NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh in New York, joined by Amy Goodman in Salt Lake City, Utah. Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Nermeen. And hello to all our viewers, listeners and readers around the country and around the world. I am joining you from Salt Lake City, Utah, from Spy Hop Youth Media Arts Center, where we’re participating in the annual conference, the 50th anniversary of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. Yes, this is Democracy Now!

An overnight curfew for downtown Los Angeles has been announced by Mayor Karen Bass following days of protest against federal immigration raids. Mayor Bass cited vandalism and looting of local businesses as the reason for the curfew.

President Trump has ordered the deployment of 700 Marines, who will be arriving in Los Angeles today to join thousands of members of the National Guard who have also been deployed to the city. Speaking at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, President Trump criticized the California governor and Los Angeles mayor, who opposed the deployments. Some of the troops in the audience booed at the mention of their names.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: In Los Angeles, the governor of California, the mayor of Los Angeles — 

AUDIENCE: Boo!

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — they’re incompetent. And they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists. They’re engaged in this willful attempt to nullify federal law and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders. That’s what it is. They’re invaders, no different.

AMY GOODMAN: Protests against militarized immigration enforcement have spread to other cities, like New York, Chicago and Atlanta. This weekend, on Saturday, under the banner of “No Kings Day,” at least 18,000 [sic] rallies have been organized nationwide, more and more joining every day. This coincides with a major military parade that will be taking place in the capital. Tanks and other armored vehicles are being transported to Washington, D.C., for the parade on June 14th, which is Donald Trump’s 79th birthday and the U.S. Army’s [250th] anniversary. On Tuesday, President Trump threatened heavy force would be used against anyone who protests at the parade.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And we’re going to be celebrating big on Saturday. We’re going to have a lot of — and if there’s any protest that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force, by the way. For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force. And I haven’t even heard about a protest, but, you know, this is people that hate our country. But they will be met with very heavy force.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Protest organizers are encouraging participants to go to Philadelphia instead of Washington, D.C.

For more on the latest news, the troop deployments and the planned rallies this weekend, we’re joined by two guests. Leah Greenberg is co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. The group is organizing the No Kings Day protests on June 14th. And JoJo Sweatt, a former Marine and the organizing director for the veterans group Common Defense, who will also be taking part in the No Kings Day protest planned in over 1,800 cities.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Leah Greenberg, if you could begin by explaining — your group, Indivisible, is organizing this protest, these mass protests across the country. Explain why.

LEAH GREENBERG: Well, when we heard and got the news that Donald Trump was planning this military parade, we understood it as part of a broader — a broader effort to project power, to chill dissent, to cement authoritarian control around this country, right? This is not just a parade. It’s part of a bigger campaign that is involved attacking state — or, attacking the power of states, attacking civil society, going after labor leaders like David Huerta, the president of SEIU in California, who was arrested while peacefully protesting ICE detentions or ICE kidnappings. What we’re seeing is a wholesale effort to assert dominance and power, from sending troops into L.A. completely unnecessarily and illegally to having this military parade in D.C. for his birthday.

And so, what we feel like in this moment is really important is for folks to understand he may have his fascist theatrics in D.C., but real power comes from people everywhere, all over the country. And so, that’s why we called for the No Kings protests. And what we’ve seen, we’ve got over 1,900 protests now all over the country. We are seeing a skyrocketing number of people who are showing up, who are asking, “What can I do?” who are horrified by what is happening in L.A. and who want to stand up. And what we’re going to show him on June 14th is that real power lies in the people, lies in the consent of the governed, not in a pageant for your birthday in Washington, D.C.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring JoJo Sweatt into this conversation, former Marine with the group Common Defense right now. First, I wanted to get your response to Marines being deployed to the streets of Los Angeles, at this point, what, 700 of them, though President Trump has now said that National Guard and Marines will be deployed around the country, and also get your response as a former Marine to what we’re calling this parade, but, in fact, it’s more than two dozen M1 Abrams tanks, each weighing more than 60 tons. This is why it’s costing something like tens of millions of dollars, this parade in Washington, to shore up the streets. The question is if they will be damaged by this heavy military hardware. They’re going to be going down Constitution Avenue near the White House in a procession that until recently was not part of the 250th anniversary of the Army’s programming, accompanied by scores of infantry, fighting vehicles, heavy artillery weaponry, plus some 6,600 soldiers, as helicopters fly overhead. So, if you could talk first about the Marine deployment, as a former Marine, and then about this massive show of force that people usually identify with heavily militarized societies, like, oh, military parades in North Korea?

JOJO SWEATT: First, thank you for having me.

And related to Marines and National Guard being deployed to L.A., I think it’s obviously a terrible idea, especially because it is not the idea of the leadership of the state to invite them to be there. Now, the National Guard has a function and works well within the states that it supports, but by the call and guidance of the governor there in the state, which hasn’t been completed. And so, it’s kind of an overstretch for the president of the United States to be involved in states’ affairs in that way when not requested.

