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martial law
Governors Warn of 'Martial Law' and Trump 'Invasion' as US Judge Halts Troop Order—for Now
"This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness," declared Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Oct 06, 2025
A federal judge in Oregon issued a new and broader order on Sunday night to halt President Donald Trump from deploying any National Guard troops—regardless of their state of origin—to Oregon, Illinois, or elsewhere, as Democratic governors resisting the president warned of a frightening escalation in his authoritarian tendencies.
U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut, who on Saturday ruled that Trump could not lawfully federalize National Guard troops from California for deployment to Portland, Oregon, issued a second order after the president mobilized 400 National Guard troops out of Texas, with the blessing of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, to deploy instead.
"It seems to me that based on the conduct of the defendants and the now seeking National Guard from Texas to go to Oregon again, I see those as direct contravention of the order [...] issued yesterday," said Immergut, nominated to the federal bench by Trump during his first term.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who brought the challenge with the request for a temporary restraining order (TRO), explained the ruling and the events leading up to it in a Sunday night video statement:
Late tonight, a federal judge issued a sweeping new order prohibiting the president from deploying National Guard forces—from any state or DC—to Oregon.
The president can’t keep playing whack-a-mole w/ different states’ Guard units to get around court orders & the rule of law. pic.twitter.com/X8hhZBSFhx
— Attorney General Dan Rayfield (@AGDanRayfield) October 6, 2025
California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose administration had challenged the order to send the California soldiers, applauded the ruling after calling Trump's effort to send the Texas troops "a breathtaking abuse of the law and power by the President of the United States."
"America is on the brink of martial law," said Newsom. "Do not be silent."
According to the Associated Press:
Approximately 100 California National Guard troops landed in Portland after midnight Sunday and around 100 more arrived by early evening, Alan Gronewold, commander of Oregon’s National Guard, said in a court filing before the emergency hearing late Sunday.
The state of Oregon also included in its filing a memo written by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that ordered up to 400 Texas National Guard personnel activated for deployment to Oregon, Illinois and possibly elsewhere.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, also a Democrat, issued a stark warning about the president's effort to send soldiers to Chicago, where ramped-up immigration enforcement raids have roiled the city and terrorized community members.
"We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion," said Pritzer. "It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops."
"The president is abusing his power, attempting to militarize our cities. The power of the people must remain greater than the people in power. We need to show up in peaceful protest across this nation. Stay Loud!"
—Rep. Maxine Dexter
Pritzker called on Abbott to withdraw his support for Trump's deployment, saying, "There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation."
As of this writing, the Trump administration had not responded to Immergut's latest ruling, but an appeal to a higher court is nearly certain.
Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) said while the latest TRO was a vital development, sustained and peaceful protest against Trump's march toward a militarized dictatorship remains essential.
"We cannot rest," said Dexter. "The president is abusing his power, attempting to militarize our cities. The power of the people must remain greater than the people in power. We need to show up in peaceful protest across this nation. Stay Loud!"
Important update! Judge Karin Immergut just issued a broader temporary restraining order that precludes any National Guard troops from being in Oregon for 14 days.
We cannot rest. The President is abusing his power, attempting to militarize our cities. The power of the people… pic.twitter.com/Ii4J1JRpBS
— Congresswoman Maxine Dexter (@RepDexterOR) October 6, 2025
In a Saturday statement, in response to Immergut's initial TRO blocking the deployment of the troops from California, Hina Shamsi of the ACLU said it was vital for the court to block Trump's dangerous move.
"As the founders of this country made abundantly clear, turning troops on civilians is an intolerable threat to our liberties,” said Shamsi.
"When President Trump is trying his best to imperil our First Amendment rights and scare those protesting his cruel policies into silence," she said, "it’s encouraging to see this court ruling based on adherence to law and facts, not the President’s fantasies of beautiful, vibrant American cities as hellscapes.”
In a similar joint statement, the Not Above the Law coalition warned that Trump's effort to deploy Illinois National Guard troops despite Prizker's objection "isn't about public safety, it's about testing how far a president can override elected state leaders and deploy forces against American communities."
"Turning troops on civilians is an intolerable threat to our liberties."
—Hina Shamsi, ACLU
“The pattern is clear and dangerous. Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Portland, and now Illinois – each time against the will of local officials," said the coalition's co-chairs in their statement. "Our armed forces exist to defend the nation and protect our freedoms – not to patrol our own streets. And our nation’s brave servicemembers should not be used as the political pawns of a would-be authoritarian."
