- President Donald Trump said he had tens of thousands of federal agents available to monitor major cities in the United States, and cited the “fantastic” work he said they had been doing in Portland, Oregon.
- “I see this as one of, if not the most alarming thing this administration has done,” Barry Friedman, a law professor and faculty director for the New York University Police Project, told Business Insider.
- “It is alarming because it is placing what is effectively federal troops in a municipal police capacity in violation of the constitutional laws of the United States,” he continued.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
President Donald Trump told Fox News presenter Sean Hannity on Thursday that he had tens of thousands of federal agents ready to deploy to major cities in the United States, although he said “they would have to be invited.”
Barry Friedman, professor of law and faculty director of the New York University Police Project, who works with communities to ensure police accountability, echoed that point, saying the president needs state consent to send federal agents.
“The federal government’s jurisdiction is quite limited for the national police, and doing so aggressively in a jurisdiction where they are not welcomed by local leadership is inappropriate and unconstitutional,” Friedman told Business Insider.
“I see this as one of, if not the most alarming thing this administration has done,” he continued. “It is alarming because it is placing what is effectively federal troops in a municipal police capacity in violation of the constitutional laws of the United States.”
Federal law enforcement officers are already present in Portland, Oregon, and Trump announced Wednesday that he planned to deploy a “surge” of Department of Homeland Security agents in other US cities, such as Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, as part of a plan called Operation Legend.
However, citing events in Portland, where federal officers in camouflage have been compared to an occupying military force, state governors and mayors of major U.S. cities have spoken out in anticipation of the agents’ arrival.
“If the Trump administration wants to antagonize new Mexicans and Americans with authoritarian, unnecessary and inexplicable military-style ‘repressions,’ they have no business in New Mexico,” said New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.
Still, Trump told Hannity that “we will go to every city, any city.”
“We are ready,” he said. “We will put 50,000, 60,000 people who really know what they are doing. They are strong. They are tough. But as you know, we have to be invited.”
Reports have linked generically identified federal agents in Portland to controversial arrests of protesters and civilians without explanation of why they were detained.
Federal agents in Portland have been accused of arresting and beating up innocent bystanders.
Reuters
Oregon lawmakers have rejected the presence of federal forces guarding the city, and Oregon Attorney General and the American Civil Liberties Union filed lawsuits accusing the federal government of violating protesters’ rights while monitoring the city.
Without a specific state or city invitation, the Trump administration has substantiated the legal justification for federal law enforcement in Oregon as protection of federal property, which is within its power. However, federal agents have been accused of going beyond such duties, making arrests, and engaging in other law enforcement activities far beyond the boundaries of federal monuments and property.
Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at Yale Law School who specializes in constitutional and administrative law, said it was “very atypical for federal law enforcement to enter a city or state where they have not been invited by the governor or the mayor “Especially if there has not been a” clear collapse in the authority or capacity of the state to handle whatever is happening. “
“I think the most important point at the moment is that, as a practice, the federal police do not engage in general surveillance unless the state or local government has invited it,” he said, citing the example of the riots caused by Rodney King’s beating in Los Angeles in 1992.
The National Guard and federal agents were mobilized at the request of the then governor. Pete Wilson and then Mayor Tom Bradley amid civil unrest, city-wide unrest and violence.
“There is definitely a violation of ordinary practice from the looks of it, looking from afar,” Rodriguez said of the growing situation in Portland.
Similar to the legal situation behind the Los Angeles riots, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that federal troops would arrive to try to help the city stop its gun violence. She said the agents would not be involved with the protesters.
“Unlike what happened in Portland, we will receive resources that will connect to existing federal agencies that we work with regularly to help manage and suppress violent crime in our city,” Lightfoot said, according to a report from the local WLS store. .
“I am not putting anything beyond this administration, that is why we will continue to be diligent and why we will continue to be ready,” Lightfoot said, according to the Chicago Tribune. “If we need to stop them and use the courts to do it, we are ready to do it.”
Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard Law School, criticized the motives behind what she described as the “deliberately vague terms” behind the deployment of federal agents in major US cities.
In an email to Business Insider, Tribe wrote that the situation “would have been completely unthinkable for those who fought against a bloody revolution and founded a republic to preserve the ‘blessings of freedom’, for those who gave ‘the last measure of devotion’ to preserve the Union, or for those who sacrificed their lives in two world wars to maintain the authoritarian regimes on our shores. “
“Calling this staggering takeover of streets and spaces for peaceful protests unconstitutional is a dramatic understatement,” Tribe wrote in the email. “And the cynicism of those who disguise these movements in the garb of essential peacekeeping, which may well succeed for a time in keeping judicial relief at bay, is especially unpleasant.”
