Trump Cities Military Training Grounds Legal Concerns
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President Trump warned the country’s top ranking military officials Tuesday that they could be headed to “war” with U.S. citizens, signaling a major escalation in the ongoing legal battle over his authority to deploy soldiers to police American streets.
“What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles – they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one-by-one,” Trump said in an address to top brass in quantico, Va. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”
Commanders should use American cities as “training grounds,” the president said.
Trump’s words provoked instant pushback. Oregon has already filed a legal challenge, and experts expressed concern that what the president described is against the law.
“He is suggesting that they learn how to become warriors in American cities,” said Daniel C. Schwartz, former general counsel at the National Security Agency, who heads the legal team at National Security Leaders for America. ”That should scare everybody. It’s also boldly illegal.”
The use of soldiers to assist with federal immigration raids and crowd control at protests and or else enforce civilian laws has been a point of contention with big city mayors and blue state governors for months, beginning with the deployment of thousands of federalized National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines to Los Angeles in early June.
That deployment was illegal,a federal judge ruled last month. In a scorching 52-page decision, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R.Breyer barred soldiers under Trump’s command from carrying out law enforcement duties across California,warning of a ”national police force with the President as its chief.”
Yet hundreds of troops remained on the streets of Los Angeles while the matter was under litigation. With the case still moving through the 9th Circuit Court of appeals, hundreds more are now set to arrive in Portland, Ore., with another hundred reportedly enroute to Chicago – all over the objections of state and local leaders.
“Isolated threats to federal property should not be enough to warrant this kind of response,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “The threat has to be really serious, and I don’t think the Trump management has made that case.”
Others agreed.
“I’m tremendously worried,” said Erwin Chemerinsky,dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “Using the military for domestic law enforcement is something that’s characteristic of authoritarian regimes.”
Oregon’s attorney general filed a lawsuit Monday alleging the president had applied a “baseless, wildly hyperbolic pretext” to send in the troops. Officials in Illinois, where the Trump administration has made Chicago a focal point of immigration enforcement, are also poised to file a challenge.
Although the facts on the ground are different legally, the Oregon suit is a near copy-paste of the California battle making its way through the courts, experts said.
“That’s exactly the model that they’re following,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.
Unlike the controversial decision to send National Guard troops to Washington,D.C., in August, the Los angeles and portland deployments have relied on an esoteric subsection of the law, which allows the president to federalize troops over the objection of state governments in certain limited cases.
California’