Pod Insights 5-4 Trump Brings the War Home [UNLOCKED] About this episode California has become a testing ground for Trump's police state ambitions. In Los Angeles and across the country, he’s merging the military and the police into one entity, with its guns aimed inward.
If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode! To hear this and other Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support.
“Experts Question the Legality of Deploying National Guard Officers as Immigration Judges” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/florida-desantis-trump-national-guard-military-lawyers-jags-immigration-judges-legal/
5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Transcriptions of each episode are available at fivefourpod.com http://fivefourpod.com/
Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On BlueSky, find Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social, Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social, and Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social.
Our Sponsors:
* Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com
* Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Hi y'all, Rian in here with a gift to our beautiful, smart, and powerful listeners. We are unlocking the premium episode that we released earlier this week, so that now it is on the free feed and available to everybody. This episode is about the militarization of immigration enforcement and the police, about how the Trump administration is incorporating the US military into this racist and violent kidnappings of our neighbors. We start with talking about what happened in Los Angeles earlier this summer, and you actually have many of our paid subscribers to thank for us releasing this. A bunch of people said that they wanted to see this episode unlocked for everyone,
0:45 Speaker 00 so that it can be heard by more people and shared widely. So, go off, kings, queens, royalty. Before I turn it over to the episode, I just want to remind everyone that if you like this episode, you can check out our entire backlog of premium and ad-free episodes by subscribing at patreon.com/54pod. Our premium episodes are mostly about more ambitious topics in law and politics, from episodes on propaganda to the legal battles under authoritarianism, to what the helly is going on in John Roberts' mind.
1:28 Speaker 00 These episodes are usually a little longer than our case episodes. We will talk to an expert sometimes, or a lot of the time bring in our own extra research. And Michael usually has at least two rage rants per premium episode. So, check it all out by subscribing for $5 or $10 a month at patreon.com/54pod, all spelled out. See ya.
2:00 Speaker 01 Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On this subscriber-only episode of Five to Four, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about President Trump's immigration crackdown, specifically as it relates to two ongoing cases in California. Earlier this summer, masked ICE agents conducted aggressive raids in Los Angeles. Five men who were picked up by ICE sued the government, claiming that ICE agents had failed to identify themselves or give a reason for their arrests, and that they were denied access to legal counsel. In response to the raids, protests against ICE erupted in downtown Los Angeles, leading Trump to bypass California Governor Gavin Newsom and deploy the National Guard.
2:42 Speaker 01 Newsom sued, asserting that Trump had exceeded his authority, but a court of appeals sided with the administration. Both of these cases are active and might eventually make it to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, this is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and our burgeoning police state suck.
3:08 Peter Shamshiri? Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have turned our nation cryptically racist, like an American Eagle ad.
3:16 Michael Liroff? Yes.
3:17 Peter Shamshiri? I'm Peter. I'm here with Rhiannon.
3:19 Speaker 00 Hey.
3:20 Peter Shamshiri? And Michael.
3:21 Michael Liroff? Sydney Sweeney can do no wrong, in my opinion.
3:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:25 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. Michael, a big simp for Sydney Sweeney.
3:29 Speaker 00 I haven't heard that in a long time. That's really funny.
3:31 Peter Shamshiri? I have to say, I don't, it's very hard for me to care about the American Eagle ad where Sydney Sweeney says, like, "It's in my genes," and people are like, "Oh, my God, she's doing Adolf Hitler."
3:42 Speaker 00 I have good genes, or whatever.
3:44 Peter Shamshiri? And it's like, I agree that this is distasteful, but I feel like you're putting a lot on the dipshits at American Eagles.
3:54 Michael Liroff? Yeah.
3:54 Peter Shamshiri? Who, I promise you, have no real ideology beyond selling their third-rate ass genes.
4:02 Michael Liroff? Yeah, the pun, the gene pun.
4:04 Peter Shamshiri? It's the only gene pun you can do, so...
4:08 Michael Liroff? But if you want to say it's distasteful, maybe even purposely winking at like the right, I would just kind of shrug my shoulders and say, okay, whatever.
4:20 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, maybe.
4:21 Michael Liroff? Maybe. I saw a TikTok that was like, she says her jeans are blue and that's a reference to blue bloods and hierarchy and all this like, oh, I don't know, man, this is just left wing green M and M's. I think some of this shit is like, it's fucking like, relax about the M and M's lady's boots or Lola Bunny's tits or whatever. Like,
4:46 Peter Shamshiri? Right, right.
4:47 Michael Liroff? Or the Sydney Sweeney Gina, just be like, it's kind of gross.
4:50 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
4:51 Michael Liroff? Yeah.
4:51 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. If you obsess over this stuff, you veer into left wing Black Santa. It's a little bit too much. All right. So today we're talking a little bit about the police state under Trump and we're going to focus on what happened back in June in Los Angeles. In June in Los Angeles, there were aggressive ICE raids, there was community resistance and protest, and there was escalation by the Trump administration, including the deployment of the National Guard. At the time, a lot of people were calling on us to do an episode to cover it. And sometimes we will cover breaking news, but we also don't want to be
5:33 Peter Shamshiri? a podcast that just sees news about what Trump is doing and then says like, oh, holy shit, you guys seeing this?
5:38 Michael Liroff? Yeah. Right.
5:39 Peter Shamshiri? But now we are a couple of months later and we have a better understanding of what happened on the ground as well as what is happening parallel across the country. So we are going to talk about what happened in LA. And for that, we're going to use the ACLU's lawsuit as our basis. They sued based on what happened in LA. We're also going to talk about what we're seeing in other parts of the country and what it all tells us about the police state apparatus that the administration is trying to build. Yeah.
6:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think what we see out of this lawsuit and others is like a clearer and more detailed picture than what we could see just from news at the time. And so you get some details, you get some statistics here, you get all in one place what the government announced that they were going to be doing, which is detaining and trying to deport thousands of people, right? And what you get, I think, from the lawsuit as well is a look into one of the ways, one of the weapons, one of the tactics for confronting the Trump administration. Here, it's legal. And so, you know, kind of looking at what the ACLU sued over and what initially at the district court level, what the judge is saying so far. So yeah,
6:57 Speaker 00 I think in this episode, we're talking about what happened in Los Angeles, the militarization of immigration enforcement, et cetera. And we're also looking at the legal battle against some of this stuff.
7:11 Peter Shamshiri? So in early July, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the administration, various officials within the administration. That lawsuit has now been joined by the city of Los Angeles. And it tells a very specific story of escalation in enforcement that emanates from the top down. In January, as the administration got started, they gave each ICE field office a daily quota of 75 arrests. There are 25 field offices across the country. Obviously, having a quota changes the way that ICE operates, right? Because now they need to hit that minimum number. And immediately, you see reports of more aggressive tactics than we've seen
7:55 Peter Shamshiri? previously. Courthouse arrests being the big one. People showing up for court, you know, which is doing your diligence to be in this country and getting detained by ICE. Very quickly, the administration also attempted to shut down several oversight departments within the Department of Homeland Security, like the Office for Civil Rights and the Citizenship and Immigration Services ombudsman. They rescinded internal guidance that restricted raids in sensitive areas like schools and hospitals and churches. Then in May,
8:27 Peter Shamshiri? Stephen Miller summoned the heads of the ICE field offices to demand even more arrests.
8:34 Speaker 00 So they're demanding more arrests simultaneously and just after basically removing any structural accountability that's at DHS that enforces accountability on ICE, also obviously ratcheting up the number of arrests that they're demanding ICE makes.
8:52 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. So Miller says that the agents no longer need to develop vetted target lists, but could aggressively, quote, "push the envelope," which is the exact language used in an email. They ratchet the quota up to 3,000 daily arrests nationwide. Previously, it had been 75 per office, which is 2250. Plus, Miller threatens to fire the office heads in the bottom 10% of arrests across the country. So the incentives for reckless arrests are sky high at this point, right?
9:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, people who will lose their job if they're not overseeing the arrests of thousands of people.
9:31 Peter Shamshiri? Right. So that's what's happening as we enter into June, right? So how does this manifest on the ground? Basically, it manifests in ICE consistently ignoring several key provisions of immigration law. First, immigration agents generally need a warrant to arrest someone, but they can arrest someone without a warrant if, one, they have probable cause to believe that they're in violation of immigration law, and, two, the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. It seems that ICE has basically been ignoring both of these requirements, right? There's reason to believe that, at least at times, they are not establishing probable cause, that
10:12 Peter Shamshiri? people are undocumented. They are simply raiding places where they anticipate undocumented people will be and arresting everyone that fits the racial and ethnic profile. And then they are also not establishing that these people are flight risks before making arrests. We essentially know this because many people are arrested without being previously known to ICE and without questioning. So they would have no way to establish their flight risk, right? They're not even pretending to establish that these people are a flight risk. They don't know who they are. Regulations also require immigration officers to, one, identify themselves as an immigration officer who is authorized to execute an arrest, and, two, state that the person is under arrest and the reason for the arrest,
10:57 Peter Shamshiri? at least as soon as it is practical to do so. We know from video footage and witness statements that this is not happening.
11:05 Speaker 00 Right.
11:05 Peter Shamshiri? Not only are they not verbally identifying themselves, they're not always identifiable from their attire.
11:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:12 Michael Liroff? No, they're wearing masks. You can't see their face.
11:15 Speaker 00 They're in plain clothes.
11:16 Michael Liroff? They're in plain clothes, plain car.
11:18 Peter Shamshiri? Right. DHS has also denied detained people access to counsel. Attorneys reported being denied access to their clients at detention facilities in LA for days at a time. They showed up one weekend and there was just a sign up saying, like, no visitors this weekend. Very unprecedented for attorneys to encounter that level of obstruction.
11:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, just as an example, you know, I did criminal defense. I was a public defender in criminal. And yes, criminal law and immigration law are a little bit different. But when you're talking about access to counsel, you're actually talking about a constitutional right. In my experience, practicing in the state of Texas, in rural and in urban jurisdictions, big cities, very, very rural, small cities, I, as an attorney, could go to the jail 24 hours a day and access my client at any time in any of those places. Now, that might not be the exact rule everywhere, but just to say, like, this is the most analogous situation in my direct experience.
12:20 Peter Shamshiri? And that's Texas. We're not talking about some liberal jurisdiction.
12:23 Speaker 00 Right. You have unfettered access. This is a constitutional right. You can see your attorney.
12:27 Michael Liroff? The step down in protections and standards is just, it's massive, right? Like, the gap between those two things is, I think, not explainable by just, oh, this is immigration law, so it's different, right?
12:41 Peter Shamshiri? Right. So the ACLU lawsuit brings several causes of action. This is not exhaustive, but they are alleging Fourth Amendment violations. Fourth Amendment protects against your right against unlawful searches and seizures. Violation of the immigration statutes and regulations for the arrests without probable cause or a flight risk, failure to identify the reasons for the arrest, denial of access to counsel. They also have Fifth Amendment claims regarding conditions of confinement because the conditions of people's confinement are unconstitutional. And in fact, people in LA were being held in a facility that's not meant to house people for long periods of time. It's meant to be this like very brief, temporary holding facility. And they
13:25 Peter Shamshiri? are alleging Fifth Amendment due process violations. So that is what was brought before a federal judge in early July.
13:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, lots of constitutional issues, right? These are major, major, major violations of individuals' constitutional rights. And as part of this lawsuit, individuals sued, but there are also organizations that sued. They are legal organizations. The United Farm Workers, a union of, you know, many migrant workers and also citizen workers, also sued based on their membership and how these ICE raids and these detentions were hurting them as well. So let's talk about what happened in court, at least initially. This lawsuit gets filed. And in the very, very initial stages, this is a big lawsuit. It will take a long time. One of the first steps is plaintiffs,
14:16 Speaker 00 the people who are suing, ask the court to issue a preliminary injunction, right? We've talked about this before. Most recently, we talked about injunctions in the episode, a few episodes ago on Trump v. Casa. And we talked about the standards for when judges grant injunctions. And so remember that an injunction is an order that the defendants stop the harmful behavior, stop the thing that they're doing while the case makes its way through court. And the test for whether a plaintiff should get an injunction, what it comes down to is, in just like a really simplified way, first, there's this question that the judge initially answering, are the plaintiffs likely to succeed on the merits? Are the claims that they're making about the ways that defendants are harming them?
14:59 Speaker 00 Are the claims that they're making about their rights being violated, are those claims likely to succeed in the end? And then second, a judge is considering like, is an injunction needed to make sure that the plaintiffs don't suffer continued harm that will be irreparable, something that is not going to be able to get fixed. So the judge needs to order that this behavior stop right now. So let's get a little bit into the facts that are alleged here in this case. This lawsuit gets filed in district court for the central district of California. The judge is Judge Mamé Awusi Mensa Frimpong. So Judge Frimpong, we should just say, agrees with the plaintiffs on both of these questions.
15:42 Speaker 00 They are likely to succeed on the merits, she says, and an injunction is needed to prevent the plaintiffs from suffering irreparable harm from the federal government. And so, yeah, jumping into like some of the facts and the evidence that she's relying on. This is what she sees and this is how she's ruling. So there are five individual plaintiffs. Three of them were arrested together at a bus stop in Pasadena while they were waiting to be picked up for a job. These men are Pedro Vázquez Perdomo, Carlos Alexander Osorto, Isaac Villegas Molina. They were approached by multiple armed agents who were masked. They had weapons. They did not identify themselves. They did not have a warrant. All three men were surrounded. They were handcuffed,
16:26 Speaker 00 detained, driven to another location where their IDs were checked for the first time. And they were put in a detention facility in the basement of a federal building in LA. These men filed this lawsuit, joined this lawsuit during their detention from that basement in the federal building in LA. Then they were denied access to a lawyer during their detention. The other two individual plaintiffs are Jorge Hernández Vieramontes and Jason Bryan Gavidia. The first of them, Hernández, was stopped at a car wash where he has worked for 10 years.
17:03 Peter Shamshiri? And by the way, car wash is basically on the list of places to target similar to like, uh, Home Depot parking lots, right?
17:10 Speaker 00 Yep.
17:10 Peter Shamshiri? Where the premise is not like, oh, we know that there's someone undocumented there, which is what you realistically need to conduct an arrest if you're ICE. Instead, it's like, where do undocumented people hang out? We're just gonna go there.
17:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're gonna talk about the factors that ICE is using to justify these stops in these detentions. So yeah, Hernandez was at a car wash where he has worked for 10 years. Gavidia was stopped at a tow yard where he was working on a car. Both of these men are US citizens who were nonetheless surrounded, questioned, detained, again, by masked agents who did not identify themselves, despite both men having ID on them. Like their real ID, like the driver's license, right? One of them was put in a car and just driven around until ICE agents verified his citizenship.
18:03 Speaker 00 And then he was dropped back off at the car wash where the same day later on, another group of agents raided the car wash again. The other man who was at the tow yard, he was surrounded by agents with assault rifles. He was pushed against a metal gate. His arms were twisted. And even though he proved he was a citizen with his real ID, those agents stole his ID. He never got his ID returned to him. And so this is what Judge Frimpong is reviewing and the evidence and the facts on which she is deciding, yes, I'm going to order an injunction. The federal government has to stop doing this while this case proceeds.
18:47 Speaker 00 And I just want to say, I think the decision, her order on the preliminary injunction and issuing a temporary restraining order, I recommend people go read it. It's so refreshing. To read a judge's opinion and order that is this frank, that is very clear, explains the law very well, I think, in an accessible way. And she's just like not taking the bullshit, not at all. She says like, the evidence is overwhelming. And so remember, she's assessing in issuing the injunction. She is assessing in large part whether the plaintiffs will succeed on the merits later on. And she says they are really likely to succeed.
19:31 Speaker 00 They are likely to be able to show that stops are happening that should require at least reasonable suspicion, but no reasonable suspicion has been established. They are very easily going to be able to show that the stops are actually based on four factors that ICE admits they are using that are impermissible justifications for arrest. Those include race, those include speaking Spanish. And like Peter said, presence at a particular location or somebody having a particular type of work. This is what ICE is saying they are using to justify arrests, right? We're going to Home Depot parking lots, we're going to car washes because we think
20:14 Speaker 00 that's where undocumented people are hanging out. They're also, Judge Frampong says, very likely to be able to show that their right to an attorney was obstructed. This is happening, she says, on its face, lots of evidence in their favor. And so this is why ultimately the injunction is ordered. So at this point, the federal government, at least in the central district of California, is ordered to stop these ICE raids and these detentions and the obstruction of access to counsel in the way they've been carried out.
