The White House wants to numb voters to ICE chaos

By Ronald Brownstein

One major American city in turmoil was apparently insufficient for President Donald Trump.

Under pressure from allies, he is retreating from immigration enforcement in some key economic sectors. But simultaneously, in a post to his social media platform on Sunday night, he made clear he intends to apply the coercive immigration enforcement tactics he is using in Los Angeles against other big Democratic-run cities.

Those tactics begin with a rhetorical framework that defines California and Los Angeles as something outside the unified American republic. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration agenda, routinely portrays the state and its elected leaders as a secessionist force undermining the federal government’s rightful authority.

Echoing Civil War-era language, Miller has accused Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom of “insurrection” and “nullification.”

Even more ominously, Trump and his aides often describe Los Angeles and California as occupied territory that must be “liberated”— either from their own elected officials or undocumented immigrants. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took the latter approach last week immediately before her security detail tackled California’s US Senator Alex Padilla when he interrupted her press conference. “We are staying here,” Noem declared, “to liberate this city” from what she called its “socialist … leadership.”

Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies democratic erosion, told me that he found Noem’s remarks even more troubling than Padilla’s manhandling. “Noem essentially described the mission as one of regime change,” Nyhan said. Trump extended that argument nationally in his Sunday social media post when he insisted the leaders of Democratic cities “hate our Country.”

Having defined blue states and cities as something apart from, and threatening to, the American mainstream, the Trump administration is now subjecting them to tactics appropriate to an enemy force.

One is a greater willingness to arrest their leaders. The administration has already arrested a New Jersey mayor and US representative, a Milwaukee judge and a California labor leader. In each instance, the White House has accused these officials of physically impeding immigration enforcement. But Miller and other top Trump aides have said that policies in Democratic jurisdictions limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement are “aiding and abetting” criminals and terrorists — language with clear criminal connotations.

At a hearing last week, Alabama Republican Representative Gary Palmer urged the Justice Department to prosecute the Democratic governors of Illinois, Minnesota and New York over such state policies. Trump endorsed arresting Newsom (though Border Czar Tom Homan has demurred). And while federal security officials did not arrest Padilla, they did physically restrain and handcuff him after he identified himself as a US senator.

With all this, Nyhan said, Trump is replicating a strategy common to authoritarian leaders: discouraging ordinary citizens from expressing dissent by signaling no one is beyond prosecution. “The point is to show everyone they are vulnerable,” he said.

In Los Angeles, the Trump administration has hurtled down another perilous road: trying to numb the public to military involvement in domestic law enforcement. The initial step was federalizing the state National Guard. In the legal battle with Newsom over that decision, the administration went further by arguing that even without invoking the Insurrection Act, it could use the Guard and active-duty military to clear roadways and provide perimeter security for ICE raids. “They are using immigration as the pretext for normalizing the deployment of the military inside the United States,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me.

The Republican congressional majority has shown no interest in discouraging Trump’s offensive against Democratic-led states and cities, but federal courts might erect more obstacles. In last week’s decision temporarily barring Trump from seizing control of California’s Guard, federal Judge Charles Breyer ruled that contrary to the administration’s claim, courts are entitled to examine whether conditions justify federalizing the Guard — and by extension — claiming other emergency powers. “The most important part of Breyer’s opinion is … saying that ultimately it is for the courts to decide” whether a genuine emergency exists, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley law school, told me. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has stayed Breyer’s ruling while it hears further arguments, starting Tuesday.

However the appeals court rules, many legal scholars expect that the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority, which has taken a maximalist view of presidential power, will be more receptive to Trump’s claim to emergency authority if this, or similar cases, reach them. And while Trump is plainly resisting the inflammatory step of invoking the Insurrection Act, its provisions give him broader and possibly unlimited leeway to employ the military for domestic purposes than the law he’s used in California.

So, while the courts might set some limits, the most important constraint on Trump’s use of iron-fist tactics against blue jurisdictions may be public resistance, such as the massive “No Kings” rallies over the weekend. Though violence was minimal at those protests, there’s always the risk such activism will trigger disorder that Trump can cite to justify further crackdowns. But he also faces the opposite danger: that military forces deployed on US streets may overreact, as they did during the anti-Vietnam War protests at Kent State University in 1970, and injure or kill civilians.

Trump clearly sees militarized immigration enforcement as a means to crack what he called in his post “the core of the Democrat Power Center” in big blue cities. But he's setting in motion confrontations that could end in tragedy — and ultimately cause more Americans to question how he’s employing his own power.