The other factor about the Marine Corps is that it’s — that is not the purpose of our Marine Corps. That is not why the Marine Corps exists. And when I was a Marine, if I wasn’t in a combat or war scenario, then I was in a humanitarian scenario. And that’s when we’re, you know, fixing everything that we’ve destroyed and trying to rebuild, not things that we would want to do on U.S. soil. And it doesn’t make me feel good that it’s the president of the United States that is requesting this type of armed reaction on its citizens — that is, citizens that are actually practicing their rights that they have here in the United States.

As far as the parade, it’s an egregious overspend. It is a showing of his ego. It is also his birthday. It is not just the Army’s 250th year of service. It’s actually the Marine Corps’s birthday later on this year. So, we don’t have these individual parades or support of parades by the military to the president like you’ve seen in North Korea. We just went through two crazy quarters of this new administration, with them giving us DOGE, and on the pretense that we need to save money as a country and that we’re broke. And so, to say those things and enact DOGE and talk about cutting 83,000 jobs at the VA and Medicare and care for everyday Americans, but then to host this parade in Washington, D.C., where there’s not even really roads to support this, we’re spending an egregious amount of money. And for what? A birthday celebration that is completely unnecessary.

AMY GOODMAN: If you could talk more about the amount of money, for example, the $45 million? It started at $20 million, but now it’s gone up, as you point out, then, yet thousands of jobs have been lost through DOGE. If you could talk about the healthcare and cuts to veterans’ healthcare?

JOJO SWEATT: Yeah, these cuts to veterans’ healthcare are already showing up, actually, especially in rural communities or with veterans that are using specialty services, specifically for cancer treatment. We’re talking to those veterans already who are being affected, who are being denied care, who have lost their psychiatrist, their therapist on staff.

And so, spending — then turning around and spending that money in the face of America for a parade for a president does not seem like you really care. And we were in D.C. just the first week of May trying to interface and speak with Secretary Doug Collins, and, in fact, he actually ran from us when we asked him the question about cutting 83,000 jobs and then having a parade for the president. But a lot of these representatives don’t want to answer those questions, or they want to relate it to recruiting. And I don’t think that this is what recruiting dollars should be spent on.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: [inaudible] is working on is that of Black veteran Marlon Parris from Trinidad and Tobago, who was detained in Phoenix, Arizona, just days after Trump’s inauguration in January. This is his wife, Tanisha Hartwell-Parris.

TANISHA HARTWELL-PARRIS: I am having to visit my husband through a glass window. And I do not know when he’s coming home.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, could you tell us more about the case?

JOJO SWEATT: Yeah, I’m really close with the Parris family in Arizona. As you reported, Marlon was picked up several days after the Trump administration took office and after their immigration policies went into play. Although Marlon Parris had committed a crime, he served his sentence. He left that system and became a viable member of our society, you know, once he had adequate treatment, once he got access to his VA services after being deployed to war several times. And I want to stress that his crime was a nonviolent crime. The minute Trump became in office, Marlon Parris was leaving his home in his neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona, to go to work, and was just randomly targeted, picked up and detained, and has been detained since January 22nd.

His court date continues to be pushed out so that we can try to mitigate whatever is happening with his paperwork that’s causing all of this. There have been many missteps that have happened within his immigration process, but one thing that we know for sure is that he has a letter of no interest, which is a letter that you get when any situation comes up in your life where you’re eligible for deportation. So, he got that no-interest letter at the end of his court case and serving his time. In addition to that, his green card was renewed after that, in 2017, and it’s not even set to expire until 2027. But there was an error when he was coming back from vacation into the United States in 2023, I believe, and they confiscated his green card. And he’s been trying to reobtain his green card through legal representation since that happened. He was allowed reentry into the country, but they took away his documents. And in the fight to try to get those back, suddenly this man has been detained under the new administration, and we haven’t been able to rectify the situation. And he’s currently detained in Florence, and our next court date is in August.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could explain more fully, JoJo, about the number of people who go into the military hoping it will help them become U.S. citizens, and yet seeing that people are being deported after they have served in the U.S. military?

JOJO SWEATT: Yeah, it’s thousands. I was actually a recruiter during the time that we were recruiting for the forever wars, when I came back from that war. And so, I was a recruiter in Denver, Colorado, from late 2003 to 2006. We were giving away at that time, which was totally unprecedented for the Marine Corps, a two-year contract to join the United States military, because we were in an active war. And what that means is that instead of serving four years and then four years in the IRR, you would do two years on active duty and have six years on the IRR. And many talking points when we were selling that program to join the United States military was talking about a pathway to citizenship.

