Between June 7 and 9, 2025, something unprecedented occurred in American history. President Donald Trump deployed 5,000 troops to occupy Los Angeles—4,000 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines—against the explicit wishes of California’s governor, the city’s mayor, and even the Los Angeles Police Department. The justification? Forty-four arrests during immigration raids.
Let that sink in. Forty-four arrests. Five thousand troops.
This is not crowd control. This is not disaster relief. This is the federal government using military force to occupy an American city whose leaders are saying no. And if we don’t understand what line we just crossed, we won’t recognize where it leads.
Manufacturing crisis, normalizing occupation
The damage was real. Five Waymo autonomous vehicles were torched and destroyed, their lithium-ion batteries creating toxic smoke clouds. Twenty-nine businesses were looted in a single night, including sporting goods stores and cell phone shops. Downtown Los Angeles was marred by graffiti and broken windows on buildings and storefronts.
But the arithmetic still reveals the disproportion. Property damage and civil disorder—serious, yes—met with 5,000 federal troops. That’s more military personnel than were deployed for Hurricane Katrina’s immediate response. Trump claimed Los Angeles would have been “completely obliterated” without his intervention, turning localized unrest into an existential urban crisis requiring military occupation.
The manufactured crisis isn’t the riot damage—it’s the White House’s response. When Governor Newsom called the deployment an “illegal act” that’s “immoral” and “unconstitutional,” Trump didn’t back down—he doubled down. When Mayor Bass said the city was being used as an “experiment” and a “test case” for taking power away from local authorities, the administration sent more troops.
The message is clear: federal authority doesn’t require local consent. Constitutional norms are suggestions. And American cities can be occupied when their politics displease Washington.
Historical memory: When presidents deploy troops domestically
Context matters, especially historical context. The last time a president invoked the Insurrection Act was in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict. But here’s the crucial difference: President Bush acted at the request of Republican Governor Pete Wilson and Democratic Mayor Tom Bradley. Local authorities had asked for help.
Before that, presidents rarely deployed federal troops without state governors’ consent. The main exceptions occurred during the Civil Rights era, when federal troops were sent to Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama—not to suppress protests, but to protect Black students from white mobs while Southern governors defied federal desegregation orders.
Trump’s deployment inverts this history. Instead of federal power protecting constitutional rights against state resistance, we have federal power imposing military occupation against state objection. The precedent being set is that any president can declare any city a threat and send in the troops—regardless of what local communities want or need.
The ghosts of Kent State
Fifty-five years ago, National Guard troops shot and killed four unarmed college students at Kent State University. The parallels aren’t perfect, but they’re instructive. In both cases, political leaders characterized protests as dangerous threats requiring a military response. In both cases, the actual situation on the ground was far less volatile than officials claimed.
At Kent State, Republican Governor James Rhodes disregarded warnings from local prosecutors and university officials who had a better understanding of the campus than he did. They told him deploying troops could “spark conflict and lead to fatalities.” Rhodes sent them anyway, promising to “eradicate” the “communist element.”
The language echoes. Trump called Los Angeles protesters “violent, insurrectionist mobs” and “paid insurrectionists,” while simultaneously admitting he didn’t think an actual insurrection was taking place. It’s the same rhetorical playbook: inflate the threat, deploy overwhelming force, then claim credit when the manufactured crisis doesn’t escalate further.
But here’s what Kent State teaches us about using military troops to police civilians: “Force is inherently unpredictable, often uncontrollable, and can lead to fatal mistakes and lasting human suffering.” Soldiers are trained to fight, not to manage civil disorder. When they feel threatened—or when orders become confused—people die.
The constitutional crisis hidden in plain sight
What’s happening in Los Angeles isn’t just about immigration policy, protest management, or protecting Federal buildings. It’s about whether the United States remains a federal republic where states retain meaningful authority, or becomes a centralized system where Washington can override local governance at will.
The Insurrection Act of 1807 does give presidents broad authority to deploy federal troops domestically. But like many laws written in the early republic, its language is dangerously vague. The act allows intervention to address “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy”—terms so broad they could theoretically justify military response to almost any organized political activity.
Legal scholars have warned for years that the act’s language needs to be clarified and constrained. The current situation shows why. When forty-four arrests can justify five thousand troops, when protests can be redefined as insurrection, when local opposition becomes grounds for federal occupation—the law has become a weapon against democracy itself.
