The 700 United States Marines President Trump is deploying to Los Angeles are not from nearby Camp Pendleton. They’re coming from a desert base much farther away: Twentynine Palms.
Massachusetts Congressman Jack Auchincloss knows Twentynine Palms. He once served as a captain and commanded infantry there. Last week, he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining why President Trump’s order deploying the Marines was unnecessary, illegal, and particularly unfair to the Marines from Twentynine Palms.
Congressman Auchincloss joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share why he thinks it’s a bad idea to send a unit trained for urban warfare to police a city. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I read this op-ed with great interest, because I’ve been to Twentynine Palms, back in 2007 with GBH’s Frontline. We filmed the training there — it was training for desert warfare and for counter-insurgency operations in villages in Iraq. Could you talk about the training one gets at Twentynine Palms and why it might not be right for an American city?
Rep. Jake Auchincloss: These 700 Marines who are being ordered to Los Angeles are infantry Marines — 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. They’re not military police, they’re not logistics. They have trained for the last decade for military operations on urbanized terrain to locate, close with and destroy the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the People’s Liberation Army.
They have not trained in crowd control or in urban policing. That’s what the LAPD is for, and they’re well-resourced and equipped to do it. The Marines just present an operational challenge, as the LAPD police chief himself said. So this deployment is deeply unfair — not just illegal and unnecessary, but unfair to these sergeants and corporals who are ultimately going to have to grapple with the tactics of urban policing.
These sergeants…picture a 30-year-old who spent the last five years engaged in tactics that look like building-by-building, clearing fires, maneuvering destruction. You are entering a training facility that is made up of shipping containers, and you first aim fire at that building. You then maneuver a group of four to six Marines into the building, they clear it out room by room, and then they train their fire on the next building.
Property damage is collateral damage. The population that is there is treated in accord with the Law of Armed Conflict, but not the Bill of Rights. It’s about seizing and owning a city as a battlefield, not as a place for people to peacefully protest.
These Marines are not being set up for success, and I can only imagine that this thrown-together training they’re getting over these next couple of days is not even sort of going to close the gap for them.
Rath: You mentioned that they’re doing, I guess, sort of a crash course training in just a couple of days.
Auchincloss: Yes. The Northern Command says that they’re getting, I think, four days’ worth of training. Remember, they’ve spent years training for exactly the opposite scenario. Marines are not trained to de-escalate scenarios with citizens. They are trained to be no better friend but no worse enemy — to be the last thing that an enemy sees.
This is an example of a politician trying to use the military to boost sagging approval ratings. It is not an example of a president trying to support law enforcement.
Rath: I was going to ask you, because there are Marines or other military that have different types of training, why do you think the President would go to Twentynine Palms?
Auchincloss: Why he chose an infantry battalion over military police, I’m not even sure he could answer, and certainly Pete Hegseth couldn’t answer. I mean, if you watched his testimony in front of the United States Congress, it’s quite clear that Pete Hegseth doesn’t understand either the operations, the tactics of the law surrounding Posse Comitatus or urban policing.
[NOTE: In an email response to GBH’s request for comment, the Department of Defense referred GBH to the Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s recent congressional testimony.]
I think, frankly, Donald Trump doesn’t care about any of the actual operations or logistics. He cares about the photo-op. He is grappling with a number of challenges — most of which are his own making, whether it’s economic volatility or reduced approval ratings because of his handling of due process and individual freedoms. He’s trying to distract from that.
What he wants is a fight over immigration in a blue state, and what he really wants is to be associated with the last popular federal institution, which is the United States military. And in so doing, he’s actually going to degrade the public’s trust for the military over the long term, which is a horrendous disservice to this country.
Rath: You write about how this move is illegal. Could you explain briefly the Posse Comitatus Act and how this is, in your view, illegal?
Auchincloss: Posse Comitatus is a principle that, really, dates all the way back to the Magna Carta, but is a law in America codified in the latter half of the 19th century that states that the president, generally, cannot use the military for domestic law enforcement.
Now, there are some exceptions, most of which are codified under the Insurrection Act, but both the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act are poorly drafted. They’re way too broad. They don’t describe the scenarios in which the president can deploy the military well enough. But there is a general consensus that there are really only two scenarios where it is acceptable to deploy the military on U.S. soil.
One is an actual insurrection. So, think of like the Civil War — or, for that matter, January 6th, 2021, when I’ll note President Trump refused to activate the National Guard. Number two would be when a class of individuals is systematically deprived of their constitutional rights. So, think [of] school desegregation in the deep South during the Civil Rights Era. Those are really the only two scenarios where legal scholars on both sides of the aisle agree that there is a legitimate case.
A few scattered protests in Los Angeles, where the governor, mayor and the local police chief are all saying they are fully resourced and equipped to handle on their own, is not even close to a scenario envisioned under Posse Comitatus, which is why a district court judge just ruled against the president, although unfortunately, an appeals court judge stayed that.
I expect that, ultimately, the 10th Amendment is going to hold here. The 10th Amendment basically says: If there’s a dispute over whether the feds or the states have a right to do something, the tie goes to the states. That’s basically what a judge just said. [The judge] said, “Hey, it’s unclear here, so the tie goes to the states.”
Rath: You ask us to imagine what it’s like to be one of these young Marines with this kind of training. For you, that’s not a thought experiment; you’ve been a young Marine with that kind of training. Could you put us in the head of what it might be like to be one of the young Marines with this training [to be] deployed to Los Angeles and, potentially, in a situation where [they are] facing a potentially illegal order?
Auchincloss: One of the things that gave the Marines such esprit de corps that upholds good order and discipline within the ranks — both for the enlisted and also for the young officers — is this conception of being a ferocious fighting force, of being the most highly trained individuals in the world for a task — the president’s 911 — that the country can rely on for the hardest scenarios.
What the president is doing here is really undercutting that esprit de corps, because he’s taking these Marines who think of themselves as war fighters and putting them in a scenario where they are being put in opposition to fellow citizens. They don’t actually have the tactics or training to encompass those scenarios, so he’s enervating their sense of being war fighters on behalf of America by turning them into poorly trained, inequipped cops.
It’s really one of the...not that this President cares, but it’s just such a mean-spirited thing to do [to] these kids — and they are kids who enlisted in the Marines because they want to be proud of their service to the country.
[NOTE: The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.]
