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supreme court
Masked Agents Snatching People Off the Street in Trump's America
If California is a sign of the future, it seems ever clearer that the courts have little appetite for standing in the way of this president.
Jul 07, 2025
“I must say,” Donald Trump commented, “I wish we had an occupying force.” It was June 1, 2020. The president, then in his first term in office, was having a phone call with the nation’s governors to discuss the ongoing Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests taking place nationwide in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman. He was urging the governors to call in the National Guard in response to BLM protests in their states. Otherwise, he threatened he would do so himself. “You have to dominate,” he told them, while labeling the protesters “terrorists.” Otherwise, he claimed, “they are going to run over you.”
Later that morning, Trump left the White House and took his infamous walk through Lafayette Park, where members of the Washington National Guard, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and several other agencies, joined by guard units from a number of states, confronted protesters. As I recounted in my book Subtle Tools, “Protesters threw eggs, candy bars, and water bottles, while law enforcement shot rubber bullets, launched pepper balls, and fired tear gas into the crowd.”
Several weeks later, protests in Portland, Oregon, tested the president’s resolve to send in an “occupying force.” Although he didn’t then go as far as to send in the National Guard, as he had threatened in that phone meeting, he did deploy federal agents to counter the protesters without consulting the governor of that state. Seven hundred and seventy-five Department of Homeland Security agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and elsewhere appeared on the streets of Portland, authorized by a presidential edict to protect federal buildings. As if to intentionally blur the borderline between military and civilian authorities, the federal agents arrived dressed in black military-looking uniforms without identifying insignia and drove unmarked vehicles. The administration justified the deployment by arguing that local law enforcement was unable to effectively control the protests.
Not surprisingly, Oregon Governor Kate Brown and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler protested, claiming that local law enforcement was perfectly capable of handling the protests without federal aid, and that the presence of federal agents, with their aggressive tactics, including the use of tear gas and rubber bullets, had only provoked the protesters, making the situation much worse.
Sound familiar? Fast forward to today in Los Angeles.
Donald Trump is once again president, and immigration raids across the country are hurrying to meet the White House target of 3,000 arrests per day. This time around, Los Angeles has become the focal point of the resulting battle over federal versus state authority. In early June, responding to an outbreak of protests challenging the administration’s brutal immigration raids, Trump sent 700 active-duty Marines and 4,100 National Guard into that city to counter the protesters. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and California Attorney General Bonta have protested resoundingly, claiming, like their Portland counterparts, that the deployment was unnecessary and counterproductive. Mayor Bass has maintained that the local authorities “had the situation under control,” concluding that “there was no need for the National Guard.” Summing up the consequences of the deployment, Governor Newsom considered them to be “intentionally causing chaos, terrorizing communities, and endangering the principles of our great democracy. It is an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism.” Attorney General Bonta echoed Newsom by insisting that the troops were instigating violence, not defusing it, and suing the Trump administration (unsuccessfully so far) for illegally taking over a state National Guard.
Where all of this may be headed is anyone’s guess, but Portland’s attempts in 2020 to fight back against the deployment of federal agents, despite the wishes of local authorities, provide some guidance about what to expect, as well as lessons learned when it comes to the role of the courts, of dissent by local and state leaders, and of the path down which American law may be headed in relation to the president’s ability to usurp the power of local authorities.
The Law
The battle over federal versus state authority is rooted in laws pertaining to presidential powers. The Posse Comitatus Act, as former United States Attorney Joyce Vance explains, “prohibits the federal government from using the military inside of the domestic United States for law enforcement, absent truly compelling circumstances.” But there are exceptions. Title 10 of the U.S. Code fleshes them out, authorizing the president to federalize the National Guard and deploy it to a state in rare instances of invasion, rebellion, or the need to “execute [federal] laws.”
In Portland in 2020, President Trump labelled the protesters “terrorists” and threatened to bring in the National Guard if the protests didn’t stop. Yet days later, he pulled back from that threat, telling George Stephanopoulos on ABC News that such a move would have violated the law. “We have to go by the laws,” he said then. “We can’t move in the National Guard. I can call insurrection but there’s no reason to ever do that, even in a Portland case.” He further concluded that “we can’t call in the National Guard unless we’re requested by a governor.”
