act, the Posse Comitatus Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and martial law.
Once again, in the face of a lawless executive, the courts must now step up. The Supreme Court may want to avoid a conflict, but here, it may have no choice. It is imperative that it uphold checks against the use of military force against civilians.
And now that we know that the existing laws can be used, however tendentiously, to justify provocative military action, we must fix those laws so they cannot be abused again.
The Brennan Center has proposed reforms to the Insurrection Act, including defining the law’s critical terms and enforcing more checks on its use. We have also proposed reforms to strengthen the Posse Comitatus Act. Americans must be adamant, too, that even under existing statutes, presidents lack the power to declare martial law.
This is a critical moment in U.S. history, and it demands that we stand strong in our opposition to the administration’s reckless and unlawful use of military force, in Los Angeles and across the country.
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Judge Extends Block on Trump DHS Effort to Prevent Harvard Enrollment of Foreign Students
"Too many international students to count have inquired about the possibility of transferring to another institution," said the school's director of immigration services in a recent court filing.
May 29, 2025
A federal judge on Thursday extended an order blocking the Trump administration's move to end Harvard University's ability to enroll international students, a small victory for the elite school.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced last week that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered the agency to yank Harvard's Student Exchange and Visitor Program (SEVP) certification. "Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status," said DHS in a statement.
The following day, Harvard sued over the move. That same day, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs handed down a temporary restraining order freezing the ban while the litigation proceeds. And on Thursday, Burroughs ordered that the temporary restraining order remain in place until a preliminary injunction is issued, according to the court docket.
Earlier Thursday, the Trump administration submitted a letter to the court that it had sent to Harvard the day before, letting the school know that it has 30 days to respond with "any sworn statements, documents, or other evidence on which the school relies to rebut the alleged grounds for withdrawal" of the university's SEVP certification. Failure to respond to the notice within that time period will result in a withdrawal of the certification, according to the letter.
Politico reported that despite this revelation that the Trump administration is no longer immediately imposing the cancellation, Burroughs said during the hearing that an order barring the Trump administration from taking action against Harvard is still needed.
In its lawsuit, Harvard wrote that its more than 7,000 F-1 and J-1 visa holders and their dependents have "become pawns in the government's escalating campaign of retaliation."
During the the 2023-2024 school year, international students accounted for 5.9% of the total U.S. higher education population, or over 1.1 million students.
In a Wednesday court filing, Maureen Martin, director of immigration services at the school, said that because of the Trump administration's revocation notice currently enrolled international students are "reconsidering their futures at Harvard."
"Too many international students to count have inquired about the possibility of transferring to another institution," Martin told the court.
Harvard also held its commencement on Thursday.
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Kristi Noem and the Greenland War–A Dog’s Tale?
As the struggle against Denmark over the island heats up, who better qualified to conduct a national anti-Great Dane campaign than Noem?
Apr 19, 2025
Unless you’ve lived in South Dakota—which Kristi Noem represented in Congress and later served as governor—there’s a good chance that if you recognize her name, it’s due to the video clip from inside a prison in El Salvador that featured the new secretary of Homeland Security in front of a cell full of shirtless, tattooed, shaven headed Venezuelan deportees that she denounces—while sporting a $50,000 Rolex watch. An immediate effect of which was to raise anew the question of why President Donald Trump had appointed her to a position for which she appeared to have little to no relevant experience.
Some attributed it to her exhibiting a superior level of sycophancy during last year’s vice-presidential speculation season. No, thought others, in such times fawners sprout like toadstools after a summer rain; surely there must be something special about this one. And now, a theory—involving America’s upcoming war with Denmark and Noem’s previous career PR highpoint—the story of how she had once shot her 14-month-old dog, out of frustration at her inability to train her.
For those who savor the surprises of the Trump years, the recently articulated hostility to Denmark has to rank as top tier. We can imagine that he himself was actually as amazed as the next American to learn that humongous Greenland is actually an autonomous territory of otherwise tiny Denmark. And, real estate being the president’s primary business interest, he has decided that the U.S. has greater need for the world’s largest island than Denmark does. Heads that take Trump seriously—as well as those that don’t—were set spinning alike by this newly enunciated national security priority. But as the now ubiquitous, but previously unfamiliar, north pole-centered maps clearly show—across the ever-shrinking Arctic ice pack from the U.S. lies… Russia!