20:50 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. And so just so people understand, this will be escalated up to the Ninth Circuit.
20:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:57 Peter Shamshiri? And then, potentially, the Supreme Court, where we'll find out whether Sam Alito thinks it's okay to arrest people because they are looking
21:07 Speaker 00 Speaking Spanish.
21:08 Peter Shamshiri? Hispanic, speaking Spanish, hanging out at a Home Depot. Why do I feel like we're about to hear about some real thin technicalities, folks?
21:19 Michael Liroff? Mm hmm.
21:22 Michael Liroff? Yeah, so I think that's a pretty good overview of like the ICE overreach in Los Angeles. Of course, this wasn't met quietly by the people of Los Angeles. And in fact, they almost immediately started protesting this big push by ICE. Those protests got a little unruly. At one point, they were at a location where ICE agents were behind a locked gate at a parking lot, and protesters used a big commercial dumpster as a battering ram to try to break through the gate. The next day, people were throwing shit at federal
22:04 Michael Liroff? officers and cars, and somebody threw a Molotov cocktail. A car was burned. People were not happy, let's just say. People were not happy with ICE. And in response, Donald Trump issued an executive order in which he said, "The protests or acts of violence directly inhibit, to the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States." And therefore, under the statute 10 U.S.C. 12406, he was taking control of
22:46 Michael Liroff? the California National Guard and deputizing them and ordering them to essentially protect ICE, control the protests, protect federal property and aid in these, these operations.
22:59 Peter Shamshiri? I want to pause here just to note that the definition that the administration is using here for rebellion
23:08 Michael Liroff? Oh, yeah.
23:09 Peter Shamshiri? would capture any protest that violates the law.
23:14 Michael Liroff? Yeah.
23:15 Peter Shamshiri? So you don't have a permit for your protest? Engaged in rebellion. You know, break a curfew or something, engage in rebellion. You know, there's really no end to how aggressively you could define rebellion if this is what you're using.
23:31 Michael Liroff? Directly inhibit the execution of laws. Like if you're just kind of blocking ICE agents, that's rebellion. Regardless of whether you support the violence or oppose the violence, I think what's important to understand is that it's just being used as a very thin pretext here to call in the National Guard. That's, that's what's happening here.
23:55 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
23:56 Michael Liroff? So Gavin Newsom in the state of California sue because they say like, that's our National Guard. What the fuck do you think you're doing? You can't, you can't do that. It gets before Judge Charles Breyer, brother of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
24:16 Michael Liroff? Pod favorite.
24:19 Michael Liroff? And Breyer enters a temporary restraining order, returning control of the National Guard to the state of California, saying that essentially Trump exceeded his authority and that his determination that there was a rebellion was likely to be unsuccessful or like found, you know, wanting legally and that the balance of interests and equities favor California, et cetera, et cetera. The Ninth Circuit stayed that injunction, so essentially then returned control back to the federal government.
24:58 Michael Liroff? They said that the federal government's actually owed a lot of deference on what constitutes rebellion. The panel was two Trump appointees and one, I think Biden appointee. That has been then called for rehearing en banc by the full Ninth Circuit. Question that is currently being briefed by the parties and considered by the Ninth Circuit. While the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel, the three judges are moving on to the actual merits of the injunction, rather than just the initial stay pending appeal. While in turn, the district court is moving forward with the trial on whether or not this is, this is all legal.
25:43 Michael Liroff? So it's, there's three different. Cases happening at once around this. There is the trial set for August 11th about whether this is legal. There is an appeal about a temporary restraining order slash injunction pending the trial. And then there's an en banc hearing with the full Ninth Circuit, possibly about the Ninth Circuit panel's decision to return control of the National Guard to the federal government pending appeal. That's the goods on the National Guard. So currently, the federal government has it. That could change at any time. And the trial for that will start
26:27 Michael Liroff? probably just a week after this episode.
26:29 Speaker 00 This feels like a good time for a break.
26:32 Michael Liroff? And we're back.
26:34 Peter Shamshiri? This is one of those interesting things where I feel like if you were on the left and appropriately cynical last year, you might have said, you know, Donald Trump plans to deploy the military domestically, right? He talks about it. He is clearly interested in doing this.
26:49 Michael Liroff? He wanted to do it last term and was upset that he didn't.
26:52 Peter Shamshiri? Right. The response to that was either total silence from the media, not interested in talking about that, or a lot of people who would say, well, you know, not really. There are legal constraints here.
27:04 Michael Liroff? The Posse Comitatus Act, blah, blah, blah.
27:06 Peter Shamshiri? Right. There are federalism concerns. There's all this stuff that might prevent him from doing this. All of that gave way very quickly. There's a little bit of violence in LA. Not nothing, but not a ton either. And that was enough. That was enough for a court to be like, all right, he can take the California National Guard.
27:20 Michael Liroff? Yeah.
27:21 Peter Shamshiri? So I don't know, just another sort of like institutional barrier that just just withered into nothing immediately.
27:27 Speaker 00 Yeah. And also, I think we should like get into like the militarization of immigration enforcement itself, which is the Trump administration incorporating the use of the military to not just You know, quote unquote, respond to riots in LA, but to effectuate ICE detentions, ICE raids to support in that and expanding the detention capacity of the federal government with regard to immigrants. So back in May, DHS asked for 20,000 National Guard members to assist ICE in like day to day operations, night raids, quote unquote rural interdictions.
