As the marshals were attacked, Kennedy first used the Mississippi National Guard and thousands of federal troops. (That military operation, code-named RAPID ROAD, was actually the first and only time during the Cold War that the military deployed and used strategies it had developed to quell civil unrest after a nuclear attack.)
Then, in 1963, Kennedy again relied on the National Guard to help integrate the University of Alabama, and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, used marshals and the National Guard to protect civil rights marchers in Selma after Alabama state troopers brutally attacked them at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Presidents began using the military, including the National Guard, often in American cities in the 1960s. During the summer riots following police brutality in Detroit in 1967, President Johnson ordered the 82nd Division.n.d and 101St The Air Force Division in the city and Michigan governor George Romney called out the Michigan National Guard; more than 40 people were killed, more than half by Detroit police. National Guard soldiers killed 11, including a four-year-old girl, Tanya Blanding, who died when a Michigan guard opened fire with a tank-loaded rifle.
While the military was deployed again during the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the dire nature and dangers of such deployments were clearly seen two years later at Kent State University when National Guard soldiers opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four and injuring nine.
In the years since there has been remarkably limited domestic use of federal troops — the 1992 Los Angeles riots being one — and presidents and attorneys general to the point that the Trump administration has often gone out of its way to coordinate federal law enforcement in cities or states.
Even during the high number of marshals and military deployments in the South amid the civil rights movement, presidents acted only after federal officials refused to end violence against Americans exercising their constitutional rights or, in the case of Alabama state troopers, be the cause of violence against peaceful citizens themselves. Usually, the president would act only after there was contempt due to a formal court order—ensuring that there is a second branch of government that acts as a check and balance and is responsible for such federal action.
While Trump said that the effort to strengthen immigration in Minneapolis – like previous efforts in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, Charlotte, Portland and, most recently, in Maine – is designed to enforce “law and order,” there is no consensus, reason, or need to be sent without political fear.
Trump today is trying something unprecedented that stands against all the historical traditions of the United States: the brutal use of federal forces against state and state for no apparent reason without being led by members of the political opposition.
In sending immigration officials and border security agents from DHS, instead of deputy US marshals from the Department of Justice—as presidents have done in the past—Trump is also changing the nature and basis of his federal military. Marshals, whose work and training involve constitutional rights and protection, have been used to protect civil rights and effective court orders and come with strong police and authority powers. Agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are different. They are not trained to common law enforcement public relations standards and are designed to operate with a very limited mandate to enforce immigration matters, not general federal laws. CBP agents are primarily non-regular law enforcement agencies, based on due process, and armed forces intended to operate in border regions. They were not intended to have regular contact with US citizens and residents.
Trump also tried to use the military in similar efforts last year and was thwarted by federal courts, which, among other things, previously blocked his assembly of the California National Guard.
