Could Trump Have Sent Military into Minneapolis?

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

 

Thousands of protesters shut down parts of Minneapolis since the start of the year, to demand an end to the sweeping immigration crackdown that roiled the city for weeks.

Federal agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, arrived in in early January. They are responsible for removing non-citizens illegally in the country.

But they have shot and killed two protesters during this time, and this has set back President Donald Trump’s efforts. He has been losing public support, and it might be the biggest public-relations crisis of his presidency. To become more conciliatory, he dispatched “border czar” Thomas Homan to ease the situation. ICE, which proved too heavy-handed, is retreating from the city.

Both the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, had declared Minneapolis a “sanctuary city,” referring to a municipality that limits its cooperation with the federal government in enforcing immigration law.

They reiterated their commitment to stop ICE within their jurisdictions. Frey recently told illegal residents that Minneapolis “will do anything in our power to help because you’re not an alien; in our city, you’re a neighbor.” Walz made it clear that illegals can even claim state benefits.

Trump in turn accused them of fomenting an “insurrection” in Minneapolis and warned he might invoke the Insurrection Act, though he has now stepped back, clearly, from that threat, given the current unpopularity of ICE’s methods.

 But would this have been legal? The Insurrection Act grants the president vast powers to deploy the military to enforce domestic law. Throughout his 2004 election campaign, Trump vowed to crack down on illegal immigration, calling the southern border situation a “national emergency” that could be better handled by invoking the 19th century statute.

Yet many Americans think Trump should not be trusted with the use of the armed forces. Already in Trump’s first term, Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks, in a January 30, 2017 article in Foreign Policy, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020,” raised the possibility of a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.

Six Democrat members of Congress recently posted a video aimed at service members, “reminding” active members of the military that “the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.” The president called the video seditious.

Trump’s critics claim that deploying National Guard and regular U.S. military forces to enforce the law in American cities violates civil-military norms and is unconstitutional. Is it?

In 1807, at the behest of President Thomas Jefferson, Congress passed the Insurrection Act. It was intended as a tool for suppressing rebellion when circumstances “make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

The Insurrection Act remains controversial because it grants presidents significant discretion. It overrides state preferences. It stands as the primary exception to a longstanding prohibition against military involvement in civilian law enforcement.

Trump is far from the first president to consider its use. After the Civil War, the U.S. Army was involved in supporting the Reconstruction governments in the southern former “slave” states. In the election of 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant deployed Army units to protect the rights of African American citizens at southern polling places.

Two years later, the Posse Comitatus Act was passed. It normally prohibits federal armed forces from participating in civilian law enforcement. Trump’s critics claim this bars the use of federal troops domestically. But the Insurrection Act allows the President to deploy active-duty armed forces or to federalize and deploy National Guard forces to quell civil unrest or to execute the law in a crisis. So, yes, it is the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act.

Presidents utilized the Insurrection Act on five occasions during the 1950s and 1960s to counter resistance to desegregation decrees in the South. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed his state’s National Guard to prevent the integration of a high school in Little Rock. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by placing the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and deploying soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the law.

The most recent invocation of the act was by President George H. W. Bush, in 1992, during the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict, when U.S. Army and Marine divisions reinforced the California National Guard. A jury had acquitted four police officers of assault and excessive force charges regarding the brutal, videotaped 1991 beating of the Black motorist.

Trump’s critics also charge him with violating both domestic and international law by using the U.S. military to target drug cartels. But as far back as the Reagan administration in 1986, U.S. Army infantry and aviation assets operated with Bolivian forces against drug producers in that country.

And in 1993, President Bill Clinton issued a presidential directive assigning a substantial role in drug interdiction to the military. So Trump is less of an outlier than his critics imagine.

At the end of the day, though, all of this begs the question: can a U.S. state decide its own immigration policy? Are Americans prepared to surrender, thanks to protestors, the enforcement of immigration law?

Will the Iranian Regime Collapse?