28:09 Speaker 00 They were asking National Guard members to start guarding ICE detention facilities and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, obviously approved a lot of National Guard members already to assist in states like Florida, Louisiana, Texas. And back just a week ago, I think this NPR report quoted a US official speaking on condition of anonymity, saying that hundreds more National Guards troops are expected to be called up to assist in immigration operations, ICE operations in Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. And then the expansion of military bases.
28:52 Speaker 00 The Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, approved DHS making moves to expand military bases, to use military bases, two of them, one in New Jersey and one in Indiana, to do immigration detention, to be an immigration detention facility. It is proposed that 1,000 people at each of those military bases can be detained in addition to a proposal to double the capacity for immigration detention at Guantanamo. That would bring up immigration detention at Guantanamo Bay to 400 people. And again, in that same NPR report, NPR reported that DHS currently has 57,000 people in ICE detention and only 41,000 beds.
29:37 Speaker 00 So, you know, with this like militarization thing, the incorporation of the military against Our civilian population.
29:45 Peter Shamshiri? You're almost seeing this conceptual collapse between immigration and military concerns on the right.
29:53 Speaker 00 Yes.
29:53 Peter Shamshiri? Where you have like an executive order saying, hey, we're being invaded by a Venezuelan gang, using military language to describe immigration, right? And that allows for them to call upon military resources. Very sort of like classic fascist and pseudo fascist politics where they are, you know, clamoring to utilize the military. As much as Trump talks about the frivolousness of foreign wars and wanting to wind down foreign wars, there's still this unquenchable appetite on the right to utilize the military, to do violence.
30:32 Peter Shamshiri? And so you see a lot of the animus that was once targeted towards Afghanistan and Iraq just directed at immigrants domestically, and they call upon the same military resources to respond.
30:47 Michael Liroff? Yeah. And to that point, according to a report from The Intercept, a third of the entire southern border is now fully militarized in the form of four what are called national defense areas, or NDAs for short. Each NDA extends from a pre-existing military base and is, you know, a few hundred to several hundred miles of terrain that the military patrols for migrants to detain and then hold and hand over to ICE. The West Texas NDA, which is around El Paso, is an extension of Fort Bliss, the Army's
31:31 Michael Liroff? Fort Bliss, which is also where they are currently, at the time of this recording, accepting bids to build a camp that will hold up to, I think, 30,000 migrants, the last time I checked. These NDAs and other enforcement actions have, by some estimates, deployed over 20,000 troops domestically. So 20,000 troops in addition to the troops in LA, in addition to, as we've mentioned in previous episodes, the military conducting some of the flights
32:09 Michael Liroff? to Cote, to El Salvador. So involved in the actual deportation process itself. To that end, you know, they also are discussing deploying 2,000 military personnel to ICE bases to help staff those bases. And Florida has proposed deputizing their National Guard Judge Advocate Generals to be immigration judges.
32:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, these are JAG officers. I'm sure some listeners have heard of this, but basically, Trump, just a week or two ago, like, gave the green light to Governor DeSantis in Florida to deputize JAG officers in the National Guard to serve as immigration judges at the detention facility in that fucked up Everglades detention facility plan, right? JAG officers, they typically represent members of the armed forces in military legal matters. These are lawyers in the military for military legal issues.
33:12 Michael Liroff? Yeah, they prosecute court marshals, they are defense counsel and court marshals, they're judges and court marshals, they advise their seniors on the legality of certain things.
33:23 Peter Shamshiri? Right. There's like one really weird person at each law school who's going to be a JAG lawyer.
33:28 Speaker 00 Yes, who says, "I'm going to be a JAG lawyer." That's right. And now, importantly, we have not said that they act as immigration judges. There really is no precedent for this, for the use of JAG officers. To act as immigration judges in immigration court, it's plainly illegal based on multiple federal laws that bar federal troops, that bar the military from civilian law enforcement or executing civilian laws, right? So in general, like federal troops cannot, according to the law, they can't run courts, not civilian courts, which is what immigration courts are for civilians.
34:07 Peter Shamshiri? Not to mention that, just like on a practical level, they have no understanding of immigration law beyond what you or I have.
34:13 Michael Liroff? It's wildly complex.
34:14 Peter Shamshiri? Forget expertise. They don't have any pre-existing knowledge of it, period.
34:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, and so this law professor, who is actually former Air Force JAG, said in this report, oh, I recommending, and maybe we can put some links to the articles that we're referencing in the show notes, but really recommending that listeners go read a report in Mother Jones by Samantha Michaels from July 9. It's called Experts Question the Legality of Deploying National Guard Officers as Immigration Judges. She really goes into very accessible detail about like the legality, actually illegality, of using JAG officers in this way. But she interviews this law professor, who is former Air Force JAG, who says, quote, "The use of military courts to hear civilian cases is the essential component of martial law."
35:04 Speaker 00 Right? If you are using federal troops, JAG, in this case, JAG officers, to do civilian cases, to run them, to adjudicate them, right? That's what martial law is. That's the military doing the law.
35:19 Peter Shamshiri? Right, not martial law in some sort of like abstract way where like they're, oh, they're, they're really cracking down on protests. It's like martial law, but like martial law in like the literal, technical sense.
35:30 Michael Liroff? Right.
35:30 Speaker 00 Yes, yes, in the legal sense, yeah.
35:32 Michael Liroff? Like you could be detained by a troop and put before a troop who will decide whether you get to stay in the country.