My, how things have changed!
On June 7th, Trump issued a memorandum declaring his authority to deploy both the National Guard and the armed services. “In light of these incidents and credible threats of continued violence,” the memo authorized the secretary of defense to coordinate with governors to deploy both the National Guard and “any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.” In other words, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was given unprecedented authority to direct events on the home front, challenging the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibitions.
Since then, 4,100 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines have arrived in Los Angeles. Their presence has been notably aggressive. Meanwhile, Department of Homeland Security agents have swarmed the streets, local employment places, and immigration offices, not wearing identifying insignia (as occurred in Portland). As Nick Turse reported at The Intercept, “Since June 8, there have been 561 arrests related to protests across Los Angeles; 203, for failure to disperse, were made on the night of June 10, after Trump ordered in the National Guard and Marines.” Meanwhile, Trump used the growing conflict to threaten Governor Newsom with arrest.
Justifying his deployments, the president labelled the protesters “insurrectionists,” laying the groundwork for invoking the Insurrection Act, which, as Joyce Vance explains, “allows the military to be used for domestic law enforcement, but — and it’s an important caveat — only to restore order.”
For help in pushing back against the deployments, California officials, like their Portland predecessors, have turned to the courts. This time around, however, the Trump administration has revised its reading of what is lawful and, so far, the judiciary seems to be bending the president’s way.
The Courts
On June 9th, Governor Newsom filed suit in federal court, claiming that the deployment of the Guard and the Marines violated the Constitution and exceeded the president’s Title 10 authority. The suit argued that the deployments were unwarranted and the administration had failed to try to coordinate with the governor. California Attorney General Rob Bonta elaborated on the limitations of the law: “Let me be clear: There is no invasion. There is no rebellion. The President is trying to manufacture chaos and crisis on the ground for his own political ends. Federalizing the California National Guard is an abuse of the President’s authority under the law — and not one we take lightly. We’re asking a court to put a stop to the unlawful, unprecedented order.”
In 2020, the Oregon attorney general had filed suit in federal court in response to the actions of the federal agents. As the New York Times reported, “The lawsuit said federal agents were violating the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution by denying the right to peacefully protest, failing to provide due process and conducting unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ultimately, the federal judge dismissed the case, claiming that “the attorney general’s office did not have standing to bring the case because it had not shown that the issue was ‘an interest that is specific to the state itself.’” The Oregon court also shied away from tackling the larger question of what powers the federal government actually had in such situations.
Suits brought by private parties, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of individuals (journalists in particular), who were injured, harassed, or “abducted” by federal agents were more successful. Initially, a judge expanded a temporary restraining order (TRO) from local law enforcement to federal agents, blocking the use of tear gas and projectiles against journalists. As the suit progressed, more weapons in the federal agents’ arsenal, including rubber bullets, were prohibited.
When the president asked for the TRO to be removed, the judge not only refused, but levied a requirement that government agents wear identifying insignia — an effort to introduce a measure of accountability into the conflict on the ground.
On appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals raised the larger issue of federal versus local authority, resoundingly rejecting the legality of the presence of federal agents in Portland, while agreeing with the lower court’s finding of “a disturbing pattern of unwarranted force by federal agents.” That court not only reinstated the TRO against federal agents attacking journalists but underscored the fact that federal agents had gone beyond protecting federal buildings to actively confronting protesters, while widening the “perimeter” in which they could act outside those buildings and so wrongfully overstepping the authorities expressly reserved for local law enforcement.
And at that time, there was also help from within Trump’s circle. In a settlement arranged between Oregon Governor Kate Brown and Vice President Mike Pence’s staff, federal law enforcement officers were indeed replaced with members of the Oregon state police. As Nik Blosser, Brown’s chief of staff and one of the negotiators, pointed out recently, referring to Vice President Pence, “There was at least someone in the administration that knew that this violence needed to come to an end. I’m not sure who is there to negotiate with now.”
