President Trump says the Justice Department will send a "surge of federal law enforcement" into American cities run by "extreme politicians" who are on an "anti-police crusade" — including Chicago, Kansas City, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee.
Those places may soon see legal battles like the ones in Portland. Four notable federal lawsuits are already challenging actions of the federal agents purportedly sent to protect federal property on the July 4 weekend and remaining in Oregon's largest city four weeks later — with only a tentative, phased withdrawal agreement between the state and the Trump administration set to begin on Thursday.
A surge of hundreds of federal officers into American cities would represent an unprecedented expansion of the role of the federal government into local police matters.
Together, the Portland lawsuits ask the court to delineate, and enforce, constitutional limits on the federal government's ability to override state and local law enforcement and use police tactics that violate protesters' constitutional rights.
Since May 29, Portlanders have marched, sung, chanted and stood together to demand racial justice and condemn police violence against Black Americans.
Local officials and observers describe a fringe minority of protesters aiming laser pointers at officers, throwing cans, breaking windows, setting dumpsters on fire and shooting fireworks at the federal courthouse. One was arrested for allegedly attacking a federal officer with a hammer.
In response, the Department of Homeland Security has deployed paramilitary-style units. The president has characterized the operation as limited to protecting federal property and personnel and enforcing federal law – but also restoring public safety after liberal politicians "put the interests of criminals above the rights of law-abiding citizens."
State and local officials and observers say those federal agents are detaining and arresting innocent protesters. They also say federal officers have fired non-lethal rounds, pepper balls and tear-gas canisters at peaceful protesters, journalists, medics and legal-rights observers.
In a court filing, the city says the presence of heavily armed federal agents is not keeping order, but rather "escalating violence, inflaming tensions in our city and harming Portlanders." The city also says that "credible allegations have been made that the federal government has effectively kidnapped people off Portland streets, among other abuses of power."
The first lawsuit was filed by six journalists and legal observers seeking to stop Portland police from assaulting reporters, photographers and legal observers documenting the police's violent response to protests. After the arrival of federal agents, the suit expanded to include the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service.
Last week, District Judge Michael Simon rejected the government's argument that the force used was one of the "'unintended consequences' of crowd control," and he told federal agents they could not arrest or use physical force on journalists or legal observers — or stop them from recording what they saw.
In the second lawsuit, state Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is seeking to stop federal agents from detaining or arresting people without probable cause or a warrant, and to require federal agents to identify themselves and their reason for an arrest or detention.
Citizens rightly fear "being thrown into a van by anonymous agents," the suit says, which infringes on their First Amendment rights to protest. It also says citizens have Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights not to be snatched "off of the streets without probable cause" by unidentified officers in unmarked cars.
On Friday, District Judge Michael Mosman denied Oregon's request to immediately bar such behavior, saying there was not enough evidence to show a pattern of unlawful detentions and finding the state did not have standing to seek the temporary order.
As the parties prepare their next moves, governors throughout the country will be watching to see if the judge recognizes a state's interest in local police matters and its standing to sue federal agencies to protect the constitutional rights of its citizens.
The third case focuses on the 10th Amendment, which says that, except for the federal powers spelled out in the Constitution, all other powers are reserved to the states and its citizens.
The plaintiffs maintain federal agencies are infringing on Oregon's sovereign powers to police Oregon streets. They say the deployment of federal law enforcement officers infringes on the power of Oregon citizens to hold state and local police accountable.
The lawsuit also argues the federal response violates the First Amendment rights of the First Unitarian Church of Portland, whose religious practice includes activism and protest in the face of injustice.
While the federal government has a right to protect its property and personnel, the suit says, "defendants have far exceeded these constitutional limitations" in Portland.
What happens next depends in part on whether the plaintiffs ask for an immediate order requiring the federal agencies to leave local policing to state and local law enforcement.
In the fourth case, street medics who tended to protesters have sued both the city and federal agencies, saying their First and Fourth amendment rights were violated when "police and federal agents brutally attacked volunteer medics with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, batons and flash-bangs."
The medics want a court order to protect them from further harm. A ruling is likely in the coming week.
The theme of urban violence used by Trump plays on white fears of Black people and those living in extreme poverty.
Trump uses coded racist language to paint a picture of cities "plagued by violent crime," "heinous crimes" and "bloodshed." He claims that local leaders have abdicated their duty to protect citizens, requiring the federal government to step in.
The nation was founded on the principle that freedom is safeguarded by two governments — a federal government with specific and limited powers, and state governments with all other powers.
The Constitution reserves to the states an expansive power to police because that allows for law enforcement policies that reflect local circumstances and customs, and are responsive to the concerns of local citizens – which is exactly what Black Lives Matter and other protesters are now demanding in Portland and throughout the country.
This is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original article.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.