35:40 Peter Shamshiri? If you knew the girl who was going to do JAG at my law school, the idea of being judged by her. My god.
35:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, so again, this is the immigration removal machine at work gaining steam, processing more and more cases, more and more bodies. And the Trump administration, what you see here is incorporating the military into these operations to expand that machine's capacity.
36:07 Michael Liroff? Right, and it's worth noting that in that same plan, the plan that the state of Florida submitted to the Trump administration suggesting the JAGS, they also said that they have identified several more locations that could serve as new camps in addition to the one in the Everglades. I won't be calling it its stupid name because I think it's base and disgusting. But the Everglades detention facility holds 5,000 people. They claim that, you know, in the span of like two to three days, three to four days each, they could set up several more 10,000 person detention centers.
36:48 Michael Liroff? They claim that they can do it in accordance with ICE's minimum standards for detention facilities, but urge the administration to relax those because, you know, why meet those if you don't have to? They also want to deputize all 47,000 state law enforcement officers to conduct immigration enforcement. So, yeah, I think that's a good, good way to transition to what I want to talk about next, which is, you know, there is this political scientist in the early 1900s named Ernst
37:28 Michael Liroff? Frankel, German Jew who fled Nazi Germany in the late 30s, social democrat, all around good guy by most accounts that I've read. He wrote an important book on the structure of the Nazi state, which he called the dual state. The terms he used, which I'm not going to use because I think they're maybe a little too overly academic, but are the normative state and the prerogative state. The normative state is the one governed by laws. It's what you see when you watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, right? Everybody follows the rules, justice prevails, you have rights.
38:11 Michael Liroff? The prerogative state, on the other hand, you are subject to arbitrary violence. The state can do whatever it wants to you. It is what you read about when you read about the Warsaw Ghetto. It is what you see when you go to the Holocaust Museum. And the idea is that these exist in parallel. You're in one state, but you can fall into the other at any time. The numbers in the Holocaust are, I think, really good illustration that like so many people died, millions of people died, but in their early 30s, the population of Germany was something like 65 million people. So especially early on, the fraction of people
38:54 Michael Liroff? subject to this lower standard, the prerogative state, this lawless track in the dual track system was very small. And for everybody else, life went on normally. They went to work, they did their thing. And, you know, they maybe read a report that something bad was happening, but they didn't think much of it. And that's what's being built right now. That is how to think about what we're discussing here. The militarization of domestic law enforcement, the building of camps, the deputizing of local law enforcement and JAGs,
39:36 Michael Liroff? the extreme abuses of ICE and the lowering of standards and the suspension of due process. All of that is the creation of this prerogative state. I said I wasn't going to use this term, but I can't help it. And it's small right now.
39:52 Speaker 00 Gaza's small.
39:53 Michael Liroff? Yeah. The borders don't feel porous. I think most people who listen to this probably don't feel like they're in serious risk of being rounded up by ICE in the next week. But, you know. The first camp in Nazi Germany was established two or three months in, and the final solution wasn't adopted for 11 years, right? And in between were a thousand, 5,000 tiny little steps, getting you from that first point to that last point. And we are well past that first point here. And the steps are being taken like over and over and over.
40:36 Michael Liroff? And the only question is how big the prerogative state gets? And how porous the borders are between the two? Before everybody starts being a little uncertain when they see a Humvee fucking rolling down the street, right? When they see someone in fatigues, where you decide, maybe you're not just gonna go out today because you heard that there are troops in downtown. Maybe you're not gonna vote in this election because you heard there are gonna be troops at the polling stations. Where we are now to there is not nearly as far as you think.
41:13 Peter Shamshiri? Right. I think it's worth noting that for decades now, people have been talking about the militarization of police. And this is its natural endpoint. There's been a broad political consensus for decades to provide exorbitant funding to police at every level of government. State and local police budgets have been ballooning for at least 50 years. Federal military budgets have also ballooned, which is relevant because, one, you can call upon those forces to do domestic policing like we're seeing now. And two, state and local police have access to surplus military equipment and have for about 35 years now, which is a big part of why so many local police
41:57 Peter Shamshiri? have fucking armored trucks and assault rifles and tactical gear and shit, right? Their day to day jobs are almost entirely responding to minor disputes and concerns. Occasionally more serious issues involving violence, but that's very rare for police. It's a relatively safe job. So why the fuck do they need armored trucks and assault rifles, right? The only possible use for it is to quell mass unrest, to turn those guns on popular movements. And It feels like it was always headed here. And it reflects this sort of like two-pronged approach where the military starts to look more like police and police start to look more like the military.
42:41 Peter Shamshiri? And we've seen police start to look more like the military for many, many years. And if I could add to that, the standard politically moderate Democratic Party line on police has always been like, yeah, we might need some reform, but policing is essential and we need to make sure it's well-funded, right? And people like policing, so if we don't fund it, we're going to make people angry and they're going to move away from the Democratic Party. I think that calculus is wrong as a matter of public safety. I don't think police budgets make us safer, but even if you assume that it was correct, what it fails to consider is that police are a right-wing political entity. The median police officer, and I'm using police broadly because it applies to ICE 2.
43:25 Peter Shamshiri? The median police officer and the median police department are well to the right of the median citizen. And so what you've done now, over time, is fund a right-wing political operation with public funds. Not only do they have powerful unions and other like independent organizations that can pull politics to the right on behalf of police, but they are now both capable and willing to be a Gestapo force for right-wing authoritarians. That is what you have created by capitulating to police over the last 50 years.
43:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, and in terms of the public safety question, you know, like, police, you know, like, let's, we can call them like law enforcement agents at whatever level, including ICE. And to be honest, including when troops are used domestically against civilians, like, they're all, we'll call them all fucking cops for this conversation, right? But especially in this question or this issue of the militarization, especially of local police forces, on the public safety question, who is more safe? Because the police have a tank. Like, you have to think, like, what, what purpose would there be?
44:37 Speaker 00 And who does it make safe that bum fuck wherever police department has a tank, has helicopters, has helicopters from which weapons can be deployed? Who, uh, like, like actually for a domestic police force, rural, urban, whatever, you know, what are these weapons for? Who would they be used against? This is also like the militarization of a law enforcement body against who? Against civilians. It's against us that they're given all of these weapons and all of this discretion and all of this power for violence, you know? And so the question of like public safety and, oh, they're here to keep us safe.
45:21 Speaker 00 And frankly, yeah, the National Guard is here to stop riots from happening so that people don't get hurt, whatever it is. I mean, this is, it's on its face inaccurate. It's on its face, actually a lie.
45:34 Peter Shamshiri? It inherently excludes a portion of the population and they get to choose what that portion is.
45:40 Speaker 00 Yes, exactly. Right. A portion of the population for whom these weapons and this militarization is going to be targeted.
45:48 Michael Liroff? I think this is a problem of, of sort of a one way ratchet with Democrats where, and there's political science, actually recent political science backing this up, that when you adopt like the opposing party's frames on something like crime or immigration.
46:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
46:05 Michael Liroff? All it does is convince the voting public that they're right about the problem and therefore probably right about the solution. And it just pulls the debate to the right. Democrats haven't really reaped any electoral benefits for moving right on immigration, for moving right on crime. They're still like battling, you know, Obama was the deporter in chief and Biden deported even more than him.
46:33 Speaker 00 Right. And Kamala said she would be worse than Trump on immigration, harsher than Trump.
46:38 Michael Liroff? Right.
46:38 Peter Shamshiri? Right. Like, I know this has been rehashed, but like. And what do they say about them? That they support open borders.
46:44 Michael Liroff? Yeah, exactly.
46:45 Speaker 00 Yeah.
46:46 Peter Shamshiri? You're not getting any political benefit.
46:48 Speaker 00 Right.
46:48 Peter Shamshiri? The people who want more immigration hate you because they tend to know that you are inhibiting it. And the people who don't hate you because they don't know what you're doing. They don't know that you're actually deporting people. They're taking their cues from the right.
47:05 Michael Liroff? Yeah, so it's not a political necessity, right?
47:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
47:10 Michael Liroff? This was not a fait accompli. We did not have to arrive at this situation. It was the combination of a number of decisions by a lot of people in media, in both parties, among business elites, to just basically demagogue vulnerable groups for political points. And, and now here we are where you have to literally be seriously discussing the timeline of Nazi Germany to understand where we are. Because nobody's had the fucking balls to stand up and just be like, actually, New York City is wildly safe.
47:54 Michael Liroff? Crime is at a historic lows and it's much safer than living in rural North Carolina by the numbers.
48:01 Peter Shamshiri? And also, you're a pussy, which should be our message. It should be, our message should be, you're a pussy. You're a fucking coward.
48:07 Michael Liroff? Yeah, fucking nut up, you loser, you baby. Immigration is good. The fucking thing on the Statue of Liberty says, give us your tired and your poor and your hungry, because we welcome immigrants. It makes us strong. It makes us great. 25 years of being afraid to say those things, longer on crime.
48:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is kind of the abysmal state of affairs that our political leaders, elected officials have put us in. But there is hope. We talked a little bit about the legal fight against what happened in LA, for example. And there are many such cases, many such important lawsuits being filed, many such legal fights happening right now across the country, which are important. And then a good reminder, though. That like the law is one tool. We have that tool, that weapon to wield to fight for our causes and like fight for our humanity. And there are other tools too. And you saw this in Los Angeles as well. So I'm talking about things like community defense.
49:07 Speaker 00 So in Los Angeles, when these raids started, a massive coalition of immigrant rights and immigration justice organizations primarily came together and started to really kind of operationalize and teach and facilitate and support community defense efforts against these raids and against this ICE violence in their communities. So what you saw was tons of people getting trained on how to observe, do essentially like ICE watch? Like how to identify like, oh, actually that's an ICE vehicle in my neighborhood or outside my workplace. What to note down, what to observe, starting hotlines and community forums where that information can be shared.
49:52 Speaker 00 Training people on rapid response. If ICE is raiding a workplace, a home, you know, what have you. Having teams who can show up and protect community members, training people on DRS even, training people on confronting militarized law enforcement in the streets of your community. You know, and I think people probably saw lots of really inspiring videos of community members, regular people. These are regular people. These are people not with some sort of like background and special skill set other than like a belief in humanity and dignity, right? Regular people protecting their neighbors, their community members
50:31 Speaker 00 from these ICE raids, you know, wielding knowledge and power in numbers, saying, no, you have to identify yourself. You have not identified yourself and so you cannot take this person. Saying, no, we're just going to be in a circle around this person or this family or around this business and you can't get around us. Or literally, right? Like confronting with lots of different tactics. Those agents, especially I saw a lot of videos of like shit getting thrown at their cars and then like running away like fucking pussies.
51:05 Michael Liroff? They made me so happy. They're such fucking cowards.
51:08 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah. So this community defense, the tactics, the weapons that are at our disposal, the tools that are at our disposal are very great and very powerful. And you know, we're not just stuck with filing lawsuits.
