President Donald Trump activated 4,000 National Guard troops on June 10, 2025, to quell protests in Los Angeles over immigration raids – with out the conventional request from the state. He has additionally despatched to Los Angeles hundreds of U.S. Marines, with the aim of defending the unprecedented deportation operations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
If this all feels distinctive, it ought to. Governors sometimes activate their very own state troops, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he would do on June 11 forward of anticipated immigration protests.
California quickly sued the president. A federal courtroom has sided with the state, however an appeals courtroom will weigh the Trump administration’s use of the U.S. code on armed services to activate the Nationwide Guard, which depends on protesters constituting both an “invasion” or “rebellion.”
“What we’re witnessing isn’t regulation enforcement – it’s authoritarianism,”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom mentioned on June 10.
Protesters report violent responses from Los Angeles police, too. Nonetheless, Newsom’s invocation of authoritarianism is apt.
The final instance of a president federalizing troops over the objection of a state authorities dates to Jim Crow segregation, a interval marked by authorized practices that routinely denied due course of and citizenship rights to Black Individuals within the South. Within the Nineteen Sixties, quite a few Black freedom struggles took stands in opposition to this authoritarianism backed by militarized regulation enforcement.
As a scholar of U.S. history, I’ve simply accomplished a book on Jim Crow policing and the methods Black Individuals fought again in opposition to racist regulation and order. I believe the militarization of policing in Los Angeles opens necessary questions on democracy and state violence.
Jim Crow goals
Through the Civil Rights Motion, the federal authorities activated Nationwide Guard troops over Southern state objections when these states would neither implement courtroom orders nor shield protesters.
In these circumstances, presidents protected folks with the assistance of troops. In Trump’s case, he’s utilizing troops to guard the federal government from protesters.
The Trump administration’s vision of law enforcement goals for the kind of militarized authority that state governments institutionalized below Jim Crow policing. In case your political enemy is perceived extra like an enemy combatant, the principles of authorized process, particularly due course of, may not apply. Policing turns into warfare.
Whenever you see the phrases “Jim Crow,” your thoughts might soar to images of racially segregated water fountains. However Jim Crow was way over that. It was homegrown racial authoritarianism, or the repression of freedom of thought and motion.
Earlier than troops enforced civil rights, Black Southerners noticed the Nationwide Guard as an enemy somewhat than a pal.
Within the words of Ida B. Wells-Barnett after a white riot in opposition to Black residents in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1917, “The police had been both detached or inspired the barbarities. … The foremost a part of the Nationwide Guard was detached or inactive. No organized effort was made to guard the Negroes or disperse the murdering teams.”
Eisenhower sends within the troops
The U.S. Supreme Courtroom’s 1954 determination in Brown v. Board of Education modified issues. It overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that legalized racial segregation and dominated that segregated public faculty training was unconstitutional. This considerably altered the federal authorities’s duty within the South’s authorized system of white supremacy.
The primary take a look at got here in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Although quite a few faculty districts throughout the South quietly desegregated, Southern governors resembling Arkansas’ Orville Faubus resisted the planned desegregation of Little Rock Central High School.
AP Photo/File
Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to cease Black kids on the door. For almost three weeks, Guardsmen blocked the small group of Black college students – often known as the “Little Rock 9” – who had been speculated to attend the college earlier than President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to face down.
Eisenhower deployed U.S. Army riot troops to Little Rock below the Riot Act. In the long run, the Little Rock Nine began their studies at Central Excessive regardless of the much-photographed spitting from the white mob that surrounded the college.
State troops, state rights
Subsequent got here the desegregation of interstate transportation.
In spring 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights advocacy group, despatched buses of integrated passengers via the Deep South. White terrorists attacked Freedom Riders, as these activists turned recognized, thrice in Alabama.
However state authorities had discovered from the Little Rock expertise. Southern governors in Alabama and Mississippi deployed the National Guard themselves. This time they supposed to solely minimally shield Freedom Riders to dam federal regulation enforcement. In Mississippi, police arrested and jail guards tortured Freedom Riders in the state penitentiary. Mob violence killed nobody.
AP Photo, File
The identical was not true through the desegregation of public universities.
When U.S. marshals arrived to implement the courtroom order enrolling James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in September 1962, a white riot erupted. State law enforcement withdrew from the scene. Two men died, and lots of extra had been injured.
President John F. Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and despatched them in to revive order. The following summer time, he did the same in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to preemptively halt a riot on the College of Alabama.
The event turned a publicity stunt for Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace. He briefly blocked the entrance to Foster Auditorium, intent on stopping the court-ordered registration of three Black college students.
“I stand earlier than you right here at present instead of 1000’s of different Alabamians whose presence would have confronted you,” Wallace said to federal authorities. A Nationwide Guard normal mentioned, “Sir, it’s my unhappy responsibility to ask you to step apart below the orders of the President of the US.”
AP Photo, File
Wallace additionally triggered the final federal use – till now – of the Nationwide Guard. Alabama’s Selma-to-Montgomery march started as a memorial to Jimmie Lee Jackson, a younger Black civil rights activist who was killed by police on Feb. 26, 1965. The march turned primarily an emblem for the yr’s Voting Rights Act.
In an necessary change, President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the National Guard to protect marchers. State troopers and sheriff’s deputies had terrorized marchers, including John Lewis, who was almost beaten to death on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.
Democracy is within the streets
The historical past of the Nationwide Guard within the South is a vital a part of what’s unfolding in Los Angeles and across the nation.
For many of the Nationwide Guard’s historical past within the South, political leaders used home army energy to protect the pursuits of racial authoritarians, not racial egalitarians. Little Rock, Tuscaloosa, Selma: These moments when troops protected racial justice protesters at house stand out as a few of America’s most hopeful moments.
Latest statements by Trump administration officers assist illustrate the way it envisions utilizing army energy in home regulation enforcement. On June 8, 2025, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “to arrest rioters” – a request past the unique order to guard ICE brokers.
And on June 12, Noem said that “the army folks which might be engaged on this operation … are staying right here to liberate town from the socialist and burdensome management that this governor and that this mayor have positioned on this nation.”
The Nationwide Guard and Marines are reportedly protecting immigration enforcement. However what would possibly occur in the event that they directly interact with protests?
With various techniques, protesters are halting enterprise as normal as a result of they see a mass-deportation regime terrorizing and disappearing people in their communities. U.S. courts are likely to agree with their evaluation however appear powerless to implement even primary due process rights for those detained by ICE.
These activists present the messy work of American social change. Their work might appear to be “anarchy” to even some Democrats. It may be maligned as “invasion” and “revolt” by the Trump administration.
However the calls to constrain ICE comply with an American custom of preventing authoritarianism.
