Chris Trotter
“This isn’t going to stop!”
That was MAGA guru Steve Bannon’s parting prediction to the BBC’s Catriona Perry. The deportation by federal officials of illegal immigrants to the United States – assisted, if necessary, by federalised National Guards or even by the enlisted personnel of the United States Armed Forces – will not cease. President Donald Trump promised to empty the United States of illegal immigrants and he is willing to “call out the troops” to get it done.
The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, whose National Guard Trump peremptorily federalised, is outraged, describing it as “illegal, immoral, unprecedented and unconstitutional”. But Newsom’s attempt to sue the President has already failed. United States’ history is replete with examples of the state militia and the regular armed forces being called upon to aid the civil power in executing the law.
The historical fact that United States soldiers have been deployed against United States citizens is much less significant, however, than the context in which they have been deployed. Overwhelmingly, the presence of armed troops on American streets is associated with racism and racial emancipation.
Among the largest military deployments in the service of law enforcement came in 1854. Federal marshals were in Boston, Massachusetts, to arrest an African-American, Anthony Burns, who had fled north to escape his slave status.
This was entirely lawful under The Fugitive Slave Act (1850). Even so, the difficulties attendant upon enforcing the law in solidly abolitionist Boston prompted the marshals to seek military back-up. Two batteries of artillery and a detachment of federal troops were placed at the federal authorities’ disposal. Not to be outdone, the Massachusetts governor generously contributed the state militia.
Lest anybody watching the global networks over the past week thinks the events unfolding in Los Angeles are in any way novel, it is worth recalling the Anthony Burns riots. These began when a vast crowd of abolitionists marched on the Boston courthouse where the fugitive slave was being held.
Armed with axes and crowbars, the crowd smashed its way into the building and fought hand-to-hand with the marshals guarding the prisoner, killing one and injuring others. In spite of the abolitionists best efforts, however, Burns remained in custody and was eventually reclaimed by his “master”. Meanwhile, outraged by the violent efforts to save him, President Franklin Pierce dispatched a contingent of marines to assist in the restoration of order.
Whatever else Trump’s actions may be, they are not unprecedented.
With the defeat of the slave-owning confederate states of America in 1865, following four years of bloody civil war, the assistance of federal troops was no longer available for enforcing the slave laws. But Uncle Sam’s soldiers were now regularly called upon to enforce the new, hard-won constitutional and civil rights of former slaves.
Dealing to the Klan
According to the US Congressional Research Service, the Civil Rights Act of 1871, popularly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, empowered the President to “employ the land and naval forces to enforce civil rights”. President Ulysses S Grant lost little time in availing himself of these newly-minted powers to crush the white-led terror campaign then being waged against the newly enfranchised African-American communities of South Carolina.
[C]onspirators in nine counties in South Carolina [were ordered] to disperse within five days and turn in their firearms, ammunition, and disguises to the local marshals or military officers, and shortly thereafter by a proclamation [the President suspended] habeas corpus, as permitted under Section 4 of the Act. Hundreds of suspected Klansmen were arrested over the following months and tried in federal court.
One wonders whether Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus (or President Abraham Lincoln’s equally “unconstitutional” suspensions during the Civil War) drew as much journalistic criticism in the 1860s and 70s as the usual MAGA suspects (like Bannon) openly calling for Trump to suspend habeas corpus has drawn from the mainstream US media in 2025.
Once again, precedents exist for the most unabashed abuse of democratic rights and freedoms.
Perhaps the most dramatic deployment of military force to ensure the rule of law would be upheld was ordered by President Dwight D Eisenhower in 1957 when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the desegregation of Central High School.
By ordering the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine Black students from entering the school, in open defiance of the US Supreme Court, the Arkansas Governor, Orval Faubus, was effectively instigating an insurrection against the government of the United States. This left Eisenhower with no choice but to immediately federalise the Arkansas National Guard, thereby removing it from Faubus’ control. He then sent in the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock.
Known as the “Screaming Eagles”, the 101st was one of the US Army’s most prestigious units. The televised images of armed paratroopers escorting the children into the school sent a powerful message to the southern states that “Jim Crow” racial segregation had become intolerable.
