Trump’s troop deployment is a warning sign for what comes next, legal scholars fear

President Donald Trump’s deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles is stretching the legal limits of how the military can be used to enforce domestic laws on American streets, constitutional law experts say.

Trump, for now, has given the troops a limited mission: protecting federal immigration agents and buildings amid a wave of street protests against the administration’s mass deportation policies. To justify the deployment, Trump cited a provision of federal law that allows the president to use the National Guard to quell domestic unrest.