The White House late Tuesday signed a memo allowing troops stationed at the border to engage in some law enforcement roles and use lethal force, if necessary — a move that legal experts have cautioned may run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act.
The new “Cabinet order” was signed by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, not President Donald Trump.
It allows “Department of Defense military personnel” to “perform those military protective activities that the Secretary of Defense determines are reasonably necessary” to protect border agents, including “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention, and cursory search.”
There are approximately 5,900 active-duty troops and 2,100 National Guard forces deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Some of those activities, including crowd control and detention, may run into potential conflict with the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.
The erosion of the act’s limitations could represent a fundamental shift in the way the U.S. military is used, legal experts said.
Read the rest at The Military Times.
(THL) President Trump's Thanksgiving Week present to America is to take us one step closer to a totalitarian police state by setting precedents that future socialist dictators might find handy.
Conservatives with the rule of law and constitutional government on their lips should take notice and reckon with this.
The Trump phenomenon–– insofar as it is driven by the scapegoating of immigrants, and the support for police state measures to be taken against them as a class of people, regardless of any individual wrongdoing...
To enforce laws that allow distant bureaucrats in Virginia and their federal police forces to lay hands on immigrants all throughout these United States, and remove them by armed force as if they were the most violent criminals, from the place that they are paying a willing lessor to live in, or a private enterprise wherein they are willingly employed by the business owner...
Merely for not having a Washington bureaucrat's papers in order or the bureaucrat's permission to be there, though they clearly have the permission of the one who actually owns the place–– is a set up for American citizens to be so badly mistreated next.
Today the police state endlessly harasses and abuses Hispanic immigrants. It's a dress rehearsal for the relentless persecution of America's business people, conservatives, and Christians.
Double plus ungood