Eight years later, as the struggle for Black civil rights reached its zenith on the Edmund Pettus bridge outside Montgomery, Alabama, President Lyndon Baines Johnson federalised the Alabama National Guard and sent federal troops to forestall any repetition of “Bloody Sunday”, the brutal 7 March 1965 attack on the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King and his fellow marchers at the hands of Major John Cloud and his baton-wielding state troopers.
Once again an obstructionist governor (in this case George Wallace) was reminded of whose laws took precedence. Just six months later, on 6 August 1965, the crowning achievement of the Black civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, became law.
Sixty years would pass before another President federalised an American state’s national guard in defiance of its governor’s wishes.
Which is not to say that the vexed issue of US race relations and law enforcement disappeared. Riots, arson and widespread looting in black neighbourhoods, many of them requiring the intervention of national guardsmen and army regulars, permanently soured the American public’s hitherto largely supportive response to the civil rights struggle.
Indeed, these manifestations of black frustration and rage became the stuff of white nightmares. The LA Riots of 1992, sparked by the acquittal of Rodney King’s four police assailants, and the Black Lives Matter disorder that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, convinced many white Americans that they were trapped in a recurring nightmare.
The election (and re-election) of the USA’s first black president in 2008 and 2012, while greeted with shock and dismay by America’s unrepentant white supremacists, also triggered deep-seated anxieties among more moderate white voters, many of whom had voted for Barack Obama in both elections. Obama’s presidency appeared to confirm that the America of their parents and grandparents was on the verge of disappearing altogether. Moreover, for those lacking a college education, the new America that was emerging gave every sign of wanting them, like the old soldiers so many of the were, to simply fade away.
This had happened before. In the years following the First World War, the white Protestant majority of the American heartland registered its profound unease with the economic and social changes that were driving America’s big cities headlong into modernity by saddling the population with three radically regressive socio-political projects.
‘Undocumented aliens’
The first was Prohibition. The second involved transforming the Ku Klux Klan into a mass national movement for enforcing white supremacy, promoting antisemitism and suppressing socialism. The third, and the most enduring, radically ‘reformed’ US immigration policy along frankly racist and eugenicist lines. This “return to normalcy” proclaimed America to be a Christian, conservative and unashamedly racist nation.
Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement drew its strength from the same broadly shared conviction that 21st century America, like the America of the 1920s, was changing too fast and too much.
At the heart of Trump’s appeal was his open hostility to the demographic impact of mass immigration, especially from countries south of the Rio Grande. Ignoring the centrality of Hispanic immigration to America’s economic success, Trump presented “undocumented aliens” as an existential threat to the American way of life.
The entire policy edifice of the Trump administration is built around the President’s promise to end this “alien” invasion by sealing the border and then deporting the “millions” of illegal immigrants – garishly portrayed as released prisoners, drug-dealers, rapists and members of terroristic criminal gangs – whom Trump accuses of unleashing “carnage” upon the USA.
This unacknowledged exercise in ethnic cleansing will, according to Trump and his court, restore the cultural and political balance of American society which the treacherous Democratic Party worked so hard to destroy.
Resistance to this core political project of the Trump administration will not be tolerated. In the eyes of the President and his MAGA supporters, the cleansing of America carries the same moral and emotional weight as the elimination of African-American oppression carried for Ulysses S Grant, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson.
Against those who stood in the way of black civil rights – the KKK, racist Southern legislatures, obstructionist governors – those presidents did not hesitate to “call out the troops”. Neither will Donald Trump. In his eyes, the men and women of Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ICE – are heroes no less compelling than the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s.
To ensure his agents are free to make America great again, he will not hesitate to federalise the national guard of any “sanctuary” state, or invoke the Insurrection Act.
In 1957, Eisenhower had the “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne Division. In 2025, Trump has the “All American” paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division. And, judging by the cheers that greeted the 47th President when he addressed them at Fort Bragg earlier this week, these All American soldiers will not hesitate to follow his orders.
Chris Trotter is a political commentator with more than 30 years’ experience. He is the author of the Bowalley Road blog
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