"It's been reasonably clear for a while that immigration and crime are Donald Trump's two best (relatively speaking) issues in a second-term agenda that is generally quite unpopular. These are also issues that tend to excite the MAGA base, particularly since the Trump-Vance campaign relentlessly combined them during the 2024 presidential election to suggest America was drowning in an immigrant-driven national crime wave."
"In two cases, Washington, D.C., and Memphis, the rationale for using National Guard units was the specious argument that violent crime was out of control. It mattered a great deal that the president already had significant law-enforcement powers in D.C., and that he was able to talk political allies in Tennessee into asking for an intervention that he had clearly decided on earlier."
"'Protecting' ICE agents was the legal and political rationale for the fateful experiment the administration initiated in the Los Angeles area this spring. Now it's being used to justify an attempted deployment of Oregon and California National Guard units in Portland and an impending deployment of Texas Guard units in Chicago. A federal district court judge (one appointed by Trump, believe it or not) in Oregon put at least a temporary kibosh on the Portland takeover."
Immigration and crime are central to a second-term agenda, energizing the MAGA base with claims of an immigrant-driven national crime wave. The administration has deployed federal and state military assets into Democratic-governed cities to crack down on crime, citing violent crime in Washington, D.C., and Memphis. In jurisdictions unwilling to validate the crime-wave narrative, protests against ICE mass-deportation tactics have been treated as a crime wave, with protection of ICE agents offered as the legal and political rationale for federal interventions in Los Angeles and attempted takeovers in Portland and Chicago. A Trump-appointed federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the Portland takeover and questioned the intervention's basis.
Read at Intelligencer
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