From Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and now… the streets of Los Angeles. The 700 US Marines deployed on the orders of President Donald Trump Monday as reinforcements to hundreds of National Guard troops already on the ground have been drawn from an elite unit that has seen action in some of the world’s most dangerous military theatres. A military spokeswoman said the Marines were expected to be walking the city’s streets by Wednesday.

The decision to send these troops to Los Angeles represents “a significant escalation” in the confrontation between the Trump administration and the protesters who have taken to the street to push back against raids targeting people suspected of being undocumented migrants, said René Lindstaedt, a political scientist and United States specialist at the University of Birmingham.

The ‘War Dogs’

The Marines aren’t the first soldiers that Trump has put in the protesters’ path. The US president ordered the deployment of more than 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles on June 7. It’s a controversial decision, and one whose legality has already been questioned by California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom as well as several legal experts. 

But the Marines’ arrival complicates the picture even more. As CNN was quick to report, these troops are “the first active-duty soldiers” to be dispatched to Los Angeles since the demonstrations broke out. And they're not just any soldiers. These troops come from a Marines battalion – 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines – that has been in service since World War II and fought in all the main armed conflicts that the US has been involved in since. Their exploits have led to them being dubbed the “War Dogs” and “Havoc”. Their motto: "Ready for all, yielding to none."

These War Dogs’ mission is, officially, “to protect federal buildings and agents” in Los Angeles, the Pentagon has said. In other words, these Marines will be ensuring that the agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be able to carry out their arrests of people suspected of being undocumented migrants without fear of violent clashes with protesters.

It’s the same mission given to the thousands of National Guard troops also deployed across Los Angeles. Sinead McEneaney, a specialist in US protest movements at the UK’s Open University, said that Trump was taking advantage of Los Angeles’ self-proclaimed status as a “sanctuary city” to argue that sending in federal troops was necessary.

“The difficulty in Los Angeles is that a regulation from 2017 bans the California police from assisting ICE agents in their operations,” she said.

The shadow of the 1992 riots

But experts that FRANCE 24 spoke to said that Trump’s decision to escalate the response by sending in elite troops seemed hard to justify.

“There have been several outbreaks of violence during the protests against the ICE agents’ operations, but all told it’s been rather peaceful, and the local authorities don’t seem to be overwhelmed,” Lindstaedt said.

“It’s hard not to analyse this decision in broader context of the political confrontation between Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom,” McEneaney said. “The two men agree on nothing, and the US president sees the Democratic governor of California as one of the main threats to the Republican camp in 2028.”

In this context, Trump may be hoping to use the protests against the ICE raids as proof of Newsom’s weakness on law and order. And what could be better than to mobilise the Marines to this effect? The US president knows that images of these elite soldiers lining the streets of Los Angeles can’t help but recall the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of police officers filmed beating Rodney King, an unarmed Black man.

This was the last time that the Marines had been sent to Los Angeles – again, with the mission of protecting local law enforcement who were tasked with putting down the riots, which caused extensive damage to the city and left dozens dead.

But any comparison between the two crises soon reaches its limit. First, McEneaney said, “because the violence of the protests and the scale of the acts of vandalism were clearly on a different magnitude in 1992”.

And also because the president at the time, George HW Bush, had invoked the Insurrection Act of 1816, which allows the president to use the nation’s armed forces to put down an insurrection or rebellion. Outside these circumstances, US law largely forbids the use of the nation’s military as a police force.

“It was already controversial at the time, but at least there was a clear legal foundation for the deployment of Marines,” McEneaney said. For now, Trump has remained vague about whether or not he will opt for this drastic measure, instead invoking another text – even more controversial – to justify his use of military force in the face of the demonstrations.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

In 1992, Bush “had justified the military intervention as a means of protecting civilians and private property”, McEneaney said. It’s a far cry from what Trump has been saying – the only mission given to the troops has been to protect ICE agents charged with applying the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportations.

And if it’s difficult to imagine putting the two crises on the same level, it’s easier to see the risk of the situation in California degrading further – following the Marines’ arrival.

“There’s always the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Lindstaedt said. Sending in the National Guard and then the Marines “constitutes a security escalation that could be seen as a provocation by the protesters”, he warned.

Especially seeing as the Marines “are certainly trained to face rebellions in conflict zones, but they’ve not received specific training on how to control protesters”, Lindstaedt said.

In the context of Los Angeles, “the use of Marines could potentially be more dangerous than useful, and fits clearly into a strategy of escalation”, said an expert on the US military who spoke on condition of anonymity. In any case, it’s the kind of explosive situation that requires a certain tact – something that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to a battalion known as “Havoc”.

(Source: France 24)