A former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official during Donald Trump's first term as president claimed that what is happening in Los Angeles is exactly what the president has been hoping for so he can unleash the military on Americans.
Speaking on MSNBC's "The Weekend," former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor stated the protests in Los Angles against militarized ICE agents do not rise to the level of insurrection that Trump's inner circle is claiming, but it has handed him the pretext to do what he has always wanted to do.
As he explained, "This is, in my opinion, the single most significant act you've seen yet in the Trump administration. People are going to start to come to that realization over the next few days. This is the big one, this is the one that people like me were warning about when I came forward first in 2020 and started talking about the things I was most worried about that I saw in the first Trump administration that the president wanted to do."
"At the top of that list was deploying the U.S. military on U.S. soil to enforce domestic law," he recalled. "We had stopped Donald Trump in 2019 from invoking the Insurrection Act because we and our lawyers didn't think the way he wanted to do it was legal. In fact, I rushed to the White House as he was planning to make the State of the Union address and he wanted to insert a line about how he was invoking the act and deploying the U.S. military on U.S. soil. We felt like that was a dangerous slippery slope so that Donald Trump would end up taking control of national law enforcement."
"Make no mistake, his own lieutenants were worried he would create a de facto police state if he was going to be deploying the military on U.S. soil," he added.
"What is happening in Los Angeles is not a rational response to what they're seeing on the ground," he pointed out. "This is indeed, in my view, pre-planned to be able to give the president justification to invoke the Insurrection Act and it made sense that where they decided to do these raids was Los Angeles."
"I very firmly believe in the White House they suspected the response would be protests, and then they could use the protests as a response to use the Insurrection Act," he elaborated. "But this is much, much bigger than Los Angeles. I'm telling you, from the first term, if Donald Trump had gotten the authority to use the military on U.S. soil to enforce domestic law, it was going to go much beyond enforcement of immigration law. That was our fear and we are seeing potentially the early innings of that play out in real-time."
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