The material logic of military protection for ICE
Strip away the rhetoric about law and order, and ask a simpler question: why do immigration raids need military protection?
The answer reveals the real politics at work. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents aren’t protecting communities from dangerous criminals—they’re separating working-class families whose labor keeps American cities functioning. The protests in Los Angeles emerged from immigrant communities that include nearly half the city’s population. These aren’t outside agitators or professional activists. They are people defending their neighbors, their families, their communities.
When immigration enforcement requires military backup, it’s because the policy lacks popular support. When federal agents need protection from local police departments, it’s because the raids are tearing apart the social fabric that local cops are supposed to maintain. The deployment of troops isn’t evidence that enforcement is working—it’s evidence that it’s politically unsustainable without the use of coercion.
This is how authoritarianism functions in practice. It doesn’t announce itself with jackboots and rallies. It presents itself as a necessary response to crisis, temporary measures for extraordinary circumstances, federal authority stepping in where local leadership has failed. Each precedent makes the next intervention easier to justify.
Where does this end?
So here’s the question that should keep every American awake: if this deployment becomes normalized, what’s next?
If a president can send troops to protect ICE raids in Los Angeles, why not to break strikes in Detroit? If immigration protests justify military occupation, why not environmental protests? If local opposition to federal policy triggers troop deployment, what happens when sanctuary cities refuse to cooperate? Or when blue states resist federal abortion bans? Or when any community decides its values conflict with Washington’s demands?
The precedent being set is that a federal military force can be deployed wherever local communities resist federal policy. That’s not federalism—it’s internal colonialism.
Mayor Bass was right to call Los Angeles a “test case.” We’re watching the pilot program for governing American cities through military occupation. If it works in Los Angeles—if communities accept it, if resistance fades, if the media normalizes it—it will be tried elsewhere.
The line we can’t keep moving
Every democracy has a moment when it must choose between the rule of law and the law of rule. When constitutional norms collide with political ambition. When the question becomes whether institutions will constrain power or power will reshape institutions.
But here’s the problem: we’ve been in this moment before with Trump. Multiple times. And each time, we’ve moved the line.
January 6th was supposed to be that moment—when a sitting president incited a mob to storm the Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power. Before that, it was Trump’s phone call pressuring Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes.” Before that, it was using the presidency to extort Ukraine for dirt on a political opponent. Before that, it was firing the FBI director for investigating Russian interference. Before that, it was the Muslim ban, the family separations, weaponizing the Justice Department; the list goes on.
Each time, we were told this was the line. Each time we’re told this is not the America we know. This was where democracy would finally assert itself. This was when institutions would hold. And each time, after the immediate crisis passed, we quietly adjusted to the new normal. What seemed unthinkable became unprecedented. What was unprecedented became concerning. What was concerning became just another Tuesday in American politics.
This is how authoritarianism works—not through sudden conquest, but through gradual habituation. Each violation shifts the baseline of what’s acceptable. Each accommodation makes the next transgression seem reasonable by comparison. What once would have ended careers now barely registers as a news cycle.
Trump’s deployment of federal troops to occupy Los Angeles isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s the logical next step in a pattern we’ve been enabling for nearly a decade. When you refuse to accept election results, you move closer to refusing local authority. When you call protesters “insurrectionists” without evidence, you prepare the ground for a military response to political opposition.
When you weaponize federal power against political enemies, you normalize using force against dissenting communities.
The question isn’t whether this deployment crosses a constitutional line—it’s whether we’ll keep moving that line to accommodate it. Will we spend the next few weeks debating the legal technicalities of the Insurrection Act while federal troops patrol American streets? Will we normalize military occupation as just another policy disagreement? Will we wait for the next escalation to finally say “enough”?
Because that’s what Trump is counting on, he understands that American political culture abhors sustained confrontation. We prefer to move on, to find a reasonable middle ground, and to treat each crisis as isolated rather than part of a deliberate pattern. He’s betting that we’ll accommodate this deployment the way we’ve accommodated everything else—by gradually accepting that this is just how things work now.
Forty-four arrests. Five thousand troops. A precedent that will outlive the protests that triggered it.
The question isn’t whether downtown Los Angeles looks like a military occupation. The question is why we’re pretending it doesn’t.
As with all news-analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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