Trump’s military deployment in Los Angeles has little to do with the rule of law

It may be tempting to seek, in Donald Trump’s incursion on Los Angeles, some evidence that he is merely trying to defend an essential if not widely understood foundational American principle: the rule of law.

It is a violation of law, after all, for people to enter the United States without authorization or inspection, or to overstay their visas. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama defended the rule of law when they stepped up deportations and border arrests, which reached a peak under Obama in 2012.

Why was it OK when they did it, but not Trump?

But the analogies are weak and the equivalencies false. The angry protests against the Los Angeles immigration raids, arrests, incarceration and impending deportation come after months of repeated Trump administration attempts to deny the most basic constitutional protections to people targeted for deportation. A wide swath of residents, some with student visas, some with pending court proceedings, were grabbed off the street or from their workplaces or homes by federal agents who often failed to identify themselves or the reasons for their actions.

Some of the targets were sent to foreign countries with which they have no familial or language connection, such as South Sudan or Libya. Some appear to have been surreptitiously transported among various federal court districts to avoid orders preventing their deportation. Some were denied access to family or legal counsel. Some were targeted merely for expressing their opinions. Some are alleged, without proof, to belong to gangs.

In many cases, if not most, targets were denied the most basic elements of due process: The right to know the charges against them, and to respond and present evidence in front of a neutral magistrate with power to block the government’s action. It’s fine to argue that members of certain gangs, for example, are deportable if they are not U.S. citizens, but who judges the government’s claims that some tattoo is irrefutable evidence of gang membership? Where does a person present evidence that the government’s claims are mistaken or trumped-up?

Without due process, none of us is safe from government persecution. Any citizen could be accused of being a non-citizen and in the U.S. unlawfully and would be powerless to argue otherwise.

Trump has claimed that allowing due process to his deportation targets would take too much time. His position is inherently hostile to the rule of law and would substitute an abhorrently anti-American principle: Rule by autocrat.

Previous presidents who deported people who were ineligible to be here did so without deploying the Marines, federalizing the national guard, threatening to arrest the governor of California, slandering hard-working aspiring Americans as invaders and occupiers, and gratuitously spurring violence and chaos in cities rich with immigrants. They enforced the law with skill and discretion, recognizing the difference between migrants who are helping to build the nation, just as generations of their documented and undocumented forebears did, and those who exploit and harm others. They respected the rule of law.

To Trump, the rule of law is a prop, to be deployed or discarded for political reasons to satisfy political and personal goals.

He appears to be trying to roll back and replay the disastrous (for him) summer of 2020, when protests against the police murder of George Floyd threatened his presidency. He considered federalizing national guard units and sending the military to cities run by Democrats, including Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. He considered invoking the Insurrection Act to allow federal troops to make arrests. But cooler heads in his administration talked him out of it.

Cooler heads are now banished from the White House and replaced by hotheads like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who said of Los Angeles, “They are not a city of immigrants, they are a city of criminals.” And White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller, who called undocumented immigrants “invaders” and those who protested their arrests “insurrectionists.”

The word choice is noteworthy in the wake of a series of court rulings properly rejecting the administration’s claims that undocumented immigrants constitute an “invasion” of the sort that would constitutionally empower Trump to suspend fundamental American liberties and imprison people based on his decrees rather than upon the proper administration of justice.

And “insurrectionists?” Trump’s respect for the rule of law is so paltry he called the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, which he egged on, a “day of love” and pardoned all 1,500 insurrectionists, including those who assaulted the police officers who were trying to protect the building and the officials who occupied it.

That’s the background to the immigration raids in Los Angeles and the demonstrations against them. Protesters are not standing against the rule of law. They are standing against its blatant and frightening violation.

Read More: Trump ignored Newsom in putting the National Guard in LA. That’s rare in US history

Federalizing the national guard over the objection of a governor is rare, and previously was used to protect civil rights and human dignity, not threaten them, as the Trump actions in Los Angeles do. The most recent instance before now was when President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the Alabama national guard in 1965 over the governor’s head to protect marchers between Selma and Montgomery as they demanded that their state respect the right of Black citizens to vote. Before that, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas national guard in 1957, shifting the previous role of the troopers — to block nine Black students from attending all-white Little Rock Central High School — to instead enforce the desegregation order.

Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus was aghast, claiming that his state had become “occupied territory.”

“In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish, what is happening in America?” he asked.

It was a rhetorical question, but there was a ready answer: What was happening was the long-delayed extension of liberty, justice and the rule of law to all Americans.

Trump argues that his arrests in Los Angeles (and New York, Texas and other places where round-ups have been met with angry protests) are also on behalf of freedom, justice and law, but his horrendous track record shows his deep disregard for those principles and the utter failure of any parallel with previous presidential orders.

Yet the Marines are now deployed in Los Angeles, as if it were occupied territory. In the name of God, liberty and decency, what have we allowed to happen to America?