martial law

The images coming from Los Angeles in June 2025 are not without precedent. But the precedents are not American. They are global, and they are troubling. Military convoys rolling into a city over the objections of its elected leaders. Peaceful protest recast as a public threat. Immigrant communities targeted with sweeping enforcement actions and then blamed for resisting. What unfolded in Los Angeles this summer looked less like the United States of 1992 and more like Beijing in 1989 or Paris under curfew in 1961. These were moments when governments exploited protest as pretext and used the language of order to justify repression. What makes Los Angeles so alarming is not just the imagery of troops on domestic streets, but the quiet dismantling of legal guardrails that once kept that imagery exceptional.

This is not just a story about immigration raids. It is about the redefinition of dissent as rebellion and the deployment of military force to enforce that fiction. For the first time in modern U.S. history, active-duty federal troops were sent into a state not to uphold civil rights or restore public safety, but to enforce domestic policy over the objection of state leaders. There was no invocation of the Insurrection Act. Instead, the Trump administration relied on a lesser-known statute, 10 U.S.C. §12406, and vague assertions of inherent executive power to federalize California’s National Guard and deploy 700 Marines across Los Angeles. Governor Gavin Newsom objected. The Pentagon bypassed him.