The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) was founded in 1974, at a time when nearly every country in Latin America was governed by a military dictatorship. Over the past 50 years, we have accompanied many hopeful transitions from dictatorship to democracy. Knowing the proper role that a military should play in democratic politics is deeply embedded in our DNA.
As Latin America transitioned away from military dictatorship, we accompanied people in government and civil society working to get soldiers out of internal policing, to get generals out of cabinet positions, and to put civilians firmly in charge of defense policy, budgeting, and oversight. We fought for U.S. policies that supported and did not undermine these gradual, complex transitions.
Today, though, we are concerned about the United States. Efforts to politicize the U.S. military and attach it to the administration’s political project are gathering momentum.
In the span of a few days, U.S. citizens are witnessing:
- A large and growing role for military personnel in crowd control in Los Angeles, despite objections from local elected officials.
- An increasing military presence at the U.S.-Mexico border, with at least 8,600 active-duty troops deployed at a cost of over $525 million, alongside over 2,500 federalized National Guard members who have been given the power to facilitate arrests of civilians, even as migration dwindles amid an illegal ban on asylum access.
- An unprecedented military parade taking place in the capital on June 14 to mark the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, which is also the President’s birthday.
- A presidential speech before thousands of reportedly hand-picked soldiers who, with the apparent assent of their commanding officers, cheered attacks on migrants and transgender people and booed legitimate elected officials.
We have never seen this in the United States. But we have seen it in Latin America.
There, too, we have observed, with great concern, backsliding on democratic civilian control of the armed forces. Regimes like those in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have completely attached the military to the dominant political party’s project, a process that is nearly complete in El Salvador. Mexico has created a militarized national security force (the Guardia Nacional) to replace the federal police, which, after constitutional reforms in 2024, is now part of the armed forces.
Witnessing this backsliding is like watching the past half-century’s demilitarizations and democratic transitions in reverse, like a video played backward. But to our dismay, we are watching the first scenes of this video, too, in the United States.
This is a pivotal moment. The U.S. military has a long tradition of staying out of politics and, except in the most extreme emergency circumstances, staying out of internal law enforcement. Everyone who cherishes this tradition should pay close attention to, and speak out about, what is happening in Los Angeles and what may soon happen elsewhere.
At a May 21 White House meeting, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to increase the daily number of undocumented immigrants its agents were detaining from about 1,000 per day to 3,000. Fulfilling this order has meant going after people seeking work, those reporting to check-ins and court dates, or those who have had their paroles or temporary protected statuses abruptly revoked: these are the easiest to locate and round up. Miller specifically suggested targeting Home Depot hardware stores, where day laborers seeking work sometimes congregate. On June 6th, an ICE raid at a Home Depot, along with other aggressive operations in Los Angeles, triggered protests that, despite some lapses, have been mostly nonviolent.
The White House escalated rapidly, ordering a deployment of the California National Guard, above the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass. Further escalations in the military mission have followed; the National Guard presence will soon reach about 4,000 soldiers, along with a contingent of 700 active duty U.S. Marines. There are now more military personnel operating in Los Angeles, enabling the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, than are currently serving in both Syria and Iraq combined.
The United States has a strong prohibition against using military personnel in domestic law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits it with just a few exceptions.
The exception that the Trump administration has cited for the troop deployment in Los Angeles is Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code. But what is happening in Los Angeles doesn’t seem to be covered by this statute. Section 12406 only applies to National Guard personnel: the active-duty Marines are not contemplated here. Section 12406 also clearly says that orders “shall be issued through the governors of the States,” but the governor of California opposes this deployment so vehemently that he has filed suit in federal court to stop it. (Opinions diverge on how strongly the statute inserts governors in the chain of command.)
Update: on the evening of June 12, hours after initial publication of this analysis, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the National Guard deployment was unlawful and issued a temporary restraining order halting it. Breyer found that conditions of “rebellion” did not exist and that orders to deploy had not been issued through California Governor Gavin Newsom, as Section 12406 specifies. “The Court is troubled by the implication inherent in Defendants’ argument that protest against the federal government, a core civil liberty protected by the First Amendment, can justify a finding of rebellion,” Breyer wrote.
The Pentagon also appears to be relying on arguments about an inherent authority to use the military to protect federal property and functions. But here, too, the administration is bending that legal theory to the point of breakage by having military personnel accompany ICE agents as they carry out arrests of civilians. Rules of engagement empower National Guard personnel and Marines to forcefully hold civilians, including U.S. citizens, until civilian law enforcement can perform an arrest.
Statements from U.S. Northern Command indicate that the military is taking steps to avoid overreach: personnel are getting trained in de-escalation and the Marines are not carrying live ammunition in their rifles. But limits could go out the window if the Trump administration escalates further by exercising a “nuclear option” in U.S. law.
The broadest exception to the Posse Comitatus Act is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which empowers the president to use the military domestically, with few restrictions, whenever he “considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws.”
Though Supreme Court decisions going back to the 1820s give the President broad power to decide when those conditions exist, the Insurrection Act has only been invoked 30 times in U.S. history. The last time was a very limited role during the rioting in Los Angeles after the 1992 verdict exonerating police for the beating of Rodney King.
The Insurrection Act has seen rare use because civilian and military leaders alike have valued the norm of not giving soldiers free rein to use violence against civilians on U.S. soil. Despite that norm, Stephen Miller, the White House official, has on several occasions voiced a view that the Insurrection Act is an option under serious consideration.
In Latin America—as in other parts of the world where life under military dictatorship is within the memory of a single lifetime—most nations understand the gravity of giving the military powers like those foreseen in the Insurrection Act, and are very reluctant to do it. During months-long nationwide protests in Colombia in 2021, for instance, the government of Iván Duque deployed some soldiers to provide “asistencia militar” to police. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission recalled that the country’s jurisprudence limits the military’s role to “protect social demonstrations, not to control them or contain them,” and while civilian police aggressively confronted protestors, soldiers mainly performed duties, like clearing road blockades, that minimized contact. Similarly, events like soldiers jeering elected leaders, as occurred at Fort Bragg on June 10, would be unthinkably rare in Latin America except in more authoritarian countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Cuba.
At WOLA, we work to defend human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and healthy civil-military relations throughout the Western Hemisphere. We did not anticipate needing to point out the same threats to the military’s democratic neutrality here at home. But here we are.
Still, we are Latin Americanists: we are not members of Congress or other elected leaders, and we are not members of the U.S. national security establishment. Before it escalates further, we call on the United States’ elected leaders, and its active (civilian) and retired (civilian and military) defense, intelligence, and law enforcement leadership, to speak out forcefully on this enormously risky misuse of the U.S. armed forces.