Today, in Los Angeles, the courts are similarly engaged in a suit over the administration’s deployment of federal agents to counter protests. So far, however, the outcome is trending very differently. Earlier in the month, a federal judge issued a TRO against the National Guard in that city. In a 46-page ruling, Judge Charles Breyer, the brother of retired Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, rejected the government’s characterization of the protests as “a rebellion” and excoriated the president for assuming powers beyond his constitutional and statutory authority. “That’s the difference between a constitutional government and King George” was the way he put it. In addition, Judge Breyer returned the authority to deploy the National Guard to California rather than the federal government.
The administration immediately appealed. As in the Portland case, the appellate court is once again the Ninth Circuit. On June 18th, there was a hearing before a panel of three judges, two of them Trump appointees and one a Biden appointee. Repeatedly, the judges seemed to reject the notion that the law requires the active involvement of the governor in the decision to deploy such troops, appearing to side with the federal government lawyer, who told the judge again and again, “Our position is this is not subject to judicial review.” In other words, the president should have free rein to do as he pleases.
In their ruling, the appellate judges agreed with Trump and not with the state of California, overruling the district court judge and unanimously agreeing that the president had acted lawfully and that his failure to notify the governor before deploying those troops was not grounds for obstructing the president’s order. In other words, he could indeed keep control of the troops in L.A.
In short, the case has taken us another step down the road to the “maximalist” view of executive power. The ruling suggests that last year’s Supreme Court immunity decision, allowing a president to do more or less whatever he wants while in office without fear of retribution, was indeed a game changer. As a reminder, in July 2024, while Trump was running for office a third time, the court ruled that, “under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” The court then added, “There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”
In the context of recent events in Los Angeles, rather than immunity for criminal activity, it suggests that the Supreme Court might indeed support immunity from legal pushback for acts committed at the state level. And that would, of course, remove yet another of the checks and balances that once underlay the protections against untethered presidential power in the American system of government.
A Genuinely Frightening Moment
How this will play out at the Supreme Court the next time around is anyone’s guess and may turn on the issue of whether that court assesses that there really was a rebellion in Los Angeles — the government’s premise for bringing in federal troops. Nonetheless, this should certainly be considered a frightening moment. After all, that presidential memorandum authorizing the federal deployments to L.A. was in no way limited to California. In fact, there was no geographical specificity to it at all and no specific type of protest named in the memo. It was a blanket authorization for deploying federal troops, based on unspecified acts of violence, disorder, and protests. If California is a sign of the future, it seems ever clearer that the courts have little appetite for standing in the way of this president. In addition, as loyalty to him is the first requisite of government officials, any pushback from within the ranks of his administration seems essentially inconceivable.
So here we are, once again learning that the restraints Americans could rely upon in the past are fast disappearing. And while protests from democratic leaders abound, it’s the courts that, at this moment, hold the power.
It’s tempting to point to the moments in recent times when we should have seen this coming — the growing powers granted to the president in the name of the Global War on Terror, the unchecked ability of the president to repeatedly make acting appointments and fire those in his cabinet who oppose his will, the coopting of members of Congress through threats of primarying them out of office or grants of vast amounts of money should they demonstrate sufficient loyalty to the president.
But as it stands, this is probably not the time to focus on who’s to blame in the past. Instead, it’s time to consider the future and our power to strengthen the fundamentals of our democracy before all is lost. Only if our trust in the law and the courts is restored will we truly be able to turn our thoughts to the mistakes and missed opportunities of what by then would be the painful past.
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In a Post-Roe America, Knowledge Isn’t Just Power—It’s Survival
This is a critical moment in history for both patients and physicians alike to stay informed—because the moves happening now could reshape access to reproductive healthcare nationwide.
Jul 02, 2025
Three years ago, I remember exactly where I was when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. My stomach sank. As an OB/GYN PA with more than a decade in reproductive care, I knew this wasn’t just devastating—it was going to reshape the healthcare landscape completely.
The conversations I’d been having with patients for years—about abortion, birth control, miscarriage, pregnancy loss, pain—were about to get harder, more complicated, and more dangerous.