By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

When U. S. President Donald Trump restored “maximum sanctions” pressure against Iran a year ago, he was clear about its goals: Deny Iran a nuclear weapon, dismantle its terror proxy network and stop its ballistic missile program.

The government in Tehran has fended off through violence and repression previous large-scale protests but now may limit or hold its fire. After all, Trump has been willing to go where no U.S. president has, including the authorization of a strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity last year and the recent capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Trump has demonstrated that his government is willing to use military measures to overthrow an enemy regime, and Tehran was, perhaps surprisingly, one of the closest allies of Maduro. The two countries were united by their approach to international sanctions and their ability to survive in American enmity.

Over the past three decades, this combination of political sympathy and anti-American rhetoric developed into a complex web of cooperation involving oil, finance, industry and security.

Since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, came to power in 1999, relations between Tehran and Caracas tightened significantly. During his first visit to Iran in 2001, Chavez declared that he had arrived “to help pave the way for peace, justice, stability, and progress in the 21st century.”

Nearly 300 economic, infrastructure, gas, and oil agreements were signed, worth billions of dollars. At one point, Venezuela even considered selling F-16 fighter jets to Tehran, while Iran supplied Venezuela with advanced Mohajer-6 drones. All this now comes to an end.

Maduro’s removal constitutes a severe blow to the operational base of Tehran in South America. With Maduro gone, “Iran is now in the eye of the storm,” observed Fawaz Gerges, Middle East analyst and professor of international relations at London’s School of Economics and Political Science. 

“The big lesson out of the fall of the Venezuelan regime is not Colombia, not Greenland,” he said. “The Iranians know that Iran is the next target. Not only of the Trump administration, but also of the Benjamin Netanyahu government” in Israel.

Israel, which has long perceived Iran as an existential threat, launched 12 days of what it described as pre-emptive strikes on military and nuclear sites in Iran last June, with U.S. war planes attacking three major nuclear facilities.   

They now see Iran as being cornered, extremely vulnerable and weak at this moment. “I think they’re piling on the pressure. They’re hoping that they could really, basically bring about regime change in Iran,” Gerges added.

On Jan. 12, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian shifted focus away from Iran’s stuttering economy and suppression of dissent and towards his country’s longstanding geopolitical adversaries, Israel and the United States. Speaking on state broadcaster IRIB, Pezeshkian claimed that “the same people that struck this country” during Israel’s 12-day war last June were now “trying to escalate these unrests with regard to the economic discussion.

“They have trained some people inside and outside the country; they have brought in some terrorists from outside,” he charged, alleging that those responsible had attacked a bazaar in the northern city of Rasht and set mosques on fire.

“My assumption is that the Mossad is active in Tehran behind the scenes,” contended Ahron Bregman, who teaches at King’s College London and has written extensively on Israeli intelligence operations. “Israeli officials are unusually quiet.” There are clear instructions not to talk and “not to be seen to be involved in any way.”

“I’d be very surprised if Israeli agents were not active within Iran right now,” defence analyst Hamze Attar maintained. “They’re going to be doing everything they can to make sure these protests continue and escalate.”

But anything that Israel is up to will of course be covert. This restraint is a calculated approach taken to avoid disrupting a process of regime change that may be driven internally. Intervening would only confirm the regime’s claims that the protesters are “Zionist agents,” a charge that could shift popular anger onto the demonstrators and douse the movement.

“Any visible involvement would give the Iranians an excuse to intensify repression,” explained Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and former head of Iran research in an Israeli military intelligence branch

Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, who maintains he wants peace with Israel and the United States, suggests Iran faces a historic moment. “In all these years, I’ve never seen an opportunity as we see today in Iran. Iranian people are more than ever committed to bringing an end to this regime,” he stated. “By God, it is about time that Iran gets its opportunity to free itself from a tyrannical regime.”

Iranians have seen the regime and its backers exposed and humiliated by an American administration and Israel, and they are taking advantage of it. But it won’t be easy. This is a religious nomenklatura that will use all means at its disposal to hold on to power. Never underestimate their cruelty and resolve.