One day before the Trump administration deployed U.S. Marines to confront protesters in Los Angeles, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to direct the military to detain or arrest “lawbreakers,” a move one expert called “a grave escalation.” 

A letter sent Sunday from Noem to Hegseth, obtained by the Chronicle, requested that the Pentagon give “Direction to DoD forces to either detain, just as they would at any federal facility guarded by military, lawbreakers under Title 18 until they can be arrested and processed by federal law enforcement, or arrest them.” The military is generally barred under federal laws from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Granting Noem’s request would likely require the administration to sidestep those laws by invoking the Insurrection Act, two legal experts said in interviews. 

State Sen. Tom Umberg, a retired Army colonel and judge advocate general officer, said he found the letter’s requests alarming. “It looks like a preparation for a military assault,” said Umberg, D-Santa Ana. “This looks like a subterfuge to create some sort of rationale for some sort of invocation of the Insurrection Act.” Umberg said he was concerned that the letter did not explicitly say people should only be arrested or detained based on reasonable suspicion or probable cause. It would be false imprisonment to detain someone unless those conditions are met, which is a crime, he said. “As a former federal prosecutor and former JAG officer, I find it to be outrageous that two Cabinet secretaries are basically attempting to provoke a situation where both law enforcement as well as other individuals could be hurt,” Umberg said.

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