I had the honor of joining over 100 incredible storytellers in Washington, D.C. for the Our Voices, Our Stories, Our Future: Free & Just Storyteller Summit, to mark three years since the deadly Dobbs decision.
In emergencies, minutes matter. I’ve been in those rooms. And I can tell you: When someone is crashing in front of you, the last thing you should be doing is calling legal.
I am still in awe of the number of people who were courageous enough to travel from across the country to tell their stories and fight for reproductive freedom. We laughed together, we cried together, and we shared our visions for a better future.
We also came to D.C. to meet with lawmakers to remind them that Dobbs didn’t just overturn Roe: It changed lives.
Although the fall of Roe didn’t end abortion in this country, it made it exponentially harder to access. It made it scarier. It deepened the segregation of healthcare access in America. If you’re wealthy enough to travel for care, you might still be okay. But if you’re not—if you’re young, uninsured, working class, Black, or Brown—you’re at greater risk. And we know abortion bans lead to higher maternal mortality, especially for Black women.
Let’s be clear: The anti-abortion zealots behind Dobbs were never going to stop there. In the three years since, I’ve watched extremists celebrate it as a win for “states’ rights,” while women are forced to flee their home states for basic care. “Leaving it to the states” doesn’t mean freedom. It means chaos. It means harm. It means people die.
That’s not an exaggeration—that’s reality.
And President Donald Trump? He doesn’t need to sign a national abortion ban to wreak havoc. He and his allies are already gutting protections through rollbacks, legal loopholes, and silence where there should be leadership.
Recently, Trump’s Supreme Court ruled that states can block people relying on Medicaid from choosing Planned Parenthood as their trusted healthcare provider, a devastating blow to abortion rights and reproductive healthcare—specifically, the freedom of millions of people who use Medicaid to choose Planned Parenthood as their healthcare provider.
The court put millions of Americans’ essential right to reproductive care at risk, and it will devastate communities all across the country just so Republicans in Congress can completely gut Medicaid for millions more Americans. Earlier this month, the Trump administration rescinded federal guidance that protected abortion access in emergencies. That guidance made clear what EMTALA—our federal emergency care law—already guarantees: If a pregnant patient shows up to the ER in crisis and needs an abortion to survive, they must get care.
Now that guidance is gone. And providers are left wondering if they’ll be sued—or even arrested—for doing their jobs.
In emergencies, minutes matter. I’ve been in those rooms. And I can tell you: When someone is crashing in front of you, the last thing you should be doing is calling legal.
And now they’ve set their sights on medication abortion—specifically mifepristone. This medication has been safely used by more than 8 million people over the last 20+ years. It’s not only essential for abortion care—it’s critical for miscarriage management too. But extremists don’t care about science, or safety. They care about control.
If they succeed in restricting mifepristone, it won’t just impact abortion access. It will gut miscarriage care. It could force providers to delay or deny treatment. And it could shut down clinics that rely on it to function—clinics already hanging on by a thread.
This is how they win. Not just with bans, but with quiet sabotage. With red tape. With fear. With confusion. With back-handed backdoor restrictions on our rights to bodily autonomy.
This is a critical moment in history for both patients and physicians alike to stay informed—because the moves happening now could reshape access to reproductive healthcare nationwide.
That’s why I started Take Back Trust—because people need more than outrage. They need answers, and they need tools. Patients need to walk into an ER or a clinic and know what to say, what to ask, and what their rights are.
Take Back Trust is a national resource hub helping people navigate this broken system. Whether you’re facing a miscarriage, scheduling a birth control visit, or trying to figure out if your state still protects you—we’ve got your back.
I am inspired by the words of former Vice President Kamala Harris, who surprised us via video at the Summit. “I know these are difficult times, and it requires a whole lot of courage, and it requires a level of optimism, to remember that we’re fighting for something, not against something,” the former Vice President reminded us. “And in that way we are doing good and important work that is about upholding fundamental rights, such as the freedom of an individual to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do.”
As a clinician, a content creator, and a full-time reproductive rights advocate working at the intersection of medicine and movement, I’ll keep showing up. I’ll keep saying the quiet parts out loud. Because we’re not going back—and we’re not backing down.