As a recruiter and somebody who used to have to compile all the documents of anybody that I needed to enter into the Marine Corps and send to the MEPS, it floored me to discover that after the MEPS and medical process and verifying who you are as a person at entry into the service, generally, the buck stops there, and it is becomes then the onus of the service member to find the way for that pathway to citizenship. And if they do, and they have a good command that helps set them up to do the paperwork, they may get several appointments that are scheduled in future time. And then, when that service member deploys or gets reassigned, that is the farthest thing from their mind, because in their mind, they’re thinking, “Well, I joined the service with a pathway to citizenship. They have all my documents. They know everything about me. They must be taking care of it,” when, in fact, the United States military has no impact or no design on helping you actually get that citizenship.

So, unfortunately, a lot of people leave the service thinking, “Huh, I’m a U.S. citizen, because I served in the United States military, and I have this beautiful document called a DD214,” and when, in fact, that is not the case. And when they find themselves in a situation that makes them eligible for deportation, that is generally when they find out that they are eligible for deportation and are not a U.S. citizen.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Leah Greenberg, let’s go back to the resistance to Trump, what Trump is doing, the protests that you have planned across the country, the No Kings Day protests. I mean, in this case, the military parade that’s happening on Saturday is one he wanted to have during his first term, inspired in 2017 by the Bastille Day parade that he witnessed in France. But at the time, D.C. officials and the military resisted, with defense secretary at the time, Jim Mattis, reportedly saying that he would rather, quote, “swallow acid.” So, if you could talk about what you see as greater capitulation now to Trump among government and military officials?

LEAH GREENBERG: I think you’re speaking to a phenomenon that we’re seeing across all facets of society, which is that in 2017 there was a resistance to Trump from a bunch of different places — right? — everyone from federal employees to members of his own party sometimes, to state and city governments, to business, media, corporations, higher education. Folks pushed back and held up, like, whatever little corner of the norms of liberal democracy that they were supposed to hold up.

And what we’ve seen this time around, that I think has been one of the dominant themes of the last six months, has been just an enormous degree of people obeying in advance, people treating Trump as the new normal and trying to go along, to comply, to secure their own safety and position in — under this would-be dictator. And this is what we talk about — when we talk about this internally, we talk about the aura of inevitability, the idea that, you know, this guy is in power, he’s gonna stay in power, you just gotta make your peace with it and figure out how to secure your own safety.

And I think that’s what we’ve seen across a bunch of facets of society, and part of how we get something like a military parade, which is that anybody in the military who was prepared to tell Donald Trump this is a bad idea is saying no. The D.C. government is in a fundamentally different posture than it was in 2017. And, you know, it’s just part of a broader phenomenon, right? California does not want the National Guard. Nobody in D.C. wants a military parade. The only person who wants all of these theatrics, all of these authoritarian tactics, these militarized crackdowns on our communities, the only person who wants — or, the person who wants this is Donald Trump.

And so, fundamentally, we’ve got to collectively generate the pushback that kicks other parts of society, the other people who are responsible for pushing back, wherever they are, back into gear. We’ve got to, by showing up in large numbers, generate the conditions for courage that let other people push back, too.

AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, Leah Greenberg, if you can talk about No Kings Day? I mean, before, I said 18,000, but I think the number is 1,800 cities and towns and villages, and counting. But how you’re organizing, and also your decision not to hold a major protest in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, as Trump threatens to use heavy military force against protesters? But how the organizing is taking place?

LEAH GREENBERG: Yeah, that’s right. Well, look, Indivisible is a movement of regular people. We are working with partners and an extraordinary coalition across the entire pro-democracy coalition, from veterans’ groups, like our friends at Common Defense, labor unions, civil rights organizations, immigrant rights groups, faith leaders. We really want to pull in as many people as possible into this collective moment of peaceful defiance of a would-be dictator.

Now, these events are organized by people in your community, right? They are overwhelmingly volunteers who are putting them together in order to create a community space for us to push back. There are — as you said, there are actually 1,900 on the map as of this morning, and it continues to rise. We anticipate hitting over 2,000 events around the country by the end of today. If you are pretty much anywhere, wherever you are, you are probably about less than 30 minutes away from your closest No Kings event. They have incredible coverage, including in really red areas, where you might not expect there to be resistance, but what we’re finding is that this is everywhere.

So, if you are interested, you can go to NoKings.org, and you can look on our map and find the event that is closest to you. If there is not an event that is close to you, there is still time to organize one yourself. Pull together a few folks in your community and collectively say, “We’re here to declare no kings, stop the raids, stand together as communities and reclaim our democracy.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thank you so much, Leah Greenberg of Indivisible and JoJo Sweatt, former Marine and Common Defense.

Coming up, we’ll also look at growing condemnation of President Trump’s travel ban, which went into effect Monday in 12 countries. Stay with us.

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NERMEEN SHAIKH: “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City,” rendition of Zeshan B in our Democracy Now! studio.