Juliette Kayyem:
So there’s two different pieces of this.
One is, federal law enforcement agencies, FBI, HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, working with, in tandem Washington, D.C., police. This is — it’s unique. It is not clear what their — what the federal agents’ authority is. It is not clear whether they have — they can arrest for a petty crime, since that’s not a federal crime.
And I think there’s a lot of confusion about what their authority is. Right now, we just see them walking around. The second is what we call presence patrols that is being done by the National Guard. Presence patrols are, we are here. We’re an army or a unit that is making its presence known.
It is not generally used in the military because there’s really no task or purpose for it. There’s no mission for it. It’s just simply that we are present. And, in both cases, the concern is, because the mission isn’t clear — ending crime, getting rid of poverty, all of those things are sort of nebulous in terms of what are the tactics that would justify federal involvement — it is not at all clear whether the mission will maintain or you’re going to get mission creep over the next couple of days and weeks.
