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No Kings. No Redcoats. No Occupying Armies.
Initially, and quite properly, Saturday’s upcoming nationwide demonstrations were focused, loosely, on Donald Trump’s assumption of neo-royal powers: Seizing Congress’s authority to fund and defund, establish and disestablish departments and agencies; threatening judges who rule that he’s violating the Constitution; ignoring people’s constitutional right to habeas corpus, that sort of thing. The “No Kings” theme associates these protests—as I argued four months ago that they should—with the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution, with the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord rushing to their village green to repel British soldiers come to arrest the patriot leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams.
As events would have it, Saturday is also the 250th anniversary of the Continental Congress’s founding of the U.S. Army, specifically to defend Americans against British redcoats. Last year, the army planned a modest celebration of this anniversary, but when Trump became president, he ordered that celebration expanded to include a parade of tanks and armored vehicles through Washington’s streets, culminating in a different birthday party, as he turns 79 on Saturday.
But over the past week, the echoes of 1775 have grown ominously louder. Trump’s ICE agents, now backed by a federalized National Guard and the Marines, are seizing people who look like immigrants off the streets, in order to meet the quotas the White House has imposed on them. The administration is no longer even maintaining the pretense of deporting immigrants convicted of violent felonies, a policy with broad, bipartisan support. Instead, they’re now swarming shape-ups, garment districts, restaurant kitchens, car washes, and, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, farms and packing houses, to round up as many immigrants as they can.
Just minutes ago, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), the representative of 40 million Californians, was manhandled, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for having the temerity to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at a press conference.
So, who’s the intruder here? Who’s the invader? Who’s disrupting the community and the economy? Who are the redcoats deployed from a distant capital, and who are the locals trying to preserve their communities and a modicum of power over their communities’ safeguards and rules?
As events would have it, Saturday is also the 250th anniversary of the Continental Congress’s founding of the U.S. Army, specifically to defend Americans against British redcoats. Last year, the army planned a modest celebration of this anniversary, but when Trump became president, he ordered that celebration expanded to include a parade of tanks and armored vehicles through Washington’s streets, culminating in a different birthday party, as he turns 79 on Saturday.
But over the past week, the echoes of 1775 have grown ominously louder. Trump’s ICE agents, now backed by a federalized National Guard and the Marines, are seizing people who look like immigrants off the streets, in order to meet the quotas the White House has imposed on them. The administration is no longer even maintaining the pretense of deporting immigrants convicted of violent felonies, a policy with broad, bipartisan support. Instead, they’re now swarming shape-ups, garment districts, restaurant kitchens, car washes, and, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, farms and packing houses, to round up as many immigrants as they can.
Just minutes ago, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), the representative of 40 million Californians, was manhandled, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for having the temerity to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at a press conference.
So, who’s the intruder here? Who’s the invader? Who’s disrupting the community and the economy? Who are the redcoats deployed from a distant capital, and who are the locals trying to preserve their communities and a modicum of power over their communities’ safeguards and rules?
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-11-trump-immigration-ice-national-guard-marines/