51:20 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. It was interesting to watch in LA because it was so organic, right? These weren't like activists who were going down to meet ICE and they all had prior training necessarily, right? This is sort of like the community learning on the fly how to shut down ICE. It was, it was interesting to watch from that perspective. This is like a tangent, but it is really fascinating to me how like as police have militarized, they appear to be more cowardly than ever before.
51:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:49 Peter Shamshiri? Like watching ICE just get chased out when they have actual armored trucks.
51:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:55 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. And like assault rifles and shit. I don't want to make our listeners think that like instigating violence against ICE or any other police like will result in them retreating necessarily, right? That's, that's not advice that we're giving here on five to four. They are incredibly violent and have the backing of the state if they choose to go down that road. But I just think it's almost like psychologically fascinating that they are so cowardly like.
52:22 Speaker 00 What losers they are. Yeah.
52:24 Peter Shamshiri? We were talking about the growth of police budgets and their access to military surplus and the way that they sort of present themselves as deserving of those budgets, but also our respect because they put themselves in danger. And yet they do not. They, they actively choose to avoid danger very consistently. Uvalde is, you know, the classic example and everyone knows about it, but it remains the best example because if they won't put themselves at risk to protect children.
52:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
52:53 Peter Shamshiri? From being murdered.
52:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
52:54 Peter Shamshiri? Then obviously they are not going to put themselves at risk for the community, period.
52:58 Speaker 00 Right, right. The violence they're trained to do, actually, the violence they know how to do is actually to be wielded on the community and against the community. And actually they don't fucking know how to keep us safe. It's not actually something they're trained for. So the police have armored vehicles, but you can't trust or rely on them to protect your child from being shot at school. So again, it just goes back to what are those tools for then?
53:26 Peter Shamshiri? Right. Or even, and even to, you know, to solve a murder, right? I mean, like their clearance rates have gone down over the last several decades, even like just the sort of. Basic fundamentals of what you were taught that policing is
53:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:41 Peter Shamshiri? Have started to fade away.
53:42 Speaker 00 Right.
53:43 Peter Shamshiri? And instead, it's become a persistent show of force in every community across the country on behalf of the state to some degree, but also on behalf of themselves.
53:57 Michael Liroff? Yeah. In a lot of places, they're just a gang.
54:00 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, they're just a just a state affiliated gang showing force in every city in the country. I think that's a better way to understand many police departments than as like a protector of your community.
54:13 Michael Liroff? That's why when I'm president, I'm going to use the Tren de la Agua precedent to declare Texas an enemy state.
54:20 Speaker 00 No.
54:21 Peter Shamshiri? And finally get Rhiannon out of here.
54:23 Speaker 00 No, that's me.
54:24 Michael Liroff? All of rural cops and associated gang and send them all to C. Goodbye.
54:28 Speaker 00 No.
54:30 Peter Shamshiri? Well, I will say, you know, when you look at like Project 2025, one of their big strategies was just identifying social and cultural and economic sources of liberal power and then attacking them with the force of the state.
54:45 Michael Liroff? Right.
54:45 Peter Shamshiri? That's why they're going after higher education. It would be wise for Democrats to, at the very least, understand police at the state, local and federal level as a political opponent.
54:59 Michael Liroff? Yes.
54:59 Peter Shamshiri? Rather than something that could be brought into the fold or cozied up to in some way, because they are your political opponents in practice. And it might be harder to go at them than it is to go at Harvard or something, but you still need to understand that they are your political enemy.
55:19 Peter Shamshiri? All right, folks, next week, McMahon v. New York, shadow docket case from just a couple of weeks ago about the hollowing out of the Department of Education.
55:27 Speaker 00 Bye bye, Department of Ed.
55:29 Peter Shamshiri? I know that you guys all liked getting educated, but you can't do it anymore. Unless you're listening to Five to Four.
55:36 Michael Liroff? That's right.
55:37 Peter Shamshiri? Follow us on social media at 54pod. Thank you for subscribing to our Patreon. You are our true and loyal friends. It is not parasocial. I've said it before. I will continue to say it.
55:49 Speaker 00 That's true.
55:49 Peter Shamshiri? Thank you for supporting us. Rhiannon, of course, needs your help.
55:53 Speaker 00 That's right.
55:53 Peter Shamshiri? Because without the Department of Education, it is likely that she will lose loan forgiveness. And then she will have to pay back, what I last heard, is $2.5 million in student loans.
56:02 Speaker 00 Not quite, but it feels like it. Might as well be.
56:06 Peter Shamshiri? Don't worry, we're gonna get you there.
56:10 Peter Shamshiri? All right, folks, if you haven't bought our new merch, 54pod.com/merch, it's good.
56:16 Speaker 00 Check it out.
56:17 Peter Shamshiri? We'll see you next week.
56:18 Speaker 00 Bye.
56:19 Michael Liroff? Bye, everybody.
56:31 Michael Liroff? Five to Four is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Nefok provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. If you're not a Patreon member, you're not hearing every episode. To get exclusive Patreon-only episodes, discounts on merch, access to our Slack community, and more, join at patreon.com/54pod.
57:09 Peter Shamshiri? This is my hot take about Sydney Sweeney is like, I, like, the, the level of controversies that surrounds her is something that befits the hottest person in the world. And I'm not saying she's not hot. I'm just saying I'm not seeing all that.
57:23 Michael Liroff? Disagree. Disagree.
57:25 Peter Shamshiri? You know what? Put that in the episode. I want people to hear this.
Previous Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton Next McMahon v. New York Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated