Troops everywhere? Trump may send military to occupy more U.S. cities
U.S. Marines, deployed by Trump, watch as protesters march past on Saturday, June 14, 2025, in Los Angeles. | Ethan Swope / AP

WASHINGTON—Beyond what is now, under Trump’s orders, a continuing 60-day occupation of Los Angeles by U.S. Marines, the president says he’s now ready to send troops into any other big city run by Democrats, African-Americans, or Latinos. 

He has ordered his security apparatus, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to focus on stepping up immigration raids in all those cities, especially, but not exclusively, in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. The president says that could necessitate the sending in of the U.S. military to those same cities.

Sending troops to patrol, much less occupy, U.S. cities violates the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The act says that unless there’s a constitutional violation, “it shall be unlawful to deploy the Army…for the purpose of executing the laws.”

Instead, Trump told reporters on June 10 that sending troops to L.A. was “the first, perhaps, of many” such orders to troops to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents’ raids. The raids themselves violate the law because they are carried out by unidentified agents often in plainclothes, mirroring secret police tactics. Rather than arrests accompanied by charges, they involve warrantless kidnapping, no due process, and immediate imprisonment without charges at either detention centers in the U.S. or virtual concentration camps overseas.

Equal or greater force still to come

“I can inform the rest of the country that when they do it, if they do it, they’re going to be met with equal or greater force” than what was used in L.A., Trump said. The force he was referring to was the harsh treatment of demonstrators in the nation’s second-largest city, and elsewhere.

Troops will stay in Los Angeles “until there’s no danger,” Trump declared. The courts have yet to issue a final ruling, not on the deployment of the Marines, but on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit demanding the return of control over the National Guard to him. 

Under questioning, Trump Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth elaborated on the administration’s plans. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, asked him at a June 11 Senate hearing: “Do you think [Trump’s] order applies to any Guard anywhere, any service branch anywhere? Did you just potentially mobilize every Guard everywhere and every service member everywhere? I mean, create the framework for that?”

Hegseth said the military’s intent “is getting ahead of a problem, so that if in other places, if there are other riots (sic) in places where law enforcement officers are threatened, we would have the capability to surge National Guard there if necessary.”

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, declared the troops’ real mission was to aid Trump’s ICE agents in the mass deportations of an estimated 11 million undocumented people. ICE agents have grabbed people, including a 4-year-old girl being treated for cancer. “President Trump promised to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in American history, and left-wing riots (sic) will not deter him in that effort,” Leavitt snapped. 

Prelude to martial law?

“This is all a prelude to Trump’s efforts to call for martial law,” says Richard Green, the co-chair of Communist Party USA’s California District. “Los Angeles is a testing ground. But he’s been surprised by the pushback” nationally, Green said of Trump. The troops are there only in support functions. The mainstream media, notably Fox, “has focused on only a few pitched battles” in “a very localized area” of several blocks of the 500-square-mile city.

Members of the Communist Party USA’s California District, led by CPUSA National Co-Chair Rossana Cambron, center, on the march in Los Angeles. | Photo via CPUSA

This wouldn’t be the first time martial law has been floated in Trump’s presence. After his boss lost the 2020 presidential election, ex-Gen. Michael Flynn, then a Trump campaign adviser, advocated imposing martial law—in an Oval Office meeting—and re-running the voting in battleground states.  

Green noted the Marines and the National Guard are guarding two virtually empty buildings: The federal building next to historic Union Station, downtown L.A.’s Amtrak terminal, and a detention center a block away. The detention center has been the site of most protests against ICE raids. 

“They’re standing around, doing crowd control,” Green said of the Guard and the Marines. Meanwhile, “the resistance is growing, not diminishing. And new coalitions are being formed” to push back against both the troops and the ICE raids.

“If he [Trump] removed the troops, all of this would stop.”

No troops on Jan. 6

The crowd control and riot prevention tasks that Green mentioned was something troops could have legitimately been assigned to do on another occasion. Gov. Newsom, for instance, has drawn the contrast of Trump federalizing the California National Guard and sending 2,000 of its soldiers to L.A. to help quell small disturbances with the president’s refusal to activate the D.C. National Guard—which the president directly controls—as 1,600 armed Trumpites overwhelmed the U.S. Capitol police in their Jan. 6, 2021, invasion and insurrection.

Trump watched the invaders on TV, lauding them as he saw lawmakers, staff, and reporters running for their lives. That included his own Vice President, Mike Pence, who evaded a potential Secret Service trap, reached a safe area, and called out the D.C. Guard without consulting Trump. 

In the Windy City, the Chicago Teachers Union said the violence witnessed the last several days—both from troops and from a far-right assassin in Minnesota—is “the byproduct of a deeply coordinated, decades-long campaign to normalize hate, delegitimize protest, and weaponize political power against the people.” 

The teachers said that the country has entered a moment “where labor leaders are jailed for leading workers”—Service Employees California President David Huerta, a U.S. citizen, in L.A.—”sheriffs openly threaten to bury protesters, where a U.S. president pardons violent insurrectionists, and where his cabinet members” had security guards “physically assault U.S. senators, and where lawyers smear labor leaders by putting them on missing persons posters.”

Newsom summed up the situation: “Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes. This moment we have feared has arrived.”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg
Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.

John Wojcik
John Wojcik

John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People's World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and '80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper's predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.