We can’t afford to.
Lives are on the line. Not someday, today.
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Supreme Court Agrees to Hear GOP Effort to Further Gut Campaign Finance Law
Watchdogs say the spending coordination limits that Republicans are challenging were put in place to "guard against the corrupting effect of large campaign contributions."
Jun 30, 2025
The Supreme Court is taking up another Republican legal case seeking to erode campaign finance law and give more power to the wealthy donors seeking to influence elections.
On Monday, the court agreed to hear a challenge to campaign finance restrictions which limit the ability of party committees to directly coordinate spending with individual candidates. The anti-corruption group Public Citizen argues that this provision was put in place to "guard against the corrupting effect of large campaign contributions."
The challenge was brought by the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committees, as well as the 2022 campaigns of two Ohio Republican congressmen: former Sen. JD Vance, who has since become vice president, and former Rep. Steve Chabot, who lost his re-election bid in 2022.
The case seeks to overturn rules implemented in the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1971, which put strict limits on the ability of party committees to spend money in coordination with specific candidates. The Democratic National Committee will defend the rule before the court after filing a motion to intervene.
The rules were put in place, in part, to stop wealthy donors from using parties to get around rules about coordinating individual spending with candidates.
Under current law, how much coordinated spending parties can undertake is limited by the population of the state or district in question. At most, parties can coordinate nearly $4 million worth of spending for a single Senate candidate and $127,200 for a single House candidate.
The Republicans bringing the challenge have argued that the limits on coordinated spending violate the First Amendment.
The Campaign Legal Center, which has argued before the court against weakening these rules, has described them as a powerful bulwark against corruption.
"Since the party coordinated spending limits were enacted in the 1970s, these limits have checked the corruptive effect of large contributions flowing through party committees to candidates and prevented the quid pro quo exchanges that such contributions would otherwise facilitate," they wrote last year in a policy page arguing against the GOP challenge.
"Because the limits allow political parties to spend only a prescribed amount of their money in direct coordination with a candidate," the Campaign Legal Center continued, "they moderate the risk that a party committee could effectively pass on every big donation—or six-figure check collected via joint fundraising—to the donor’s chosen candidate in the form of coordinated expenditures."
"This case has nothing to do with the First Amendment and everything to do with Republicans' obsession with creating a government by and for billionaires," said Brett Edkins, a spokesperson for the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America.
In 2001, the Supreme Court upheld coordination limits in another case brought by Republicans: FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee.
In that case, often described as the Colorado II decision, the majority ruled 5-4 that "a party's coordinated expenditures, unlike expenditures truly independent, may be restricted to minimize circumvention of contribution limits."
Since then, however, the Supreme Court has helped the Republican Party chip away at laws that kept powerful donors in check.
Most notably, in the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC case, they ruled that political spending is a form of protected speech and that individuals could spend unlimited amounts of money influencing the election process, so long as it was not directly coordinated with candidates and instead done through "independent expenditure only" committees, more commonly known as super PACs.
"In the 15 years since the Supreme Court's abysmal Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate and billionaire campaign spending, the corruption of American politics has gone from bad to worse," said Jon Golinger, a spokesman for Public Citizen.
Despite the supposed wall of separation, most candidates now rely on super PACs for large amounts of their political communication and organizing. In 2015, a report by Public Citizen titled "Super Connected" found that 45% of super PACs spending over $100,000 directed that spending toward a single candidate.
The amount of election-related corporate spending directed to these largely unaccountable entities has exploded in recent years. According to OpenSecrets, outside spending reached an unprecedented $4.5 billion in the 2024 election, compared with just $555 million in 2008, the last presidential election year before Citizens United.
The top three individual spenders—the Mellon family, Elon Musk, and the Adelson family—spent a combined $369 million to help Donald Trump win the presidency.
"The right-wing supermajority on the Court already dismantled decades of campaign finance protections in Citizens United, and now they’re poised to gut what few remain, inviting billionaires to bankroll candidates through political parties with no limits," Edkins said.
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