The LA protests against ICE raids have quieted down. But will the summer see more unrest across the United States, and will President Donald Trump call in more National Guard troops to quell them?
I turned to Kristofer Goldsmith, who has for years infiltrated and monitored extremist groups through his nonprofit Task Force Butler. “Things have calmed down in California specifically because Donald Trump’s attention has shifted away from California, first to Iran and now to the budget bill,” he told me in this conversation. (And he had some tech issues for the first few minutes, so I made a few cuts to the video.) “California is going to be quiet relative to what it was, unless and until Donald Trump decides it is the most important thing to him,” Kris went on to say.
Trump made history by ignoring the California governor’s objections. His administration said thousands of troops were needed to counter “lawlessness,” to protect federal immigration officers and government property. And an appeals court did find that “before the deployment of the National Guard, protesters ‘pinned down’ several federal officers and threw ‘concrete chunks, bottles of liquid, and other objects’ at the officers. Protesters also damaged federal buildings and caused the closure of at least one federal building.”
The June order saw California troops deployed within their own state. But Kris thinks in future protests this summer, the president may deploy members of the National Guard across states — and that troops from red states might just be “more willing to use force against Americans who live in blue states.” Really. He says that people in uniform have been contacting him to express that concern. “They are worried about their own peers having a different understanding of their oath to the Constitution than they do.”
Kris also told me that the far left and the far right share a common belief: That the Proud Boys will be deputized by the president. That’s despite the megabill which Republicans are rushing to pass by Independence Day. It would allocate nearly $30 billion to ICE. More in the video.
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