Latest news with #FugitiveSlaveAct
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
California hopes law from bloody era of U.S. history can rein in Trump's use of troops
California's fight to rein in President Trump's deployment of troops to Los Angeles hinges on a 19th century law with a a blood-soaked origin and a name that seems pulled from a Spaghetti Western. In a pivotal ruling this week, Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer ordered the federal government to hand over evidence to state authorities seeking to prove that the actions of troops in Southern California violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids soldiers from enforcing civilian laws. 'How President Trump has used and is using the federalized National Guard and the Marines since deploying them at the beginning of June is plainly relevant to the Posse Comitatus Act,' Breyer wrote Wednesday in his order authorizing 'limited expedited discovery.' The Trump administration objected to the move and has already once gotten a sweeping Breyer ruling that would've limited White House authority over the troops overturned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. This time, the Northern District of California judge made clear he would 'only allow discovery as to the Posse Comitatus Act' — signaling what could be the state's last stand battle to prevent Marines and National Guard forces from participating in immigration enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act dates back to the aftermath of the Civil War when the American government faced violent resistance to its efforts to rebuild Southern state governments and enforce federal law following the abolition of slavery. The text of the law itself is slight, its relevant section barely more than 60 words. Yet when it was enacted, it served as the legal epitaph to Reconstruction — and a preface to Jim Crow. 'It has these very ignoble beginnings,' said Mark P. Nevitt, a law professor at Emory University and one of the country's foremost experts on the statute. Before the Civil War, the U.S. military was kept small, in part to avoid the kinds of abuses American colonists suffered under the British. Authorities back then could marshal a crew of civilians, called a posse comitatus, to assist them, as sometimes happened in California during the Gold Rush. States also had militias that could be called up by the president to pad out the army in wartime. But law enforcement by the U.S. military was rare and deeply unpopular. Historians have said the use of soldiers to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — which saw escaped slaves hunted down and returned to the South — helped spark the Civil War. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has used constitutional maneuvers invented to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act to justify using troops to round up immigrants. Experts said leaders from the antebellum South demanded similar enforcement of the law. 'The South was all for posse comitatus when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act,' said Josh Dubbert, a historian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Ohio. But by the time Congress sent federal troops to begin Reconstruction in earnest in 1867, the landscape was very different. After white rioters razed Black neighborhoods in Memphis and mobs of ex-Confederate soldiers massacred Black demonstrators in New Orleans in the spring of 1866, 'most of the South [was] turned into military districts,' said Jacob Calhoun, a professor of American history at Wabash College and an expert on Reconstruction. 'Most scholars, let alone the American public, do not understand the scale of racial violence during Reconstruction,' Calhoun said. 'They only send these troops in after unimaginable levels of violence.' At the polls, Black voters were met by white gangs seeking to prevent them from casting ballots. 'For most of American history, the idea of an American army intervening in elections is a nightmare,' Calhoun said. '[Posse Comitatus] is reemphasizing this longstanding belief but for more nefarious purposes.' The Posse Comitatus language was tucked into an appropriations bill by Southern Democrats after their party won control of Congress in the election of 1876 — 'possibly the most violent election in American history,' Calhoun said. Historians say white lawmakers in the post-war South sought to enshrine their ability to keep Black men from voting by barring federal forces from bolstering the local militias that protected them. 'Once they're in control of Congress, they want to cut the appropriations for the army,' Dubbert said. 'They attach this amendment to [their appropriations bill] which is the Posse Comitatus Act.' The bill won support from some Republicans, who resented the use of federalized troops to put down the Railroad Strike of 1877 — the first national labor strike in the U.S. 'It is a moment in which white Northern congressmen surrender the South back to ex-Confederates,' Calhoun said. 'With the Posse Comitatus Act, racial violence becomes the norm.' Yet the statute itself largely vanished from memory, little used for most of the next century. 'The Posse Comitatus Act was forgotten for about 75 years, from after Reconstruction to basically the 1950s, when a defense lawyer made a challenge to a piece of evidence that the Army had obtained,' Nevitt said. 