“LAW AND ORDER” AND THE 2025 ICE PROTESTS by Rachel Wagner

Professor of Religion
Ithaca College

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Make it stand out

 “A riot is the language of the unheard.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The battered old textbook I was given in fifth grade in Arkansas taught that the Ku Klux Klan was formed to protect Southern white people from “unruly Negroes.” The KKK were harmless pranksters dressed as ghosts to frighten Black people into “being good.” The book presented freed Black people as “lawless,” saying that Union politicians came south after the Civil War and “taught the Negroes to fear and to hate the white planters.” The author says:

“Fed on the lies of the Union League, many of the Negroes became unhappy. They left their jobs and roamed about the countryside getting into mischief. They stole and tore up the property of white planters and sometimes robbed and killed white merchants. In many places in the state the roads were not safe for white people to travel.”

The Klansmen, according to author Walter Brown, “told the Negroes to be good and to stay away from the polls on election days.” If they did not obey, they were “taken out and whipped.” If they had “done crimes” but avoided jail, they were “run out of state, hanged, or burned alive as a warning to others.” Some education! Even as a child, I was deeply disturbed by the racism but had no language to process it. Such toxic claims have not disappeared in America and have instead surfaced again shamelessly in the foul mouths of Donald Trump and his supporters, whose hatefulness is broad enough to include other groups of marginalized people too. Calls for “law and order” is one of the most popular ways they express their hostility, using the phrase as justification for deployment of state power against those who challenge them. Like much of what they do, they are pulling from an old playbook.

Donald Trump has been bellowing about “law and order” since the 1970s when he was a young real-estate developer in Manhattan worried about the value of his properties. He uses the phrase these days to justify sending National Guard troops into Los Angeles. The language of “law and order” has deep roots; it has been used repeatedly in American history to foment racist fears. Here is a brief (and incomplete) history of “law and order” in America, with the goal of teaching (mostly white) people about why we should object to “law and order” language, especially when it is used to justify violence against protestors like the people demonstrating now against ICE.

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According to historians Simon Balto and Max Felker-Kantor, crime is a “shape-shifting category” determined by those who benefit from its definition. Even murder is relative. Indigenous people were killed during westward expansion, their deaths “celebrated as politically necessary for national progress.” Mexican people living in the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the nineteenth century were similarly targeted. And white people could kill Black people with impunity in the American South, both before and after abolition. As today, talk of “crime” was connected to specific disadvantaged groups: “lower-class whites, immigrants, and black Americans.”

The first slave patrol was authorized in 1702 in South Carolina. Slave patrols drew from the militias, who were tasked with fighting the Native Americans. Slave patrols had the right to administer arbitrary beatings. After abolition, surveillance of Black people continued, and many were forced to work on plantations. Largely white police forces gradually grew from slave patrols with similar missions.

Thomas Dixon’s famous 1905 book The Clansman is horrifically racist. In language prefiguring contemporary fears about immigration, Black people are described as an “alien, inferior race.” Gangs, Dixon says, parade the streets at night firing their guns. “Swarms” of dangerous people descend on the Capitol, rioting, with the aim of overthrowing the government. A “mob” raises hell in the gallery. “Black hordes” are armed with rifles and threaten their former masters. D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915) was based on Dixon’s book and was shown at the White House by Woodrow Wilson in 1916. We live with the legacy of such language today, as protestors are described as unruly “mobs” and “hordes.”

Violence is baked into American history, though we aren’t often taught about it. In 1906, white people killed at least a dozen Black people in Atlanta and burned over a thousand homes and businesses. In 1908 thousands of white people attacked Black people in Springfield, Illinois. In 1917 in St. Louis, 40 Black people and 8 white people were killed when white people rioted because Black men had been employed at a factory. In 1919 in Chicago, a white man at the beach caused the drowning of a Black boy who had inadvertently crossed an invisible segregation line in the water. Police refused to hold the white man responsible. Riots erupted and attacks on Black people swept the nation afterward. About this time, developing police departments added machine guns to their arsenals.

The idea of mobs forsaking “law and order” has never left the American consciousness. In 1935, a riot in Harlem erupted when a Black boy was accused of shoplifting. In 1936 in Flint, Michigan, “law and order” was evoked against striking auto workers. In 1943, riots broke out in Detroit and in Harlem, motivated by stark economic differences and white anger.

