Democratic senators are grappling with the possibility that cities they represent could become the center of the next fight over the military being used against American civilians.
President Donald Trump’s weekend post calling for expanded deportation efforts in the biggest U.S. cities raised alarms for the Democratic lawmakers who represent California, Illinois and New York. Some told NOTUS they’re worried the directive could lead to military enforcement in their states, a concern driven by the administration’s unprecedented deployment of the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles this month during protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
“He’s done it before. He’ll do it again,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said of Trump deploying the National Guard.
Trump did not explicitly lay out plans to deploy military forces in other states. But Democrats said Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to Los Angeles without authority from California Gov. Gavin Newsom could be a “slippery slope” toward using military deployment as a form of immigration law enforcement across the country.
“If he can deploy the Marines to Los Angeles without justification, he can deploy them to your state too,” said California Sen. Alex Padilla, who made a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday after he was handcuffed and forcibly removed from a Department of Homeland Security news conference in California last week.
Those worries have persisted after Trump’s post — as has Democratic messaging that Trump is taking a political swing at cities controlled by Democrats.
“He’s not going after dangerous people; he’s going after certain immigrants in certain cities that he doesn’t like politically,” Durbin told NOTUS. “A lot of us suspect that that’s what it was always about.”
Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth said the directive for ICE to increase detentions and deportations in Chicago means the president is “using ICE to intimidate, especially Democratic states.”
“I’m all for finding and deporting felons, but so far, in this administration’s own data, the number of convicted violent criminals that have been deported are somewhere around 10%,” she told NOTUS.
Trump’s call for ICE to detain more people came just two days before New York City’s comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested and held at an ICE facility. Lander was walking a man out of an immigration courtroom at 26 Federal Plaza, a building that also houses ICE facilities, during his arrest. Multiple members of Congress — some of whom have attempted to visit the building over concerns about ICE arresting immigrants during routine hearings and check-ins — raised alarms about Lander’s arrest, calling it political intimidation.
It’s a refrain that Democrats are increasingly adopting as they grapple with what their states and cities could see next.
For California Sen. Adam Schiff, an expansion of ICE activity means an expansion of the tension that the state has already seen with the Los Angeles protests, arrests and raids outside workplaces.
“It’s only going to inflame matters worse,” Schiff told NOTUS. “To target just Democratic cities also has a terrible partisan cast to it.”
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS — a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute — and NEWSWELL, home of Times of San Diego, Santa Barbara News-Press and Stocktonia.
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