What did Donald Trump do today?
He promised to invade an American city on the same day a court said it was illegal for him to do that.
This morning, in a scathing 52-page decision, a federal judge ruled that Trump had broken federal law by sending American military forces into Los Angeles. It is illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act to deploy military units for purposes of domestic law enforcement, except in times of actual rebellion. Judge Charles Breyer noted in his ruling that this is exactly what Trump had done:
Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense 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. 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.
Nevertheless, at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws. The evidence at trial established that Defendants 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. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.
Almost three months after Defendants first deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, 300 National Guard members remain stationed there. Moreover, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country—including Oakland and San Francisco, here in the Northern District of California—thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.
As Breyer noted, outside of the courtroom, Trump has made absolutely no secret of his reasons for deploying troops to Los Angeles and threatening to do so in other parts of the country: to punish his political enemies, to frighten people who would protest against his administration, and to try to regain some political momentum. Preventing presidents from using the military to for their own political ends is precisely why the Posse Comitatus act was passed in the first place. Breyer's order specifically forbids Trump from using National Guard or regular military forces in this way again.
A few hours later, at a brief address in the White House that seemed to have been arranged mostly to provide a "proof of life" moment for a president who had been kept away from reporters and the public eye for a full week, Trump promised to invade Chicago on precisely the same pretext that Judge Breyer had enjoined him from using.
The clearest indication of Trump's plans came not from the White House, but from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who gave information about potential out-of-state National Guard deployments inside Illinois. Pritzker also alerted Chicagoans to planned ICE raids timed to coincide with celebrations of Mexican Independence Day on Sept. 16, in an attempt to terrorize Mexican-American communities in Chicago.
The American city with the highest murder rate is St. Louis, Missouri, by a wide margin—and unlike in Chicago or Washington, its murder rate is climbing rather than dropping quickly. Trump has never once mentioned it as a target for a military invasion, nor any other city in a Republican-governed state or with a non-Black mayor.
Why does this matter?
- Americans are not the enemy the American military is meant to fight.