'The case law is [all] after World War II.' Those cases have largely turned on troops who arrest, search, seize or detain civilians — 'the normal thing the LAPD does on a daily basis,' Nevitt said. The courts have stood by the bedrock principle that military personnel should not be used to enforce the law against civilians, he said, except in times of rebellion or other extreme scenarios. 'Our nation was forged in large part because the British military was violating the civil rights of colonists in New England,' Nevitt said. 'I really can't think of a more important question than the military's ability to use force against Americans.' Yet, the law is full of loopholes, scholars said — notably in relation to use of the National Guard. Department of Justice has argued Posse Comitatus does not apply to the military's current actions in Southern California — and even if it did, the soldiers deployed there haven't violated the law. It also claimed the 9th Circuit decision endorsing Trump's authority to call up troops rendered the Posse Comitatus issue moot. Some experts feel California's case is strong. 'You literally have military roaming the streets of Los Angeles with civilian law enforcement,' said Shilpi Agarwal, legal director of the ACLU of Northern California, 'That's exactly what the [act] is designed to prevent.' But Nevitt was more doubtful. Even if Breyer ultimately rules that Trump's troops are violating the law and grants the injunction California is seeking, the 9th Circuit will almost certainly strike it down, he said. 'It's going to be an uphill battle,' the attorney said. 'And if they find a way to get to the Supreme Court, I see the Supreme Court siding with Trump as well.'
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Newsom vs. Trump: What to know about California's lawsuit against the federal government
Even a casual reader of this newsletter knows the Trump administration has deployed nearly 7,000 federal troops to L.A. over the last two weeks. Most also know California officials sued to stop them. (I reported earlier that the line he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed from Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution was first invoked to deploy troops against civilians to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.) But if your life and your For You Page are anything like mine, you may not have kept up with the details since then. So as your resident legal affairs correspondent, I'm here to tell you what's happening with California's lawsuit against the federal government, and what you should watch for next. California's June 9 suit makes two big legal claims: On June 12, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer — the bowtie-wearing brother of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer — agreed with the first set of claims, saying the government hadn't shown evidence of a 'rebellion' in Los Angeles and that civilian efforts to frustrate ICE raids were not disruptive enough to trigger 10 U.S.C. § 12406. He issued an order that would have given control of most troops back to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Trump appealed the order. The 9th Circuit hit pause to review it, leaving the troops in Trump's hands. A week later, the appellate panel tossed out Breyer's order entirely. In the court's Juneteenth ruling, Judge Mark J. Bennett wrote that the Constitution and the U.S. Code gave the president broad authority to interpret the facts as he saw them. But neither court has yet opined on California's second major claim: that by assisting immigration raids, troops under Trump's command violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids soldiers from enforcing civilian laws. (That law has an 'ignominious' history. I'll explain more later this week.) On Tuesday, Breyer gave state attorneys the green light to start collecting evidence about troop activities 'on the streets of communities in Southern California', and to depose key officials, including ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office Director Ernesto Santacruz Jr. and Maj. Gen. Niave F. Knell. Meanwhile, DOJ lawyers argued troops aren't enforcing civilian law; and even if they were, that would be allowed under the statute; and even if it wasn't, the Northern District of California has limited authority to say so. (Anyone who listened to Assistant Atty. Gen. Brett Shumate argue before the 9th Circuit last week will instantly recognize this as his signature style.) Trump's June 7 executive order called up troops for 60 days — or at the discretion of the secretary of Defense. Does that mean soldiers could be deployed in Los Angeles indefinitely? That's something California lawyers have sought to clarify through the courts while the PCA claim is heard. In his Tuesday order, Breyer signaled he could weigh in on it. The one thing we can say for sure is, if California wins, the Trump administration will appeal. Today's great photo is from Times photographer Juliana Yamada at the garage of animator-turned-ceramicist Rami Kim, who has been making whimsical character-driven ceramics in Los Angeles for more than a decade. Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editorAndrew Campa, Sunday writerKarim Doumar, head of newsletters How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@ Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on