In an article from 1946 for Labor Action, J. R. Johnson describes the murder of J.C. Farmer, a Black man from North Carolina, in terms that could easily apply today. Farmer was waiting for a bus when a police officer demanded he get in the officer’s car:  

[Farmer] said he had done nothing. The cop struck him on the head and a fight began. The officer’s gun went off, shooting the owner through the hand. An hour later the posse came up and shot Farmer full of bullets.

Of the event, Johnson says: “law and order, state, federal and local, are on the side of the lynchers…And that constitutes the terror.”

In 1960 the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina prompted sit-ins in dozens of other cities, with people often picketing outside. Protestors sometimes faced violence. In 1961, Black “Freedom Riders” rode buses into the South to continue the fight for equal service in buses and restaurants. Protestors were perceived as violent, even when they were not. The charge of disrupting “law and order” was made against Martin Luther King in 1963. He replied: “Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.”

In 1964, the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed, a 15-year-old boy from Harlem was shot and killed by New York City police. Disorder broke out in New York, and unrest followed in other cities. Barry Goldwater, accepting the nomination for president, interpreted the protests as a threat: “Nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.”

In 1965 in a town in Alabama, a Black woman was struck by police. Her son tried to protect her. He was shot dead. In response, 600 civil rights activists assembled and set off on foot to the capital. They were met on a bridge by the Ku Klux Klan and state troopers and in a now-famous confrontation, “Bloody Sunday.” Marchers were attacked with tear gas, whips, billy clubs, and barbed wire by police.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in the aftermath, though it did little to resolve simmering tensions. Less than a week later, police stopped Marquette Frye in Watts, a neighborhood in L.A.. The encounter turned sour and police became aggressive. Violence erupted and dozens of squad cars showed up. Cars were set on fire amidst chants of “Burn, baby, burn!”. Looting and shooting followed. A curfew was enacted. The state called in the California National Guard.

Does this sound familiar? It seems hard to believe that Trump’s team did not intend to evoke the Watts demonstrations in their mediation of the L.A. protests this week. Old footage of burning cars was recycled; a curfew was enacted; and Trump insisted on involving the National Guard. In 1965 too, there were accusations of officers being spat on. Trump was likely evoking this claim when he said of the 2025 protestors: “When they spit, we hit.”

The Watts Riots resulted in 34 deaths and over a thousand people injured. President Johnson’s response tastelessly compared the protestors to the Ku Klux Klan: “A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face. They are both . . . lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of a free America.” In 1966 and 1967, there were nearly 100 more race-motivated protests across America.

Queen Mother Audley Moore, a civil rights activist from the 1970s, explains how the phrase “law and order” is often used for racist purposes. She says: “At first, [we] were coons, darkies, colored, niggers, Negroes, then we became crime in the streets. Law and order was [only] the latest link in the chain.” “Law and order” is perhaps the most flexible white supremacist dog whistle because its venom can cover anyone objecting to a racist or homophobic agenda. And its true purpose can be denied.

In 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency with a “law and order” campaign meant to evoke the mythology of the Old West while signaling racist tropes. Hollywood had made several western films called Law and Order. Most have, “the same tried-and-true plot: a lawman reluctantly takes up his badge one last time to clear out the ruffians who have been terrorizing the decent folks of Dodge or Tombstone.” Nixon’s symbolic alignment of Native American “Indians” with Black people as similarly un-American entities prefigures Trump’s recent attacks on Black people, Native Americans, LGBTQ, and Mexican-American groups.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Immediately, disturbances broke out in 125 cities. In the years following, police departments across America acquired “antiriot gear and ‘nonlethal’ control mechanisms” like tear gas. Surplus equipment from the Vietnam War was repurposed. Police began to use gas masks, armored personnel carriers, and high-powered rifles.

One of Donald Trump’s favorite movies, Dirty Harry, was released in 1971. In the film, Clint Eastwood plays a cop who enacts justice on his own terms. In 1974, another tough guy movie was released: Death Wish, with a beefy Charles Bronson as a vigilante who shoots his enemies without consequence. The film is a favorite of Donald Trump’s too. A 1974 review of the film says the audience would “applaud and cheer wildly whenever Charles Bronson, playing a wooden‐faced, once liberal‐minded architect named Paul Kersey, dispatches a mugger with his trusty 32 pistol.” No race riots happened in theaters because “the victims of his mission to rid Manhattan of all muggers are black, White and Puerto Rican.”

