President Trump’s deployment of federal troops to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in LA has sparked outcry from many veterans nationwide.
Since June, when the Trump administration escalated ICE raids in America’s second-largest city, over 4,000 National Guard members and at least 700 Marines have been deployed to round up at least 1,600 people throughout LA County, against the request of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
As of July, about 150 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines are being sent home from LA, with 400 Marines being sent in to replace them.
Dan Mauer, an associate law professor and retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, the legal branch of the military, said, “Our founding fathers did not view illegal immigration as a national security issue, let alone an invasion, nor did they view public protests as a form of rebellion. Yet the administration has characterized the tensions in California, Texas and other places in those very stark warlike terms.”
He said it is “very likely” that much of what the military is being ordered to do violates the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that bars the use of the federal military to enforce domestic policies within the US, including immigration law.
Against Newsom’s opposition, Trump invoked Title 10 to federalize California’s National Guard, marking the first such move without a governor’s consent since the 1960s; the statute lets the president call the National Guard into federal service under limited circumstances, including when there is a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion” or when the president is unable “to execute the laws of the United States” with regular forces.
“The closer the military acts like a police force, the closer they act to providing security around a perimeter or around a raid site, to detaining individuals, to questioning individuals that are suspected of being illegal immigrants, the closer the military is pushed to that Posse Comitatus line. And that is a very dangerous place to be,” said Mauer, who teaches at the JAG school and formerly taught constitutional and criminal law at West Point.
He added that the training the military undergoes for combat deployment is unsuitable for civilian law enforcement, as the laws of war do not concern the constitutional rights or due process of enemy soldiers.
Considering how rapidly the troops were mobilized to LA, Mauer expressed skepticism as to whether the soldiers were properly trained, noting Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s view of JAG officers, who advise commanders in combat, as too restrictive on rules of engagement.
Last February, Hegseth fired and moved to replace the top lawyers for military services including the Army, Navy and Air Force.
“The administration has unnecessarily and provocatively deployed the military in a way that reflects the very fears that our Founding Fathers had about using the military as a police force,” said Mauer.
“That is the concern shared by many law professors,” he continued. “People from my background who were former JAGs, who are now teaching in the academy, have a fairly deep and widespread concern about the legality of what’s going on — not just the big picture, but also what rules are binding the troops’ use of force, if and when they have to use force against their fellow citizens, or people who are not citizens, who nonetheless have constitutional rights when they’re within our borders.”
Although US veterans generally tend to be affiliated with the Republican party, supporting Trump by 61 percent in the last election, this condemnation comes amid a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-led plan for large-scale layoffs from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
While the original plan was for 83,000 job cuts, a 17 percent workforce reduction, the VA has since scaled back its plans, now aiming to cut 30,000 jobs by the end of September.
Joe Penzler, a member of the board of the Unite for Veterans Coalition and a Marine combat veteran who was once part of the 2nd Battalion 7th Marines — the unit deployed to Los Angeles — said “Marines are our nation’s shock troops, and it’s entirely inappropriate that they’re deployed to the streets of Los Angeles.”
“It’s not a mission that they are trained to do. It’s not a mission they want to do,” he said. “And I don’t know a single Marine worth their salt in my 20 years, if you were to tell them, ‘Hey, we want you to come on board and pair up with these masked goons to rip apart immigrant families and deport and detain them,’ how many of them would actually put their hands in the air to do that?”
Penzler said that when he was part of the unit, most of the Marines came from Texas and California, and over half came from Spanish-speaking families, with some on green cards seeking US citizenship.
“So think about what might be going through their heads right now as they’re being ordered to help ICE arrest and deport hardworking people who look a lot like people they would see at their own family reunions,” he continued.
Echoing Mauer’s concern that Marines are not trained in the de-escalatory tactics needed to conduct nonviolent civil law enforcement, Penzler said that when Marines were employed as cops in Iraq and Afghanistan, “bad things happened.”
“We saw that when Marines were deployed to LA during the riots following Rodney King, where LA police officers told a squad of Marines to cover them as they were moving up to a house, and the Marines thinking ‘cover us’ meant ‘open fire on the house,’ which is what they did,” he explained.
He noted other fatal instances of soldiers used in civil law enforcement, including the Ohio National Guard killing 4 protestors at Kent State University in 1970, and the violent suppression of the Bonus Army protestors in 1932 which saw two WWI veterans killed and contributed to Herbert Hoover’s landslide loss in that year’s presidential election.
Penzler said he worried that domestic deployment sets a precedent for future administrations to use the military for political gain, suppressing dissent and violating First and Fourth Amendment rights.
“Every second they’re standing around some federal building in Los Angeles or hanging out with ICE agencies or rounding up people is time taken away from what they’re really trained to do,” he added.
Christopher Purdy, founder and CEO of The Chamberlain Network, a civil service organization for veterans, referred to Trump’s LA orders as a “political stunt, an intentionally provocative act designed to grab headlines and incite a response from the local population, not to solve any actual problems.”
Purdy, who served in the US Army National Guard from 2004 to 2012 and was deployed to Iraq in 2011, agreed with Mauer and Penzler that federal military personnel lack the proper civilian training for this assignment.
“Guard units doing these missions are often doing them with minimal preparation,” he explained. “While many guard units may get a single civil unrest training block a year, many are now entering into 287(g) agreements with DHS,” letting state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate with ICE to enforce federal immigration laws.
“The training for those missions has been cut down to an online course,” he added. No hands-on experience, no serious field prep with anyone from DHS, just a week in front of a laptop, and they’re out there supporting these raids.”