Imagine, if you will, her standing there—in front of a pound filled with chained, baying, deported Great Danes—shotgun in hand, and Rolex on wrist.
The thing is, though, Trump doesn’t actually seem all that concerned about Russia as a security threat. During his February 28 Oval Office encounter with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he went so far as to tell him that “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me.” He’s even claimed that it was Ukraine that started the war with Russia. And the fact is that the secret potential war plans on which the Pentagon intended to brief Elon Musk—before public outcry put the kibosh on the idea—concerned China, not Russia. Which should make it pretty clear which nation is actually being ginned up as the “national security threat.”
Now, the fact is that Trump has never particularly been known for an expansive interest in or knowledge of geography that doesn’t hold some kind of business angle for him. Could it be, then, that he thinks Greenland would actually provide some kind of buffer against China? This all, of course, is speculative, but what we do know is that so far as the prospect of the U.S. taking possession of Greenland, Trump says he “thinks there’s a good possibility that we could do it without military force”—which should be quite reassuring to us all, although he cautioned that “I don’t take anything off the table.”
Hey, that’s what the man said, so let’s imagine what happens when the absurd gets serious. Some may recall that when France proved a tough sell on the endless War on Terror, announcing its intent to veto any United Nations resolution calling for invasion of Iraq, the U.S. House of Representatives responded by altering the menus of three congressional cafeterias—renaming French fries as “freedom fries.” (None will recall, however, when the U.S. entry into the First World War against Germany turned frankfurters into hot dogs.) So, if Denmark continues to balk at the presidential whim, we can no doubt look forward to ordering Cheese Americans to go with our coffee in the future.
But the ire directed at the willful little Scandinavian nation will not likely stop at the pastry shop. Which is what brings us back to the question of what Kristi Noem’s doing here. Well, the story she told about her dead dog was that she was “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.” “I hated that dog,” Noem said. The final straw came when she dropped in on some neighbors, let the dog escape her control, and it proceeded to kill the neighbors’ chickens. After paying for the chickens, she took the dog to a gravel pit and shot it. But that’s not all. She then realized that “another unpleasant job needed to be done,” and went back and got a goat her family had who was “nasty and mean,” prone to chasing and knocking down her kids. Oh, and he smelled bad—“disgusting, musky, rancid.” So she shot the goat too. Didn’t get the job done on her first shot though. Had to go back to the truck for a another shell to finish him off.
None of this story, you must understand, required any sort of hard-nosed investigative journalism to uncover. It comes from a book that Noem herself wrote: No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, an autobiography—her second—written when she was preening for the vice-presidential nod. She recounted the bizarre anecdote, she says, as an example of her willingness to do “difficult, messy, and ugly” things when they just had to be done. As we know, she didn’t ultimately land the nomination. Some suspect it was because it took her two shots to get the goat. Who knows, but Trump did ultimately decide he wanted her around.
Should the president’s Greenland-Denmark obsession continue to meander on, the campaign against Danish aggression surely won’t stop at the breakfast counter. And it’s when we start to envision additional targets that the potential Kristi Noem role in all this starts to take shape. The most obvious display of this alien roadblock to American national security? It’s the dogs, of course—Great Danes being pretty much the Greenland of dog breeds. The threat that canines of that size—in the service of an enemy power—would pose to America’s most vulnerable citizens—our children—is too obvious to require discussion.
Who—then—better qualified to conduct a national anti-Great Dane campaign than Noem? Imagine, if you will, her standing there—in front of a pound filled with chained, baying, deported Great Danes—shotgun in hand, and Rolex on wrist. Could there be a more powerful image of the nation’s determination in a life and death struggle with Denmark—and if need be against Europe itself? And should any Great Dane think to resist arrest, well, we know that Noem is one government bureaucrat whose bark is not worse than her bite.
Far fetched, you say? Scoff you may, but remember what else you used to consider far fetched until not so long ago. I know that if I had a Great Dane, I’d be thinking about lifestyle alternatives for the dog—perhaps even getting a saddle and trying to pass it off as an Icelandic pony. And I’d get real nervous if I heard that Noem was in town.
As of late, she’s been called ICE Barbie for her appearance at deportation raids. The future? Kristi Noem: Bane of Great Danes? As we are well aware, crazier things have already happened.
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