The Hill
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
History shows prosecuting officials challenging ICE raids won't be easy
President Trump's promised retribution against what he has called the 'core of the Democrat Power Center' includes siccing thousands of ICE agents on 'blue cities.' The assault has already led to the prosecution of public officials who challenged his abusive immigration seizures. But the Trump administration will likely lose those cases, thanks to the strong American tradition of jury resistance, sometimes called nullification, dating to before the Civil War. In New Jersey, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) was indicted for allegedly interfering with the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka during an immigration protest rally at an ICE detention center. If convicted of the two forcible felonies, McIver would face a maximum sentence of eight years. McIver denies the accusations, pointing out that she had a legal right to inspect the facility as a member of Congress. She has raised the Constitution's speech and debate clause as a defense. In Wisconsin, the Trump administration brought criminal charges against Milwaukee County Court Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly preventing the arrest of a migrant in her courtroom. Dugan pleaded not guilty and moved to dismiss the case on the basis of judicial immunity. McIver's and Dugan's defenses are robust and may well prevail. But even if the prosecutors manage to overcome the immunity arguments, they will still have to face juries in Newark and Milwaukee, two of the heavily Democratic cities reviled by Trump. As detailed in my book, 'Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial,' American juries have historically refused to enforce unpopular laws against sympathetic defendants, in cases far more extreme than McIver's or Dugan's. In September 1851, shortly after the passage of the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, a band of slavehunters from Maryland, holding a federal warrant and under the leadership of a deputy U.S. marshal, attempted to apprehend four alleged runaways near the village of Christiana, Pennsylvania. When the posse's presence was discovered, the local Black community, along with some white allies, rallied to the defense of the fugitives and drove it away in a hail of rocks and bullets. One would-be kidnapper was killed in the melee, and the deputy marshal was humiliated. The fugitives escaped to Canada with the assistance of Frederick Douglass. The Millard Fillmore administration obtained indictments against 41 defendants — 36 Black and five white — accusing them of forming a 'traitorous combination' to 'prevent the execution' of the Fugitive Slave Act. The formal charge was treason, which carried the death penalty. The first defendant brought to trial — ironically, in Philadelphia's Constitution Hall — was a white miller named Castner Hanway. The prosecutors wrongly claimed that Hanway had been a mastermind of the rebellion, because they could not believe Black people capable of organizing a successful resistance against heavily armed whites. Hanway was represented by Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pa.), one of the great abolition advocates of his time and later author of the 13th Amendment. Stevens put on a defense that emphasized the frequent 'kidnapping and carrying away of colored persons' to nearby Maryland. As an explanation for the resistance, he noted the seizure of 'Black people … by force and violence and great injury and malice, without authority from any person on earth.' It took the jury only 15 minutes to acquit Hanway. Recognizing the futility of proceeding, the prosecution eventually dropped the charges against all defendants. Also in 1851, an alleged fugitive named Shadrach Minkins was arrested in Boston by agents operating under the Fugitive Slave Act. He was hustled into a federal courtroom where abolitionist lawyers volunteered to represent him. As the court convened the next day, about 20 Black men shoved their way through the doors and carried Minkins into the street. Onlookers cheered while 'two powerful fellows hurried him through the square,' later to be taken by wagon to Canada. Two of the most important leaders of Boston's free Black community were arrested for violating the Fugitive Slave Act: a prominent merchant named Lewis Hayden and attorney Robert Morris, one of the first Black lawyers in the U.S., as well as a white newspaper editor named Elizur Wright. All three defendants were represented by Richard Henry Dana, author of the memoir 'Two Years before the Mast,' and scion of one of Boston's oldest families. Despite substantial evidence of the defendants' participation in the rescue, there were no convictions, with two acquittals and a hung jury. As tensions increased between North and South, there were fizzled prosecutions in Syracuse, Milwaukee, again in Boston, and elsewhere. Even when prosecutions succeeded, sentencing judges could be unusually lenient. More important than any of the individual outcomes was the political movement built around the Fugitive Slave Act trials. Before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, many northerners were content to condemn enslavement from a distance, expressing disapproval but taking no action to oppose it. Afterward, the repeated arrests of alleged