ICE: Crossing State Lines to Incite Riots The only disorder the National Guard will find comes from the deporters. [theatlantic]

 

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE. In the decade preceding the Civil War, the residents of Northern states resisted the efforts of the federal government to compel them to help Southern slave owners capture former slaves who’d escaped to the North. In 1850, the Southern-dominated Congress and a pro-Southern President Millard Fillmore enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring not just Northern police officials but all Northern citizens to aid in the seizure of Blacks who’d successfully escaped chattel slavery.

The North actively resisted these efforts. Boston abolitionists formed the Anti-Man-Hunting League, which hid escaped slaves and sought to impede the slave-hunters and the federal troops whom Fillmore deployed to help them out. But the resistance wasn’t confined to the abolitionist minority. According to historian H. Robert Baker, there were whole neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Boston that became “no-go zones for slave catchers,” so great was the level of local resistance. As I wrote in these pages seven years ago, “Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Wisconsin all enacted ‘personal liberty laws’ forbidding public officials from cooperating with the slave owners or the federal forces sent to back them up, denying the use of their jails to house the captives, and requiring jury trials to decide if the owners could make off with their abductees.”

In the 1850s, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the Constitution's Tenth Amendment, which gave states the power to enact laws not specifically preempted by federal authority. What Trump and his troopers are engaged in now is the same kind of violent enforcement at complete variance with the local, state, and regional sentiment. The Tenth Amendment, however, doesn’t reserve immigration issues to the states; they clearly fall under the purview of the federal government, as does the president’s right to declare an emergency enabling him to employ troops domestically—a consummation for which Trump and Miller have long devoutly wished. If California Gov. Gavin Newsom is to take them to court, I suspect it will have to be on the grounds that there’s no emergency, or at least no emergency that Trump and his minions aren’t fomenting themselves.

Whether that argument will prevail in the courts is far from certain; my hope is that it prevails in the court of public opinion.