(Washington, D.C., 6/12/2025)- The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s umbrella group of Muslim associations, cautions Congress and state political and law enforcement leaders to exercise supreme vigilance in their primary duty of safeguarding all people in their jurisdictions. The Council specifically urges federal and state representatives to check presidential excesses now threatening to trammel the most important safeguards and freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and state law to all who live in this nation.
Two days ago, President Trump nationalized California’s National Guard unit (bypassing California Governor Gavin Newsome’s “required” prior authorization) and deployed them to quell protests in Los Angeles that erupted against a blitzkrieg of mass-arrest operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) there.
When Newsome announced the California’s suit challenging the legality of Trump’s action yesterday, Trump alarmingly responded by ordering the deployment to Los Angeles of 700 U.S. Marines. Yes, those Marines, the crack combat-forward shock force historically positioned in overseas battle zones by the U.S. Navy. The Pentagon stated vaguely and ominously that the Marine battalion’s mission was to “provide continuous coverage of the area in support of the lead federal agency,” meaning ICE.
Trump then immediately followed his Marine deployment order with a presidential memo to double the National Guard presence in Los Angeles with an additional 2,000 troops.
Both Trump’s U.S. Marine and National Guard deployments if not already are certainly poised to violate the all-important Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which generally prohibits a president or the federal government from using the U.S. military against its own people for domestic enforcement, except under certain extreme exceptions, like an insurrection (which must be legally invoked).
USCMO Secretary General Oussama Jammal said today in a statement:
“This degree of escalation by the president’s actions is unprecedented, unwarranted, unjustifiable, and fraught with alarm and danger. We are talking about deploying the U.S. military’s most elite fighting branch against its own people, against Americans.
“Congress and all our federal and state representatives need to set aside their partisan politics and realize that something direly threatening to our democracy is happening here.
“The president is deliberately seeking to instill fear and terror in the hearts of the American people. He is showing dismissive contempt for the Constitution. He is actively seeking to fan a relatively minor, localized protest into a flaming national crisis. Why? Because it gives him a pretext to arrogate to himself the unchecked authority of a monarch.
“That political quake you feel rumbling under your feet, that’s the legal and egalitarian foundations of this republic being shook. Our leadership and ‘we the people’ together must secure that foundation’s proper balance right now. We do this by firmly invoking the available checks on our executive branch of government to preserve our nation’s integrity.
USCMO strongly urges members of Congress and the judiciary at every level, along with the institutions that represent the American people, to do their elected, appointed, and express duty and properly check the powers of the president and the executive branch now before we no longer can.
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