Despite having lost an important federal lawsuit barring the use of the military for civilian law enforcement purposes, Donald Trump is still lawlessly promising to send troops into the streets of Chicago and other cities. That is counter to the American way and the law and Trump must not do it. In a 52-page order, California Federal Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the Trump administration had ...

California National Guard stands guard as protesters clash with law enforcement in downtown Los Angeles at the Metropolitan Detention Center due to the immigration raids in L.A. on Sunday, June 8, 2025 in Los Angeles, CA..

Jason Armond/The Los Angeles Times/TNS

Despite having lost an important federal lawsuit barring the use of the military for civilian law enforcement purposes, Donald Trump is still lawlessly promising to send troops into the streets of Chicago and other cities. That is counter to the American way and the law and Trump must not do it.

In a 52-page order, California Federal Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the Trump administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act in deploying military forces to Los Angeles to assist in the immigration and speech crackdown.

Breyer, the younger brother of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, offered reasoning that was detailed but did not have to rely on any particularly convoluted evidence; his summarized plenty of evidence showing both that the armed forces understand the type of domestic enforcement they can’t do and that they were definitely doing just that.

This ruling is in some ways right on time, and in some ways way too late. It comes in advance of Trump’s pledged imminent deployment of troops to Chicago and elsewhere — effectively an attempted military occupation of multiple centers of political and cultural resistance to his agenda.

Still, it comes well after Trump has already done this to two of the nation’s most iconic cities, including the capital. That is the Trump strategy: press the envelope as hard as you can and only stop when you are stopped. We’re glad the courts are stepping in, though unfortunately, our legal system was not exactly set up to contend with an executive who’ll willfully move to violate the law and a Congress that has decided it is wholly subservient to the president.

By and large, federal judges have long given the government the benefit of the doubt, and litigation mostly takes a while. Each side must make lengthy presentations of the facts and the law at hand, and then judges must consider all of this evidence and testimony and write often lengthy rulings making a determination.

In the face of clearly illegal conduct, judges are theoretically able to issue temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions to bar government actions while the process moves forward, but that ability has been curtailed by a Supreme Court that seems too often happy to shape the law around the president’s agenda instead of vice versa.

There is nothing in our traditions or laws or Constitution that enables Trump to use the military as “a national police force with the president as its chief,” as Breyer put it. We believe that the laws and the Constitution still matter. Perhaps crime would be marginally lower if we lived in an authoritarian police state, but for plenty of good reasons we’ve decided that this is not our only goal as a society. We value our freedom and rule of law.

Insofar as the authoritarians in Trump‘s orbit have a legal strategy at all, it is to overwhelm our legal system, not comply with it. They might have lost now, but they’ll probably try again with some minor tweaks, forcing the courts to engage in their slow process of deliberation once more while the administration gets away with breaking the law.

The only way to break that cycle is to ensure that there are real and specific consequences for federal officials who knowingly and willfully violate the law and defy the courts, through contempt or other means.

___