The scenes unfolding in Los Angeles should alarm every American who values constitutional governance. Federal troops have been deployed to a major American city not in response to an insurrection or natural disaster, but to suppress protests against immigration enforcement operations. The whole of downtown Los Angeles has been declared an “unlawful assembly area”.

This represents a dangerous escalation that threatens the very foundations of the US democratic system.

What began as routine raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on June 6 quickly spiralled into something far more ominous. Federal agents swept through Los Angeles, detaining 121 individuals from restaurants, stores and apartment buildings. The raids were conducted in broad daylight, with a calculated boldness that seemed designed to provoke.

The community’s response was swift. By the afternoon, protesters had gathered downtown, not as rioters but as a grieving community, holding signs and chanting “Set them free!”.

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This was grief made public, anger given voice. But in today’s America, even peaceful displays of grief and anger are not allowed when they go against the narrative set by those in power.

The police responded with force. Tear gas canisters flew. Flash-bang grenades exploded. A peaceful demonstration transformed into a battlefield — not because protesters chose violence, but because the government did.

US President Donald Trump decided to escalate further. He signed a memorandum deploying 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatening to mobilise active-duty Marines if protests continued.

The legality of these actions is questionable at best. Under the Insurrection Act, federal troops can only be deployed after a public proclamation calls for citizens to disperse. Such a proclamation has not been made, and Trump has not invoked the act. Governor Gavin Newsom, who has the power to decide on matters of security in the state of California, was not consulted; he was simply informed.

There is no widespread rebellion threatening the authority of the United States. There are no enemy combatants in Los Angeles, just angry, grieving people demanding dignity for their communities. What we’re witnessing is not the lawful execution of federal authority but improvisation masquerading as application of law, the slow erosion of constitutional order, replaced by declaration, spectacle, and muscle.

If challenged in court, this deployment would likely be deemed illegal. But that may not matter – and that is the most chilling aspect of this crisis. We are fast moving towards a place where illegality no longer matters, where muscle has arrived with or without paperwork, and law is merely a facade.

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This moment cannot be understood in isolation. As scholar Aime Cesaire observed in his analysis of colonialism, violence in the periphery inevitably returns to the metropole. The tools of oppression developed abroad always find their way home.

In the US, this has been a decades-long process. In 1996, a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act allowed the Pentagon to transfer surplus military-grade weaponry to local police departments. In the following three decades, the same weapons that were used for imperialist violence abroad were transferred to police departments to deploy in poor and marginalised communities.

Then with the start of the “war on terror”, tactics to target and subjugate foreign populations were transferred at home to use against vulnerable communities. Congress passed sweeping laws like the USA PATRIOT Act and amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enabling mass surveillance and intelligence gathering on US soil.

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists allowed for indefinite military detention of US citizens, while a Supreme Court ruling in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project expanded the “material support” doctrine to criminalise even peaceful engagement with blacklisted groups.

Programmes like Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) turned schools and mosques into surveillance hubs, targeting Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.

While outside the US government was pursuing a campaign of renditions, torture and illegal detention at Guantanamo Bay, at home, it was deploying lawfare against “suspect” communities.

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The 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial introduced “secret evidence” in a US criminal court for the first time, with an anonymous Israeli intelligence officer claiming he could “smell Hamas” on defendants. Georgia’s prosecution of Cop City protesters under “terrorism” charges directly borrowed from this playbook, as did Tennessee’s Bill HB 2348, which extends policing powers to suppress peaceful protests.

After October 2023, the US government violated its own laws in order to participate directly in the genocide in Gaza, providing Israel with weapons and intelligence. The mass repression and erasure that Palestinians had suffered at the hands of their US-backed colonisers were transferred on American soil.

The government launched an unprecedented attack on free speech and academic freedom, cracking down on students protesting the genocide and encouraging retribution against pro-Palestinian voices. We’ve seen tenure revoked, protesters surveilled, and dissent criminalised. Palestinians and their allies have endured a fourfold increase in harassment, doxing, and employment loss; they have also faced violent attacks and murder.

All this started not under Trump, but under his “Democratic” predecessor, former US President Joe Biden, who also increased the budget of police departments by $13bn and expanded ICE’s powers.

The pattern is clear: repressive measures developed to target foreign populations have become tools to suppress all dissent at home.

What is happening in Los Angeles and other cities isn’t about law enforcement; it’s about power projection, about demonstrating that defiance will be met with overwhelming force and quashed.

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The legal framework matters less than the spectacle. When federal agents fire flash-bang grenades at protesters outside Home Depot stores, when ICE directors accuse mayors of siding with “chaos and lawlessness”, when FBI officials tweet about hunting down rock throwers, we’re watching the construction of a narrative that justifies state violence.

This is how soft coups unfold: not with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, but through executive memos, press briefings, and military logistics disguised as public safety. The Insurrection Act becomes a dead letter not through repeal but through irrelevance.

If this precedent stands, federal troops will become the standard response to resistance. Cities that don’t vote for the president will face occupation. Protest will be redefined as rebellion. The next time people gather in the streets demanding justice, they will not face police officers but soldiers.

When a president can deploy troops without following the law, and no one stops him, law loses its power. It becomes theatre, a facade for a system that has abandoned its own principles.

At this time, we don’t need just legal challenges, we need moral clarity. What’s happening in Los Angeles is not law enforcement: it’s occupation. What’s being called an insurrection is actually resistance to injustice. What’s being framed as public safety is actually political intimidation.

American imperialism has created the infrastructure for exactly this moment. The tools of empire, tested on peoples in the Global South, are now being deployed against American cities. If we don’t recognise this moment for what it is – a fundamental assault on constitutional governance – we will wake up in a country where imperial military force is the primary language of politics.

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The US Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it. In Los Angeles, that defence begins now.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.