In 1990 the young businessman Trump bought a full-page ad in New York City newspapers demanding the death penalty in response to charges against five Black and Latino youth for a rape in Central Park. Trump said: “In order to bring law and order back into our cities, we need the death penalty and authority given back to the police.” Trump was already an authoritarian-in-training savvy with media.

In 1991, members of the LAPD were caught on videotape beating a Black man named Rodney King. The next year the officers were acquitted. Los Angeles exploded with rioting. More than 10,000 armed responders were sent in, including the California National Guard. A curfew was enacted. George H. W. Bush capitalized on the violence in his presidential campaign, saying: “We need to show them what law and order is all about.” Protests took place in L.A. again in 2006, objecting to a proposed change in immigration policy that would designate illegal immigrants as felons. L.A. has long been a hotbed of dissent.  

In 2013, three Black women organizers (Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi) popularized the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin. In 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black man, was chased and shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and protests followed. In the same year another Black man, Eric Garner, was arrested on Staten Island on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes. Garner was placed in a chokehold by police, an injury which ultimately killed him. His famous last words were: “I can’t breathe.” The Twitter hashtag #AllLivesMatter became popular around this time as a way to push back against the claim that racism was killing Black people in America.

In his 2015 campaign, Trump channelled Nixon with a call for “law and order” and links this phrase to Second Amendment rights. Later at a rally in Tennessee, he goads the audience into hooting for vigilantes shooting people, and makes them chant “Death Wish!” referencing the movie. He says, “Today you can't make that movie because it's not politically correct.” Trump acts out shooting someone on the street with a finger gun: zing. In 2016, Trump tweeted a controversial video (illegally) using a voice-over from the video game Mass Effect 2, depicting Trump as “all that stands between Humanity and the greatest threat of our brief existence.” Zing, zing.

In 2016, two more Black men, Alton Sterling (Louisiana) and Philando Castile (Minnesota), were killed by police officers. Geoff Nunberg, a NPR reporter, called Trump's 2016 revival of the "law and order" slogan the “key to creating the perception of a new crisis of crime and violence; it weaves together assaults by those he calls radical Islamic terrorists, inner-city thugs and illegals.” Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II writes that Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Muslims and LGBTQ people were “political ploys based on the fundamental racial fear at the heart of the American experience.” In other words, Trump was aiming at a larger set of victims, but his purpose was the same. “When [Trump] told white Americans that he was their last chance to make America great again, he was touching a wound passed down since the lost cause religion of the 19th century.” The racism is old, as is the purported solution: violence against those who would threaten the status quo of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. Nunberg adds that when Trump uses the phrase “law and order,” it makes people think of Richard Nixon. But “when Nixon used it, it made [people] think of Wyatt Earp. But they're not making those movies anymore.” Actually, though, they are.

As I argue in my new book Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion and the Myth of the Vigilante Messiah (NYU, 2025), the American myth of the frontier is alive and well, though refashioned in a postapocalyptic hue. Today’s cowboy myths show up in modern, even futuristic forms like Westworld, The Walking Dead, and The Last of Us. The “mobs” and “hordes” show up in these fictional tales as zombies or villains, though they clearly represent conservative fears about groups in America who will not be easily controlled. In the transmedia retro cowboy franchise Fallout, we get another videogame that lets the player enact shootouts as they take aim at less “civilized” elements of society. Zing. Zing.

Trump’s evocation of Wyatt Earp is hardly stale. In a rally in 2018, Trump says to the Arizona crowd:

This great state was settled by some of the toughest men and…women ever to walk the face of the earth…Arizona is where Wyatt Earp became a legend, [where] the American West became the American dream… where generations of farmers, ranchers, pioneers and soldiers used their own two hands to build a life…They didn't have a lot of money…but they all had one thing in common: They loved their families, they loved their country, and they loved their God.

The association of Trump with Wyatt Earp is explicit in popular merchandise like tote bags, T-shirts, and mugs depicting Trump in a black coat and hat saying: “You tell ‘em I’m coming. And hell’s coming with me.” The line comes from the film Tombstone (1993), loosely based on Earp’s life. Trump evokes Earp again in his 2020 acceptance speech for the Republican nomination. At the 2024 inauguration, Melania Trump wore a Wyatt Earp-style hat.

