Using the National Guard in DEA Raids Is the Worst Kind of Drug War Mission Creep

The Trump administration deployed National Guard soldiers to assist the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other federal law enforcement agencies during a large-scale marijuana raid last week in a stunning example of drug war mission creep.

The Los Angeles Times reported that about 315 National Guard troops assisted the DEA during a June 18 raid on suspected illegal marijuana farms in Thermal, an unincorporated desert community on the southeast edge of Riverside County. The Defense Visual Information Distribution Service posted photographs showing soldiers carrying riot shields next to Humvees.

The raid, completely divorced by geography and purpose from the Trump administration's original justifications for deploying troops to Los Angeles, is a compelling argument for why the president's sweeping emergency powers should be restricted.

Writing in Just Security, Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on presidential emergency powers at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the Guard's participation in the raids represents "an alarming escalation of President Donald Trump's efforts to use the military as a domestic police force."

"Based on currently available information, it appears to be illegal, as well," Goitein continued.

Goitein wrote that, while the details of the operation are still unclear, the number of National Guard troops involved and their use as perimeter security could run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act.

The military has provided indirect support for domestic drug interdiction operations for decades, but the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 makes it a crime to deploy the armed forces "to execute the laws" except in "cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution" or an act of Congress.

The purpose of the law is to prevent direct confrontation between military personnel and civilians, particularly searches, seizures, and other coercive measures. The National Guard isn't regularly subject to the Posse Comitatus Act, since the Guard is usually under the authority of state governments, but the Trump administration's unilateral deployment of roughly 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles earlier this month has created a legal showdown over the rarely litigated law.

The Trump administration claimed the authority to deploy Guard troops and Marines under a statute that allows the president to federalize state forces in cases of invasion, rebellion, or when the president "is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States."

The use of military personnel in marijuana raids isn't just an erosion of the Posse Comitatus Act—or at least the spirit of the law. It's also an illustration of how national security tools ceded to law enforcement eventually regress to the mean of police work: busting drug dealers.

Over and over again, technology and tactics developed for the military boomerangs back to the homeland. Local police departments used anti-terrorism grants to buy cellphone tracking devices and automated license plate readers that quickly became tools in everyday drug interdiction.

When a 2019 Department of Homeland Security memo questioned whether fentanyl could be considered a weapon of mass destruction, it led Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward to observe, "It's a safe bet that any expansion of law enforcement powers authorized in the name of national security will soon be used in the war on drugs."

With respect to the boss, the only thing she got wrong was in the follow-up sentence, where she wrote, "We are on the verge of being overrun by vice cops in olive drab cosplay."

Unfortunately, we're now on the verge of being overrun by men in fatigues who are not playing at anything.

"Indeed, if this use of the military were to be upheld by the courts," Goitein warned, "it is not obvious what would stop Trump from deploying federal forces to accompany almost any federal law enforcement operation—civil or criminal—anywhere in the nation, based on justifications as mundane as temperature or topography.