Send the Marines

Or else tell it to them

I'd been wondering if Hegseth was freelancing, volunteering out of the blue when he said on Saturday he was ready to deploy Marines to Los Angeles, the project sounding so off the wall, even more illegal than the National Guard proposal, and I had trouble imagining they'd allow Trump to call him up and ask for them. "Hey Pete! They're burning down Los Angeles! Send the Marines!" And indeed, on the Sunday, Trump didn't seem to have heard of it, suggesting, as he often does when asked about some abuse that he hasn't thought about, that he hadn't made any decisions but definitely could if he felt like it:

When asked what the threshold is for sending in the Marines, Mr. Trump said Sunday: "The bar is what I think it is."

If I'm reading that right, he was saying the only consideration would be the presidential will. When he found out how he felt, what he wanted to happen, that would be the thing that would happen.

Wall Street Journal (gift link) confirms what you probably have been suspecting, that the ICE push over last week in Southern California, where they raided garment factories and warehouses, car washes (nabbing customers as well as workers) and at least one day care center (where they grabbed a mom dropping off her four-year-old), climaxing with Friday's and Saturday's assaults on Home Depot parking lots in Westlake and Paramount, was engineered by Reichskommissar Stephen Miller as part of a general strategic shift away from trying to deport gang members and criminals to deporting any unauthorized immigrants at all.

The somewhat amusing part is that it was motivated by jealousy, of Joe Biden:

Even with the high-profile arrests of suspects by masked immigration agents and the plane loads of migrants swiftly ferried out of the U.S., President Trump was falling short of the number of daily deportations carried out by the Biden administration in its final year [and t]he president, who promised to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, wasn’t pleased.

So in late May Miller called a meeting at ICE headquarters and told the agents to pick up the pace, and to stop worrying about whether the people they were detaining were criminals or not, or even whether they were on lists of suspected unlawful immigrants:

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Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away. “Who here thinks they can do it?” Miller said, asking for a show of hands.

Not that they'd been working very hard to stick to "criminal aliens" before—not just with the Palestinian grad students but with the hundreds of Venezuelans shipped to El Salvador—but this is the point where they drop their claims about gangster tattoos and the like and mostly stop bothering to lie about it (Kristi Noem will keep lying about it). Miller isn't hiding his intention to banish all the foreign-born he can get his hands on any more, I don't think. He's letting it all hang out.

The last time the Marines were deployed on US territory was in 1992—Los Angeles then, too—in response to Governor Pete Wilson's request to President G.H.W. Bush for assistance in quelling the riots following the acquittal of the LAPD officers whose brutal attack on Rodney King had been seen by millions on video, after 10,000 California National Guardsmen had failed to stop it; 31 people had died, more than 1,000 been injured, and some 3,800 structures set on fire when Bush invoked the Insurrection Act and sent 2,000 infantry soldiers and 1,500 Marines.

This time there was a lot of unsightly graffiti, damage to a brick planter box, street signs, and park benches demonstrators had used to blockade the street, and those five self-driving Waymo vehicles whose burning dominated TV news coverage—battery box fires lit, I guess, with Molotov cocktails, that consume the whole car, vomiting toxic hydrogen fluoride gas that could have really hurt people standing around. I don't have any sense of how this could be a meaningful part of a protest, unless maybe for disaffected Luddite taxi drivers whose jobs the machines are stealing, but that's the video that Trump TV is showing 24/7 that has convinced Trump and colleagues that LA is burning to the ground.

I'm not finding any general numbers on injuries except those, reportedly minor, to five or seven police; it seems to me obvious that with the tear gas, flashbangs, rubber bullets, and horrible use of police horses to stomp on people, the LAPD has caused more injuries, including to quite a number of journalists, than anybody else on the scene. Maybe the Marines could try to get some control over the cops, but I don't think they have any appropriate training for that.

If the administration believe they have a legal authority for sending the 700 Marines to LA against the express wishes of Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom (10 U.S. Code § 12406, which they've appealed to on the federalizing of the National Guard, doesn't help with this), they haven't been able to tell us what it is. Hegseth, appearing before the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee (they were scheduled to review the president's military budget, but the administration hasn't managed to prepare one yet), didn't say. It is not clear if Trump intends to tie the request to the 1807 Insurrection Act, which permits the deployment of US troops

• when requested by a state's legislature, or governor if the legislature cannot be convened, to address an insurrection against that state (§ 251),

• to address an insurrection, in any state, which makes it impracticable to enforce the law (§ 252), or

• to address an insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy, in any state, which results in the deprivation of constitutionally secured rights, and where the state is unable, fails, or refuses to protect said rights (§ 253).

Hegseth seemed at times to be suggesting that demonstrators were depriving the ICE agents of their "constitutionally secured rights" by making their job difficult:

"We believe that ICE, which is a federal law enforcement agency, has the right to safely conduct operations in any state, in any jurisdiction in the country," Hegseth told the ... subcommittee.

I really don't think that flies.

Today, it looks like it will be a while before any Marines show up on the street—not until Friday at the earliest, because they require "extensive training"

about standard rules of force, which will likely continue for two days, according to the Task Force 51 commander. "We go through extensive training to do this," said Major Gen. Scott Sherman. "They are trained to use their weapons, to actually have their weapons to do their personal protection. This is crowd control. This is stuff that we do not do usually."

Or maybe they'll just go back to Pendleton. "We'll see," as Trump loves to say. I hope they don't have to stay encamped like asylum seekers on the Rio Grande.

Guardsmen awaiting orders in some federal building in Los Angeles… “‘Currently, there is no plan for where everyone is sleeping tonight,' the source said, adding that there was an urgent need to find more portable bathrooms and dumpsters for garbage." (San Francisco Chronicle)