A contextual reading of the powers granted to the DHS secretary in 40 U.S. Code § 1315 make clear the statute’s intended purpose — to allow DHS to surge law enforcement personnel to disaster zones or genuine civil unrest. It’s similar, in ways, to the Justice Department’s process of deputizing additional officers as temporary U.S. marshals during major events. (Ironically, it’s the latter process that Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson used to deputize earlier generations of Border Patrol agents to protect civil rights marchers in the 1950s and 1960s, yet even during the height of the civil rights movement, when presidents dispatched marshals, they usually did so only after careful behind-the-scenes negotiations with segregationist governors.)

Such powers are intended to be reserved for genuine emergencies; today, the Trump administration has invoked them for run of the mill political benefit. While protests have been unfolding for weeks, Portland residents — who for the most part are going about their daily lives as normal — have been baffled at the TV images, from one neighborhood, suggesting that their city is under violent siege.

The irony of such an abuse of power is that the lawmakers who created DHS — with concerns about creeping enforcement powers in mind — mostly carefully constrained the powers of its officers. These creators notably rejected creating an all-purpose domestic security agency, equivalent to the interior ministries of countries abroad, saying that the potential for civil liberty abuses outweighed the potential value. Instead, DHS’s main law enforcement personnel, the Border Patrol agents and Customs officers, were meant to be the federal equivalent of street cops, highly limited and focused in their enforcement powers.