ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The last time a president deployed the National Guard over a governor's objections was more than 50 years ago. Over the weekend, President Trump did just that in California. He ordered 2,000 National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles, where people are protesting federal immigration raids. California's governor and LA's mayor both say they don't need or want these troops to manage the protests. And today, Governor Gavin Newsom said California is suing the Trump administration for what the governor called an unlawful action. Trump appears to be relishing a showdown with a blue state over a central piece of his political agenda. Here's what he told reporters at the White House today.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The people that are causing the problem are professional agitators. They're insurrectionists. They're bad people. They should be in jail.
SHAPIRO: He presented no evidence that protesters include professional agitators. For a bigger picture of the strategy playing out here, let's bring in national security expert Juliette Kayyem, who was a Homeland Security official in the Obama administration. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
JULIETTE KAYYEM: Thank you for having me.
SHAPIRO: When do you think it's appropriate for a president to bypass a state governor to deploy the National Guard?
KAYYEM: The president's authority to federalize the National Guard has been limited in the past to when either a governor does not follow law, as we saw during the desegregation cases, or when a governor asks for it because their own resources are depleted. But we didn't see that this weekend. We saw a president look, essentially, at cable news, see a few cars on fire and decide to federalize National Guard troops under the command of the governor and put him under the command of himself.
SHAPIRO: We heard President Trump there refer to the protesters as insurrectionists.
KAYYEM: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: He has not yet invoked the Insurrection Act, but he still might. What would invoking that law empower him to do?
KAYYEM: The Insurrection Act is essentially a way for a president to militarize first responders. I mean, that's essentially what it would be. It would be you're deploying the active military because of an insurrection or unrest to quell civil society. That might be necessary in an instance that you can think of maybe in the future. That is not what happened here.
I mean, the reason why we have police departments, emergency management agencies, fire departments is because sometimes there is unrest. Sometimes there are riots. Sometimes peaceful protests turned not peaceful. But the idea that you would say, well, there's just unrest, therefore I'm going to either federalize the National Guard or, worse, deploy under the Insurrection Act active military members - think the Marines, the Air Force - into urban society, is essentially the total end and erasure of this, you know, civil military distinction that has governed our country for a very long time.
SHAPIRO: Let me ask you about something that Vice President Vance posted on...
KAYYEM: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: ...Social media, which might point to the administration's strategy here. He wrote, one of the main technical issues in the immigration judicial battles is whether Biden's border crisis counted as an invasion. He writes, "so now we have foreign nationals with no legal right to be in the country waving foreign flags and assaulting law enforcement. If only we had a good word for that," end quote. Can you parse the argument he's making here, and do you think it's a valid one?
KAYYEM: I'll start with the second question. No, it is not valid. This is an administration that is - knows what words to use, and they're using them for potentially a future case, whether they are going to invoke the Insurrection Act or, as we've seen already, they're going to be challenged court by Governor Newsom under the Title 10 authority that Donald Trump used. So they're putting out language that is going to protect them, I believe, in any future legal proceedings. And they have so lowered the floor at this stage on the standards that most rational people would use for unrest or riots or even insurrection, that we have to assume that that is purposeful.
SHAPIRO: And so what do you make of Governor Newsom's argument that this is, on its face, illegal and that the president...
KAYYEM: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: ...Exceeded his powers? Do you agree?
KAYYEM: Yeah. I don't know how he's going to do in court. I mean, part of it is because there's not a lot of case law here 'cause we've just never seen this before. So he may have a case. In other words, the president doesn't have unfettered ability to simply federalize the National Guard. Title 10 talks in terms of words like unrest, insurrection, civil unrest, but those have not really been well defined by courts. And once again, an issue that could have been resolved if only the federal government viewed its role as supporting first responders and de-escalating difficult decisions is heading to court. And that, again, will lead to new doctrine.
SHAPIRO: Finally, what is happening in Los Angeles right now is obviously different from the administration's crackdown on higher education or on...
KAYYEM: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: ...Law firms. But do you see parallels with the way the executive branch is using the tools it has...
KAYYEM: Yes.
SHAPIRO: ...To target centers of power that Trump perceives as standing in the way of his agenda?
KAYYEM: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I have been thinking about this this weekend, that it all seems similar, that what Trump cannot do through the processes of politics, he does through the processes of force. And that is what we're seeing, whether it's contracts, whether it's a certification of educational institutions or punishing them for having international students or going after a governor who he clearly does not like. It is that brute force rather than negotiation through processes that already exist that leads us to court again and again and again.
But this instance is very different. The military deployment in society - where people are allowed to protest peacefully, where there are important debates about what this country is and who we want to be - you add a military into that calculation, and it's not a future I really like seeing. It makes me worried.
SHAPIRO: That is former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and current professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Juliette Kayyem. Thank you so much.
KAYYEM: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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