The president’s decision to use the Marines on U.S. civilians in Los Angeles is not sitting well with the public.
A YouGov poll released Tuesday morning indicates that the majority of Americans disagree with Donald Trump’s order sending 700 Marines to break up anti-ICE protests in the city. The number of people against the president’s action eclipsed those who supported it by double digits, with 47 percent of polled Americans saying they disagreed with the order compared to 34 percent who approved.
When it comes to Trump’s decision to send 4,100 National Guard members to one of the country’s most populous cities, Americans were equally unhappy: 45 percent of polled Americans said they disapproved, while 38 percent supported the action.
A shocking percentage of Americans were undecided on both issues. Some 19 percent of those surveyed said they weren’t sure how they felt about Trump sending the Marines to manhandle anti-ICE demonstrators, while 17 percent said they were undecided about the president’s decision to send in the National Guard. Both of those groups were mostly composed of registered independents, according to polling data.
The results are remarkably aligned with Trump’s overall job approval, with 51 percent of Americans disapproving of his job performance while 44 percent approve, as tracked by The Economist.
The YouGov poll was conducted before the Defense Department unveiled the price tag of sending active duty troops into Los Angeles: $134 million, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
Exactly who is breaking the law in L.A. is in question. Americans have a First Amendment right to protest, as protected by the U.S. Constitution—a document that every sitting president and public official swears an oath to uphold. But Trump has directed the military to squash the protests without California’s authorization, prompting a lawsuit from the state to peel back the order. California Attorney General Rob Bonta told reporters Monday that Trump had “trampled” California’s sovereignty.
Furthermore, Trump’s enforcement of his national agenda directly violates the will of the city of Los Angeles: The Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted in November to establish itself as a “sanctuary city,” prohibiting city resources from being used for federal immigration enforcement. Thrusting the military into the city to help federal agents rip undocumented immigrants out of their communities oversteps what Angelinos voted for.
Trump’s order also violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law dating back to 1878, that forbids the government from using the military for law enforcement purposes. The White House could have bypassed the military doctrine by invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to utilize the military during periods of rebellion or mass civil unrest, but had not done so by the time of the order. (Trump has openly discussed leveraging the nineteenth-century law to enact his agenda since his inauguration but has still not invoked the Insurrection Act as of the time of publishing.)
A month before the presidential election, the Brennan Center for Justice referred to the Posse Comitatus Act as “too flimsy a guardrail” to genuinely protect the nation from the White House, explaining that the principle within the act is protected “more by norms and historical practice” than the law itself. “Unfortunately, we’ve entered an era in which we can no longer rely on tradition to constrain executive action,” Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, wrote at the time.
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