Imagine Our Founding Fathers’ Insisting on a Militarized Police State Controlled by the President

Imagine Our Founding Fathers’ Insisting on a Militarized Police State Controlled by the President

“Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.” The relevant provision of current amended version of the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” 

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. The principal exception is the Insurrection Act to be used in times “insurrection,” “rebellion,” “domestic violence,” generally applied only to major violent uprising or actual invasion.

Invasion? Foreign predatory incursion? Huh? It is the President’s announced intention to continue to deploy federalized and active-duty military troops to suppress crime in cities and states he believes cannot control their serious criminality in their own jurisdictions. Yet, his Big Beautiful Bill slashed funding to fight violent crime and to support local police forces, so apparently controlling the relevant police force is more important than fighting crime. Further, Trump’s statement that the focus of immigration effort was to detain and deport undocumented residents with criminal arrest/conviction records, but which has since become an indiscriminate quota system where between 70% and 80% of detainees have no criminal record at all, most are hard-working, tax paying residents supporting vast swaths of American businesses and farms. Check-points, anyone?

A few observations about what the President can do with federal troops in the ordinary course of operation: they can guard federal buildings and properties, and the President does have more control over the District of Columbia which is legally under federal control. What he cannot do is to deport legal alien residents, cancelling their legal status for expressing their political beliefs peacefully, even if not acceptable to the government (Bridge vs Wixon, 1945 US Supreme Court). What he cannot do is turn the military into a national police force under his total control simply to fight crime simply be declaring “insurrection” or “invasion.” The overt statements by Mr Trump and his acolyte “junior-officer-Fox News Host-turned Secretary of Defense” Pete Hegseth, concerning expanding the role of the US armed forces, adding criminal investigative units, into a national police force, within the military and usurping local police power, were fortunately unambiguous admissions of statutory violations.

When there are crimes that cross borders or involve congressionally approved national security – like sex and drug trafficking, espionage, interstate criminality, illicit firearms, organized crime, corruption, federal property, etc. – specialized federal policing agents (FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service, SEC, IRS, etc.) have worked hand and glove with local police as cooperating crime fighters, with no local objection to this combined effort. But when all of Mr Trump’s efforts to deploy federal troops to fight crime have avoided red states and cities with far worse criminal statistics and have focused solely on blue cities with Black mayors (Los Angeles, DC, Chicago, and probably Baltimore and Oakland) with improving criminal statistics, suspicions of racism seem justified. Trump mumbled about adding red state Louisiana, notably New Orleans, but that would not be a federal imposition, like happening only with the support of the governor there.

Add allowing masked federal agents with no clear identifying indices, detaining and arresting people who look like they could be undocumented without a warrant, deportation without any meaningful due process, and you have an almost perfect definition of a police state, including rule “by law” issued by executive order vs rule “of law” as appropriately legislatively approved within the bounds of the US Constitution.

Even as a thoroughly biased US Supreme Court may continue its blind support of Donald Trump’s quest for dictatorial powers, a US Federal Court in San Francisco has ruled, two months after the federal occupation of Los Angeles (September 2nd), that such deployment of troops under US military control violated the above-cited Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. As reported in the September 3rd New York Times by Shawn Hubler, Federal District Judge Charles R. Breyer noted that the “administration, he found, ‘systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.’ Those actions, he added, violated laws that had been in place since the late 1800s… And, he said, the administration’s rationale for the deployment fell far short of the threshold for military action.

“Mr. Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense ‘deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced,’ he wrote. ‘There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence. Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.’… Judge Breyer, in his ruling, found that the 300 remaining troops on the federalized deployment could stay in Los Angeles but were essentially limited to guarding federal property.

“Hours later, the governor and California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, filed a motion demanding a complete halt to the military deployment even for those few hundred troops. Not only was there no justification for their presence, they contended, but in August the Trump administration had extended their activation through early November, when Californians will vote in a special election on new congressional maps that could determine control of Congress… ‘The timing of Trump’s extension of the National Guard soldiers isn’t coincidental,’ [Governor Gavin] Newsom said in a statement. ‘He’s holding onto soldiers through Election Day.’

“The decision on Tuesday [9/2] arose from the president’s deployment this summer of about 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, where demonstrations had erupted over immigration raids.” Make no mistake, I and most of America want to see less crime, particularly violent crime. Most of us admire the efforts of fully trained and well-qualified federal agents in battling serious criminals in our midst, a system that has worked for decades. But you do not get there by cutting federal funding to prevent violent crime and support local police, substituting inappropriate and undertrained federal neophytes and federal troops under the autocratic and partisan dictates of one man and his “whatever you say” minions.

I’m Peter Dekom, and too many Americans only look at our seemingly red/blue divide in determining the correctness of governmental policies, when they should be looking at the erosion of the constitutional intended to protect each and every one of us.