runaways and the trials that followed, of both fugitives and rescuers, made it impossible to ignore the federal government's intrusive role in enforcing human bondage. The McIver and Dugan prosecutors will have to contend with potential jurors appalled by Trump's indiscriminate pursuit of migrants, just as jurors in antebellum Boston and Philadelphia were appalled by the kidnapping of fugitives and arrests of rescuers. Defense counsel will surely highlight the hypocrisy of prosecuting McIver and Dugan for minor incidents, versus Trump's mass pardons of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. In the 1850s, northern opposition to the spread of slavery, sharpened by confrontations with slave hunters and federal marshals, led to Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860. Will the prosecution of Democratic officeholders and the arrests of countless migrants by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have the same impact on the mid-term elections of 2026? Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the author of 'Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial' and other books on abolitionist lawyers and political trials.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Manhandling of Alex Padilla Was a Red-Line Moment for America
In May 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner took to the floor of the Senate to deliver a speech denouncing slavery. Sumner was a fiery abolitionist; in his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate four years earlier, he had called for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, which an Alabama senator disparaged thus: 'The ravings of a maniac may sometimes be dangerous, but the barking of a puppy never did any harm.' Sumner continued to inveigh against slavery and its apologists throughout his first term. Clearly, he suffered from Pierce Derangement Syndrome (Franklin). Among those Sumner attacked directly in his May 1856 speech was his Senate colleague Andrew Butler of South Carolina. His words were, to be sure, impolitic: '[Butler] has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.' Two days later, in one of the most infamous incidents in American political history, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a first cousin once removed of Butler's, walked over to the Senate chamber, waited until no women were present in the gallery (Southern chivalry!), and attacked Sumner on the Senate floor with a metal-topped cane, beating him within an inch of his life. Alex Padilla, the Democratic California senator, did not bleed Thursday. He wasn't even hurt. But the sight of a U.S. senator being manhandled by FBI agents was shocking enough. Lawrence O'Donnell said Thursday night that Padilla was the first senator in history to be so accosted by law enforcement officials. I don't know for sure that that's true, but (1) I suspect if there were another, we'd know about it, and (2) even if he's the second or third, that wouldn't make how he was treated any better. The incident didn't last that long. But the real damage came after, when the lie machine reliably revved itself into action. It started with Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary whose press conference Padilla had interrupted. She went on Fox News within the hour to say he 'burst in' and was 'lunging' toward her and 'did not identify himself.' All lies. As anyone can see from the video, he was a good 10 feet away from Noem. But even if he had lunged—and even if he were not a senator but a mere citizen, or really any human being who is not threatening violence—this is how Donald Trump's FBI treats such people? Escort them away—OK. But push them to the ground and cuff them, when they've left the room and are no longer in any way a plausible 'threat'? And it was in that moment—the decision by the agents to take the matter to a totally unnecessary, completely gratuitous extreme—that we find lurking the essence of Trumpism. The essence of Trumpism is just this: Dig in the heel of the boot; step on the enemy's neck; determine in any situation the action that would be appropriately small-d democratic, and then do the opposite—go intentionally overboard, do something that shocks and offends the democratic sensibility. And then lie about it and try to reverse reality—to convince America that it didn't see what it just saw. That truth is the opposite of what it seems. A few Republican senators, and I mean a precious few, responded appropriately. Like, one: Alaska's Lisa Murkowski said, 'It's horrible. It is shocking at every level. It's not the America I know.' Susan Collins emitted the usual timorous excretion. Otherwise? Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said on Morning Joe Friday that he and colleagues Cory Booker and Brian Schatz waited on the Senate floor—who knows, perhaps not far from Sumner's Desk 29, occupied today by New Hampshire Democrat Jean Shaheen—for their GOP colleagues to appear and denounce what happened. Not only did they not do that, Murphy said: 'They basically said he deserved what he got simply because he was disrespectful to the president.' But Trump was surely most pleased by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who put all the blame on Padilla and called on the Senate to censure him: 'I think that that behavior at a minimum rises to the level of a censure. I think there needs to be a message sent by the body as a whole that that is not what we're going to do; that's not what we're going to act.' Note the 'at a minimum,' which leaves dangling the insane possibility that Padilla should … what? Just be expelled? Again, the essence of Trumpism is found in those three words. This is what they do. All the time. Trump federalizes the National Guard and sends in the Marines; he crows that if he hadn't acted, Los Angeles would have been 'completely obliterated.' Think about the scale of that lie, referring to protests in a four- or five-block area in a city of 500 square miles. He told it over and over in various forms, as did Noem and others. The behavior has its precedents in the United States: Southerners accused Sumner of faking his injuries. They argued that the cane was not heavy enough to cause severe injury. Others, more direct about matters, piped up that Sumner deserved a caning every day. And the right-wing media, like the Southern press in the 1850s, reliably echoed every word Trump, Noem, and the others said. Meanwhile the mainstream media failed dramatically this week by accepting the lazy frame that immigration is a 'winner' for Trump. Two polls came out—this one and this one—showing this emphatically not to be the case. The second poll, from Quinnipiac, was bleak for Trump across the board. Only 27 percent of the country supports the big ugly bill. That's not even all of MAGA America. People are beginning to understand that they indulged themselves last year in some fantasy projection of 'Donald Trump.' They're seeing the real article now, and they're remembering his viciousness, his ignorance, his incompetence, and his lawlessness. And it's going to get worse. Trumpism proceeds by the successive breaking of taboos. Each time a new one is broken, the previous one is normalized, made to look not so bad by comparison. The cuffing of Padilla was a red-line moment. And yet: There's plenty of reason to worry that in four months, we'll look back on it as a moment of comparative innocence. This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
Axios
02-06-2025
- Politics
- Axios
How Boston remembers Anthony Burns, a man forcefully returned to slavery
On this day 171 years ago, federal officials escorted a man in chains downtown to remove him from Massachusetts. Anthony Burns, then age 20, had escaped bondage in Virginia only to be forcefully returned. Why it matters: Burns' arrest became a flashpoint for Boston at a time when the nation was starkly divided, and historical reenactments and discussions are keeping his legacy alive nearly two centuries later. Between the lines: The nation was starkly divided over slavery. Depending on whom you asked, Burns was either kidnapped by a Virginia slave owner with the help of federal officials or returned to his rightful owner, per National Park Service archives. Anti-slavery activists debated whether the Fugitive Slave Act or a "higher law" should take precedence in a state that had abolished slavery decades earlier, says Shawn Quigley, lead ranger for the National Parks of Boston. State of play: National Park Service rangers in Boston revive that debate in their town meeting programming, including a recent reenactment of a May 26, 1854, meeting anti-slavery activists held in Faneuil Hall. Rangers pass out cards and ask the audience to deliver various arguments, Quigley says. The latest event was at the Old South Meeting House, with support from Revolutionary Space, but the Burns events will resume weekly once a restoration project at Faneuil Hall wraps up later this month. What they're saying: "The history of Faneuil Hall in Boston is not just the American Revolution, and it's a continuation of the American Revolution," Quigley tells Axios. Flashback: While activists debated in Faneuil Hall, they got word that a group of radical abolitionists tried to break down the courthouse entrance to rescue Burns. The abolitionists failed, and a federal marshal was fatally shot. Burns lost his case in court, but the day he was removed from Boston surrounded by federal troops, more than 50,000 people in Boston protested — equivalent to nearly half of the city's population at the time, Quigley says. A far smaller coalition led by the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston tracked down Burns and paid for his freedom in 1855. Burns returned to Boston briefly before studying at Oberlin College in Ohio and becoming a pastor in Canada. Today, the nation is again divided over its collective identity. Now, instead referring to slave catchers, activists are calling immigration agents " kidnappers," like in the arrest of Tufts international student Rümeysa Öztürk, while supporters hail the detention of pro-Palestinian protesters and call them terrorists. Americans nationwide, including in Massachusetts, can't agree on immigration policies, LGBTQ+ issues, or diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — all at a time when the federal government is embattled over federally funded research, its workforce and national parks resources. National Parks of Boston workers, including Quigley, wouldn't discuss the current political climate, citing restrictions under the Hatch Act. What Quigley did say is that he wants people to consider the programming like the Burns discussions as an example of how the nation's revolutionary spirit has persisted after all these years.
