LA's nullification crisis
Violence results when elected officials pretend the federal government cannot enforce federal law in progressive jurisdictions
Over the past week, President Trump has used our city as a staging ground to further his political agenda, igniting his base to cause further divisiveness. Mr. President, federal agencies should never be used as your own personal army.
- Portland, Oregon Mayor Ted Wheeler, August 17, 2020
This morning, we received reports of federal immigration enforcement actions in multiple locations in Los Angeles. As Mayor of a proud city of immigrants, who contribute to our city in so many ways, I am deeply angered by what has taken place. These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city. My Office is in close coordination with immigrant rights community organizations. We will not stand for this.”
- Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, June 6, 2025
The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles — not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.
Don’t give them one.
Never use violence. Speak out peacefully.
- California Governor Gavin Newsom, June 7, 2025
Los Angeles is the latest flashpoint in progressive west coast jurisdictions’ efforts to nullify federal laws with which they disagree. LA’s and California’s elected Democrats, and the rioters that occupied some of the city’s streets Saturday, share a belief federal immigration law does not apply there and efforts to enforce it are illegitimate.
Friday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted raids throughout the city to apprehend people suspected of being in the country illegally. Rioters took to the street, pelting the agents with rocks, starting fires, and in some cases brandishing Mexican flags.
President Trump responded by federalizing around 2,000 California National Guardsmen to help protect ICE agents and facilities in Los Angeles. In doing so, Trump relied on a federal statute allowing the president to “call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State” to suppress “a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” or “when the President is unable with regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Trump of wanting to cause a “spectacle,” while urging others opposed to the enforcement by the federal government of federal law to “Never use violence. Speak out peacefully.”
The violence, property destruction and local, state and federal responses thereto echo Portland, Oregon in the summer of 2020. There, after rioters besieged, vandalized and attempted to enter unlawfully the downtown Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse for 50 days, Trump sent federal agents to protect the beseiged federal property. Local and state elected Democrats attacked the move as unneccessary and inflammatory.
It is tautological yet, apparently, neccessary to state it is illegal to be in the country illegally, even in Los Angeles. It is illegal to damage federal property, even in Portland. It is illegal to assault, resist impede or interfere with a federal agent while engaged in official duties. It is the purview of the federal government to enforce federal laws, and to detain for adjudication those who break them.
The LA rioters in 2025, the Portland rioters in 2020 and the elected Democrats - they’re all Democrats - who represent those rioters believe the federal government has no right to enforce its laws, or protect its agents trying to enforce those laws. California officials insist local law enforcement under their control are capable of keeping the peace without further federal involvement.
Recent history suggests they’re wrong, but the claim is beside the point. The issue is not whether LA can keep the peace, but whether LA can and will protect federal personnel and property engaged in enforcement of federal immigration law which LA’s mayor says “sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city.” It won’t. Besides, LA’s and California’s sanctuary laws generally prohibit local law enforcement from assisting federal agents from enforcing federal immigration law. So, LA can’t help ICE.
The result of the Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom reasoning is, then, that the federal government simply cannot enforce immigration laws in LA if that enforcement encounters violent opposition, which opposition is rhetorically supported by Bass and Newsom, that impedes it. That’s de facto nullification of settled, longstanding federal law.
In Portland in 2020, Trump eventually removed the federal agents protecting the courthouse when Oregon’s then-Governor Kate Brown promised to send state police to take their place: but for the deployment of federal agents, local and state officials would have continued to tolerate the courthouse seige and attendant property damage because those officials largely agreed the federal judiciary, represented by the courthouse, was racist.
The same dynamic exists in LA in 2025, with resisting immigration enforcement rather than a generalized race-fueled hatred of the federal judiciary the common purpose between rioters and elected Democrats. Unlike the Portland example, however, it’s unlikely Newsom can use state police, or Bass use local cops, to protect ICE, because of the sanctuary laws Newsom and Bass celebrate.
What we are witnessing in LA is the culmination of the long-festering belief that federal law does not apply in the city, and that enforcement of federal law is unjust.
States have attempted to nullify federal law in the past, on issues from tariffs to secession to defense of state-mandated racial discrimination (they’re doing that again, too). Each time the United States has faced a nullification crisis, a demonstration of federal force was required to end it.
It is not far-fetched to look at history and that half a century ago, Presidents from Eisenhower to LBJ had to use federal officers to enforce laws that southern states refused to honor - equal rights for minority students, and the insistence of racist state governments that "state's rights" prevailed.
Now some states that are fully in thrall to leftists politics claim "independent state grounds" for interpreting their states' constitutions as usurping the federal constitution. They can get way with it when states like Oregon decide that identical wording gives the state supreme court the authority to reject practices like drunk driving roadblocks that the US Supreme Court has said meet constitutional muster.
While cloaking themselves with self--endowed moral authority, the Governors of Oregon and California have no more right to violate federal law than did George Wallace or Orval Faubus. Immigration laws are - properly - the province of the federal, not local, government, and while America is indeed a nation of immigrants, that needs many of the hard-working people seeking a better life in America, that does not mean this nation should be alone in the world by offering "open borders."
When I was DA in Astoria I was struck to learn that Canadian border police routinely turned away Americans who had recently earned a DUII conviction. I remember being quizzed by immigration officials in Britain about the length of my stay, what my source of income was, and proof that I had a ticket OUT of the UK when my trip was completed!
I find it rather ironic that that the party espousing DEMOCRACY is the one trying to destroy it. if you don't like the law of the land change it, but DEMOCRACY means that the will of the majority should prevail.