The coalition leaders said that lawmakers in Congress, who are nowhere to be seen this weekend due to Republicans in the House holding the chamber in recess, "must act now to prevent any president from weaponizing our National Guard this way. Whether you're a red or a blue state, every American should be alarmed when federal troops are deployed over the objections of local authorities. Americans in every community must speak out now. Stopping this abuse of power is essential to protecting our freedoms and our democracy.”
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Trump Wants to Turn America Into a Police State
They're not even hiding it anymore.
Aug 10, 2025
After a couple of wannabe carjackers punched out Big Balls in DC, Trump used it as an excuse to threaten to take over the city and bring in the National Guard to police it, in a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America.
None of that matters; Trump wants to turn America into a police state, just like every other dictator in the world does when they get ahold of a democracy. They steal from the people, enrich their cronies, break laws with impunity, and then use police agencies to terrorize the general populace, judges, and legislators into docility and submission when they object.
In fact, they told us this was their goal. They showed us. They planned it in writing.
You may not see it in the headlines. But if you read the memos — and watch the deployments — you’ll see it plain as day. The military is no longer on the sidelines. It’s here.
A leaked memo from inside the Department of Homeland Security reveals what many of us feared but hoped we were wrong about: that the military is no longer a last resort in American governance. It’s now a first tool. A central player. A political weapon, just like in Russia.
And they’re not even hiding it anymore.
This isn’t some vague speculation or dystopian what-if. This isn’t a shadowy plot hatched in secrecy. The document was written, circulated, and discussed at the highest levels of DHS and the Department of Defense and it spells out, in clinical, terrifying language, a plan to normalize and expand the use of the United States military within our own country, on our own soil, against our own people.
The memo, obtained by The New Republic, outlines a coordinated strategy to embed military forces into immigration enforcement not just at the border but across American cities. It calls for replicating the recent Los Angeles deployment “for years to come.” It uses phrases like “homeland defense” and paints immigration threats as akin to Al Qaeda or ISIS. It pushes for “new ideas” on how DHS and DoD can work together on “national security” threats inside the United States.
— This isn’t about law enforcement. It’s about militarization.
— This isn’t about safety. It’s about power.
— This isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about building a political machine with boots and guns that can intimidate or even subdue any opposition.
And it’s already happening. America is rapidly turning into an authoritarian police state.
Over the past two months, Trump has done what no modern president has dared. He sent 4,000 National Guard troops — federalized, not state-controlled — into Los Angeles to back up ICE raids. He followed that with 700 active-duty Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines.
These weren’t weekend warriors. These were combat-trained infantry troops deployed to performatively surround federal buildings and “support” immigration enforcement while pro-democracy protestors filled the streets.
Marines. In American cities. In June and July. “Guarding” federal offices and intimidating demonstrators.
And now, we’ve learned that smaller units have been sent to Florida and are prepping for deployment to Texas and Louisiana. The memo wasn’t a warning. It was a blueprint. A playbook for turning the world’s most powerful military force inward and turning constitutionally protected First Amendment political dissent into a “national security threat.”
Don’t believe Trump’s PR spin or the media’s pretending this isn’t as illegal and anti-democracy as it is. Don’t let the uniforms fool you into thinking this is routine.
This is not normal.
This is not legal.
This is not American.
This memo, which Hegseth and friends didn’t intend you and I would ever be able to read:
— Urges DHS to persuade top military brass to view immigration enforcement as a “homeland defense mission.”
— Seeks to embed armed, kill-trained military personnel inside ICE and CBP to “increase information sharing” and support “nationwide operational planning.”
— Frames transnational gangs and cartels as equivalent to Al Qaeda, a dangerous, dishonest leap that pretends to justify extreme, deadly force.
— And it admits, in its own words, that due to the “sensitive nature” of the meeting it documents, “minimal written policy or background” should be preserved.
Translation: They know what they’re doing is legally and morally criminal. So they’re minimizing the paper trail.
Carrie Lee, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, put it bluntly:
“This speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment.”
I’d add, also not seen since the Civil War, when Americans turned their guns on each other and 700,000 of us died. And outlawed a decade after that war with the Posse Comitatus Act. And after the Kent State massacre, we resolved, “Never again.”
Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center warned that this could create a permanent “domestic Forever War,” a campaign of endless militarization justified by fear and manufactured crises. Soldiers — including armed, masked ICE agents answerable only to the president — terrifying civilians on their own streets and in their own homes: a military occupation of The United States of America.
And that’s exactly the point. It’s all part of the classic dictator’s playbook.
You gin up fear about migrants and minorities. You call them invaders, terrorists, cartel assassins. You blur the line between protest and insurrection. You say cities are out of control. Then you send in the troops. Not to protect, but to occupy. And you call it “national security.”
This isn’t just Trumpism. This is textbook authoritarianism in the mold of Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary. It embodies the early stages of all the horror stories of 1930s Europe.
And let’s not forget the power grab embedded in all this. When Trump federalized the California National Guard, he did it against the will of Governor Newsom.
The state fought back in court. A federal judge ruled in California’s favor, but the administration appealed, and for now, the troops can remain under federal control.
That’s not just a skirmish over jurisdiction. That’s an open attack on the sovereignty of states, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. That’s a president saying, “Your Guard is my army now.”
This moment is a test. Of our Constitution. Of our institutions. Of our will.
Because if we let this stand — if we normalize Marines in our cities, Guard troops on our streets, soldiers surveilling residential communities — then we’ve already surrendered.
What happens when the next protest erupts? What happens when a city pushes back against federal immigration policy? What happens when a journalist, a mayor, or a movement becomes “too disruptive”?
Do we really think they’ll hesitate to send in the troops again?
And what kind of soldier will say no, when DHS and DoD have spent months telling them they’re defending the “homeland” against “enemy cells” within?
The line between foreign combat and domestic suppression is being erased. On purpose. By design.
The Founders of this country were obsessed with avoiding a standing army for precisely this reason.
It’s why they wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution requiring a “well regulated militia” at the state level and that same Constitution, in Article 1, Section 7 bars Congress from appropriating money for the Army for any period longer than two years. (“The Congress shall have Power To … raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”)
They had seen what happened when monarchs used soldiers to police dissent. They knew the threat; not just to liberty, but to the very idea of a democratic republic. They wanted to keep the military on a very, very short leash.
So they built guardrails. Laws. Norms. Civilian command. Posse Comitatus. State control over Guard units. Strict separation between military and police roles.
All of that is being unraveled right now.
You may not see it in the headlines. But if you read the memos — and watch the deployments — you’ll see it plain as day.
The military is no longer on the sidelines.
It’s here.
And unless we act — loudly, urgently, relentlessly — it will become a permanent force in American civic life. Not a protector of freedom, but a tool of control, just like in Orbán’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.
We are not at war with ourselves, at least yet. But our democracy is under siege.
And the troops have already landed.
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No Kings! Only We Can Save Us!
Saturday's day of action was a good start. Let it not be the end.
Jun 16, 2025
Editor's Note: The following prepared remarks were delivered at the Courthouse at the Square in Bloomington, Indiana on Saturday, June 14, 2025, as part of the “No Kings” demonstration organized by Bloomington Indivisible, Bloomington 50501, and the Monroe County Democrats.
Good afternoon.
My name is Jeff Isaac.
I’ve lived here in Bloomington, and taught political science here at IUB, for almost forty years.
I believe I’ve spoken before a crowd at the Courthouse only one other time: in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 when, as a founding member of Bloomington United, I spoke to a frightened and anxious group of fellow Bloomingtonians about the need to refuse easy answers, and to avoid demonizing or persecuting those among us who might be different but who are not therefore dangerous. I spoke then in the name of a simple democratic truth: as Bloomingtonians, we share a common place and a common fate, as citizens and residents, and are responsible, together, to address the challenges, and dangers, that confront us, and to do so with decency and a respect for the rule of law and the rights of others.
In those days, people were afraid because our country had been attacked by an obscure group of foreigners based somewhere else.
Today we are again afraid, but the attacker is not obscure, and the threat is not in any sense “external.”
Today we are threatened—our freedom and our democracy are threatened—by Donald Trump, the President of the United States, who is based not in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan, but in our nation’s capital, in the White House.
The events taking place all across the country today are taking place under the banner of “No Kings” for a simple reason: because Trump, with the aid of an exceptionally partisan administration, is today acting like a king, by organizing a massive celebration of his birthday and himself, a celebration that features an unprecedented display of military force on the streets of the Capitol, at the very same moment that he has unleashed the National Guard, and the U.S. Marines, on the streets of Los Angeles, and threatened to do the same in cities across the country.
Trump is a megalomaniac who exults in dominating others.
Trump regards the government, and the entire country, as his private property to be controlled and used to bring wealth to him and his family and friends.
In many ways Trump seems truly to believe the classic motto of that iconic absolute monarch, French King Louis XIV: “l,etat c’est moi.” The state is me. I am the state.