In May 2020, George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. Floyd’s death was followed by protests, to which Trump deployed the National Guard. Balto and Felker-Kantor say:

Floyd’s death once more showed a truth, one long known to many Black people and other people of color in the United States: that the police do not equitably serve and protect their communities, but rather serve largely as occupiers of the community, and as agents upholding a racist, capitalist social order.

Trump’s repeated calls for “law and order” signal racist purposes to his followers and threaten marginalized Americans.

The murder of Black Americans by police is still happening. Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, was killed in 2020 by police in Louisville after they forcibly entered her home. Also in 2020, a young Black man named Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump tweeted his favorite racist dog whistle in response to Portland demonstrations afterward:

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And so we come to the 2025 riots in Los Angeles.

In a recent article, the right wing American Spectator identifies people in LA who aren’t white as de facto “illegal immigrants” and “foreign invaders who have claimed our nation as their own.” The author says “Mexican nationals” making their home in L.A. do not belong there. This “invasion” is turning American cities into “satellites of foreign nations,” making the US “ripe for the third world’s pillaging.” On Truth Social, Trump reposted a similar sentiment expressed via meme:

Trump made similar remarks at his June 10 speech at Fort Bragg, a staged event in which sympathetic soldiers were placed behind him to hoot and clap. Suggesting that “entire neighborhoods” in L.A. are “being controlled by transnational gangs and criminal networks,” Trump identified non-white L.A. residents as “invaders”:

 Generations of army heroes did not shed their blood on distant shores only to watch our country be destroyed by invasion and third world lawlessness here at home like is happening in California…What you’re witnessing in California is a full-blown assault on peace, on public order and on national sovereignty carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion of our country. We’re not going to let that happen.

Trump dehumanizes protestors, calling them “animals” that “proudly carry the flags of other countries, but they don’t carry the American flag.” LA is being “invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy” with people who came “from prisons… from jails all over the world” and from “mental institutions” and “gangs.” Law enforcement in L.A. are “heroes…stopping an invasion.” And he, Trump, is the leader of the good guys. This is a president who sees himself primarily as a movie star.

Earlier this year in Munich, J.D. Vance called Trump the “new sheriff in town.” The moniker has since been repeated on the DHS Instagram site, as well as by Kash Patel, Rep. Burgess Owens, Karoline Leavitt, and others. Vance said it again at Bitcoin 2025.

The phrase denotes the appearance of a new way of doing law, with the promise that bad guys are put on notice. Merchandise is available with “new sheriff in town” imprinted alongside Trump’s cowboy image. The ad copy says to wear the shirt is “a symbol of your belief in law, order, and an America that stands tall on the world stage.”

I wasn’t taught anything about how to combat racism in my tiny southern public school. If anything, we were encouraged to keep our mouths shut. Structural problems were presented simply as how things are. Women did what men told them to, white people were presumed superior, and if people were poor God made them that way. Black people knew it was risky to live in my hometown, so they did not. Guns were a part of daily life, a means of getting food for those living on the financial edge, and a symbol of white masculinity and supremacy for others.

Trump’s identity as a “savior” is inseparable from the “good guy” cowboy symbolism that the NRA invokes. And as I have argued elsewhere, Trump is increasingly himself seen as a kind of gun that far right politicians shoot. When Trump mouths off, he damages things—usually his political enemies. He is a vigilante sheriff mouthing off at the people of L.A., justifying illegal and immoral actions by the presumption of a greater “good”— the return to a male-led, racist America. Protests are erupting because some of us will not go back, because back there was never “great.”

The protests in L.A. are not just “riots.” The work happening there is part of a long history of dissent as marginalized people work tirelessly to make America what it could be. There is a difference between tossing Molotov cocktails and exercising free speech. Thinking people know that wanton violence should be condemned, but protesting is an American right. America is at a crossroads—again—and we will have to decide who we will be.

Surprisingly, Michael Steele, former head of the Republican National Committee, condemns Trump’s response to L.A., saying this is “more Trump yippee-ki-yay cowboy BS.”

~Rachel Wagner, June 12, 2025