Opposition to garrisoning soldiers in civilian towns was a cornerstone of the American Revolution as well as an essential element of the American civic tradition. The Boston Massacre was a key accelerating event in the build-up to the American Revolution. The 3rd Amendment bans the quartering of soldier in homes except under specific and limited circumstances. I’ve written a number of times about how when it comes to this part of the American civic tradition we’re much too literal today about what constitutes an army or soldiers. Let me say a bit more about that.
Today we tend to think of two groups who wield legitimate violence on behalf of the state: police and soldiers. Police deal with citizens and law and order, while soldiers go to war. But policing organizations and other civilian paramilitaries are a very modern invention. They go back around two centuries and most of their history goes back less than 150 years. Those include metropolitan police departments as well as organizations like the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and various others.
In other words, it’s anachronistic to think that ICE or CBP don’t count as soldiers for the purposes of these civic traditions because the distinction between soldiers and police didn’t exist at the time. British troops were first sent to Boston to back British officials who had been sent to enforce unpopular mercantilist laws parliament had passed in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. Those laws and officials and soldiers were there to claw back the fairly robust level of de facto local self-government the colonists enjoyed. Britain had begun trying to exert direct royal control over the colonies a century earlier, in the late 17th century. But for various reasons those efforts never fully got off the ground. British authority in North America remained thin on the ground and largely managed by colonial elites. That began to change in earnest in the 1760s, in part because of the costs of the Seven Years War and the need to pay to secure new territories in North America but also because of rapidly changing ideas about what role colonies should play in building the power of the imperial center — in this case, Britain.
Soldiers were garrisoned in Boston to overawe the local population and compel obedience to unpopular laws. The colonists came to believe that those laws deprived them of their rights and constitutional liberties, which was essentially a right to local self-government. The soldiers sent to garrison Boston were outsiders in the very literal sense that they were soldiers from Britain and not recruited from the local population. And they acted that way. Soldiers in this era were very poorly disciplined. At the most basic level, these were armed formations of outsiders sent to dominate the local population and compel obedience to outside authority. The view of the colonists was always that they weren’t subjects of conquest to be ruled by violence but Englishmen no different from those living in the home country.
There is simply no meaningful sense in which ICE and CBP are any different from soldiers in the context of this history. The fact that we categorize them as a civilian policing force is irrelevant, a distinction that, again, didn’t even exist at the time. ICE and CBP tell their own story most clearly in their bearing and their garb. They dress quite literally like soldiers. You’d have a hard time telling them apart from the U.S. soldiers patrolling and mounting raids in Baghdad twenty years ago. What the White House is doing with ICE and CBP is no different from what it has tried to do with the National Guard and regular military and may do again. (Ironically, the U.S. military is less threatening and dangerous since it’s highly trained and disciplined and operates under a robust body of laws.)
In the 18th century, soldiers only preyed on civilian populations. The nature of their discipline and composition meant that nothing else was really possible. Garrisoning a town with soldiers meant being preyed upon and menaced, deprived of liberties both by the imposition of outside laws and taxes but also of the dignity of not being treated like prizes of conquest or slaves. The citizens of Minneapolis didn’t lose their rights as free citizens because of the result of the 2024 election just because Donald Trump thinks they did. That is the question now being settled in a standoff between the citizens of the city and the thuggish gangs Trump has sent there.
Many of us still struggle to break free of the last vestiges of the pretext that ICE and CBP are in Minneapolis and other cities to enforce immigration law, even if it’s a method of enforcement we find abhorrent. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s letter, which came immediately after Alex Pretti was fatally shot by a federal agent, makes vividly clear that the real and present purpose of these occupations is to compel opposition states — Free States if you will — through the imposition of violence, to surrender their sovereignty and their right to local self-government to brutal outside rule which treats them as a conquered people. We’ve known this. But Bondi’s letter gives us the benefit of total clarity. Minnesota can free itself of ICE/CBP if it gives up its rights to self rule by handing over its voter files and right to control its local police departments. Draconian immigration enforcement is at best a convenient additional benefit to the pretext through which the White House has imposed an occupation of a peaceful civilian city.
ICE and CBP, now operating as a masked secret police using the protocols of international borders as an end-run around the 4th Amendment, are in Minneapolis to overawe the local population and spark chaos to justify greater acts of violence. But Americans who disagree with the policies of the current administration aren’t a conquered people. The 2024 election doesn’t change that. Donald Trump and his minions, with their degenerate and alien values, want to impose a new vision and machinery of American government by force. When they start killing civilians through some mix of aggression and indiscipline, the local population gets understandably angry and restive. It’s tyrannical and wholly unconstitutional whatever a corrupt Supreme Court might say about it, and we shouldn’t expect a terribly different outcome from what happened more than 250 years ago.