“Only I can save us,” he has said.
“I was saved by God to Make America Great,” he has said.
Trump acts like a King.
And we are here to say, loudly and clearly: “No Kings!”
But in my brief remarks here I want to remind us all that Trump is not a king.
And while he inherited much wealth, he did not inherit the political power he now wields, with such cruelty and contempt, to threaten the people and the things we hold dear.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Trump is the elected President of the United States.
Well over 77 million citizens voted for him, after experiencing his Covid response, and his two impeachments, and his civil and criminal convictions, and his failed administration.
After all that, those millions of our fellow citizens elected him to the highest and most powerful office in the country for a second time.
[It’s okay to boo! It is awful that he was elected, and more awful that we are subject to him!]
It is important, I believe, for us to draw two important conclusions from the fact of his election.
The first is that while monarchs can be dangerous, Trump is much more dangerous than any monarch, precisely becausehe was elected after a multi-year campaign that consisted of angry rhetoric and violent incitement and very clear promises to do exactly what he is now doing.
Trump successfully treated the presidential election like an American Idol television show. And the viewing audience voted him the winner.
Trump is an authoritarian populist, a master manipulator of mass media, digital media, and public opinion, someone who claims the legacy of the American Revolution—remember, the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021 insisted that this was their “1776 moment” and their “July 4.” Trump claims to act, above and beyond the law itself, as the tribune and the leader and the avenger of those supposedly “real Americans” who believe in his MAGA lies. He is their “retribution.” Against the rest of us and against our constitutional democracy.
Trump is a populist in the same way that Mussolini was a populist and Hitler was a populist.
And, like these mid-20th century fascist leaders, Trump is a fascist because he preys on fear; promotes xenophobia and racism; and incites violence.
He has used his popularity to take over the Republican party, to purge all dissenters from that party and from the federal government—which is not his private property!–and to create a cult of personality.
He has begun to bring media institutions to heel, and universities to heel. He has begun using the Justice Department to threaten and investigate political critics. He has unleashed ICE, and in the past week subjected the country to something frighteningly close to martial law.
And he has done all of this with very substantial popular support.
We are here together. We ought to be proud to be here, together, determined to walk the talk of democracy. But we must recognize that most Americans are not out on the street today chanting “No Kings!”
Contending with Trump means contending with him and his coterie, but also with the MAGA Republican Party everywhere across the country, and also with his base voters everywhere—we know this here in Bloomington, Indiana, a relatively liberal island in a blood red sea of reaction. It also means contending with a mass public that is tired, cynical, and angry, and with many millions of voters who are in denial or who simply do not care.
The danger is thus enormous, and our challenge especially great, because winning real popular support for an alternative to Trumpism is today an uphill battle.
But this brings me to my second point: Trump is a despotic demagogue who has not—yet!—vanquished constitutional democracy.
Our “democracy” is no doubt plagued by numerous injustices; it is corrupt, in tatters, and besieged.
But it is not dead. Yet.
Trump has attacked the courts. But they persist in their independence, at least in some places.
Trump and his allies have attacked the universities and the media. And they have cowed a great many prominent media and university institutions—including our own Indiana University—a once great institution that the Whitten administration is transforming into a MAGA demonstration project. But independent media and educational institutions persist. Academic freedom and press freedom are not dead—yet.
Trump and his allies would love to utterly destroy the Democratic party–in many ways a sad shell of what was once a serious mainstream party, but still the only substantial source of political opposition. But they have not succeeded.
Trump and his allies still face opposition, in Congress, in civil society, and in the streets. And their party, much to their chagrin, is required by law to face elections in 2026, and again in 2028.
(To be clear, I am not saying that because the law requires free and fair elections, the law will be respected by the MAGA movement. But I am saying that the law has force, and it will be hard even for Trump to simply suspend it. In short, Trumpism can and must be electorally contested in 2026 and 2028—and we must make sure that it is so contested.)
The recent demonstrations against ICE, today’s “No Kings” demonstrations—such things are taking place, all across the country, because we still have certain freedoms and rights, and there are still spaces of dissent and opposition, and forms of solidarity and resistance, that are available to us.
There are democratic means–fragile, limited, and vulnerable to further Trump attacks—that are still available to us.
It is up to us to seize hold of these democratic means, and to use them to say NO to kings and despotic demagogues, and YES to democracy.
Think. Write. Speak. Listen.
Organize. Assemble. Reassemble.
Petition. Demand. Vote.
Act.
Only we can save us.
This is a good start. Let it not be the end.
Thank you.
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