As thousands of National Guardsmen and hundreds of Marines descended on Los Angeles this month on White House orders amid immigration raid protests, Marcos Leao was just trying to run some errands.
The 27-year-old Army veteran, wearing sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt, thought he had spare time to grab some paperwork from the Department of Veterans Affairs. While listening to music on his headphones, he took a shortcut around the Wilshire Federal Building by brushing past some police tape.
Shortly after crossing through the federal building complex, he saw a service member yelling at him to get back on the other side of the tape, and he quickly complied. After presenting his identification card at the front walkway to the VA building, he continued on his way. Then, as the song "Someday" by Flipsyde floated in his ears, he saw a Marine shouting at him to get on the ground.
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Soon, his wrists were being zip-tied, and he was held by the Marines for what he estimated was nearly two hours before being handed off to LA police.
"I was like, 'This is ridiculous,'" Leao recounted to Military.com on Wednesday. "Now, there’s a miscommunication, a big miscommunication."
Leao's detention by Marines on Friday marks what many legal, defense and policy experts say is an unprecedented violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the U.S. military from performing domestic law enforcement. While the Pentagon claims the detention was legal, others -- including several experts who spoke with Military.com -- have cast doubt on the incident.
It's also the latest example of how the military is further deepening its relationship with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection under President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's direction, further blurring the lines between the job of law enforcement and national defense.
Under Trump's administration, some 10,000 troops have been deployed to the southern border as well as nearly 7,000 to respond to protests in American cities, rivaling the U.S. military presence in combat zones around the world. Pilot programs between ICE and Marines have started at some bases to prevent foreign nationals from entering installations.
The Pentagon has even started pushing service members to get job training opportunities with DHS and Border Patrol while still in uniform and is sending 700 personnel to help ICE with paperwork and clerical duties in Florida, Louisiana and Texas.
Leao, who said he was a former Army combat engineer who served in Iraq, said he was calm in his interactions with the Marines. He had worn the uniform, too, and feared that he would have had a totally different outcome had he interacted only with police.
But he admitted that if someone else were in his shoes, it would have likely been a scary situation. Ultimately, he was not charged by LA police with any crime and was sent on his way.
"I would feel bad if someone else was going through that same thing as me, because they would probably freak the heck out," Leao said. "I know exactly how to go through this and know how to play it out."
'Distinction-Without-a-Difference Land'
Dan Maurer, a law professor at Ohio Northern University specializing in civil-military relations and separation of powers, told Military.com that small details about what service members do when they detain someone matter when considering whether troops cross the line from just protecting property to conducting law enforcement.
"If they're zip-tying, the person is their hands, because they're worried about those hands suddenly reaching for a weapon and shooting at ICE ... that would be force protection, and that would be fine -- it would not constitute direct law enforcement," Maurer, who also served in the Army and retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps, explained in a phone call Wednesday.
"But if it's zip-tying them so that they can more easily keep them docile while the military then asks some questions about what they're doing there -- that looks more like law enforcement, that looks like a temporary arrest," he said.
In Leao's case, he didn't have a weapon and, after he was detained with zip ties, he waited for several hours until the Los Angeles Police Department came to collect him -- an experience that is far from the detentions of just minutes in length that officials at the Pentagon said should be occurring.
Maurer said troops are "using techniques and tools that are very common on the battlefield that do not, in their minds, say this is a law enforcement tool" but that "in the public's mind, there's no difference between the zip ties and handcuffs."
Carrie Lee, an associate professor at the U.S. Army War College, where she co-directs the school's center on civil-military relations, was even more direct: "When the Marines detained the U.S. Army veteran trying to get into the federal building with zip ties, that's law enforcement."
"I think we're in distinction-without-a-difference land," she added in a phone interview Wednesday, referring to Pentagon officials' claims that the military is simply detaining -- not arresting -- civilians in LA.
Since then, images have emerged of National Guard troops standing guard as ICE agents make arrests as part of a raid -- something that Lee said takes the military into murky waters.
"They're participating in immigration raids ... which is also a law enforcement action," she said.
Hegseth posted one such photo online with the caption "This We'll Defend," the motto of the Army.
Another civil-military expert, Lindsay Cohn, noted that the types of missions that put military personnel working hand-in-glove with federal agents like ICE mean that "you are almost inevitably putting those DoD personnel in a position, physically, where they may have to get involved in something that looks an awful lot like law enforcement."
Cohn, who is a professor at the Navy's War College, stressed that she spoke to Military.com on Wednesday in her personal capacity.
All three experts who spoke with Military.com also noted that the general public is not adept at making the fine legal and technical distinctions -- like who is military and who is a federal agent or what is a detention and what is an arrest -- that lawyers and officials have stressed to reporters.
The result, they said, will be an overwhelming perception that troops are policing the streets of LA.
"The visual photographic evidence of the Guard and the Marines doing things that, to a layperson, look like law enforcement, coupled with the [defense secretary] and the president basically saying it's an insurrection and or rebellion. ... It conveys the idea that they're doing law enforcement," Maurer said.
Guard Window Dressing
Last week, despite California Gov. Gavin Newsom's objections, the White House surged military forces to LA amid protests over ICE immigration raids in the city. On Tuesday, it was announced that 2,000 of the initial 4,000 activated by the president were heading to the greater LA area.
Additionally, last week, 200 troops from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, were sent to the Wilshire Federal Building, where they provided protection and, ultimately, detained Leao. The California Guard and Marines are slated to be in the greater LA area for 60 days.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told Military.com on Wednesday that the troops were needed to respond to "lawless chaos" in LA and hinted that such deployments could come to other cities.
"President Trump rightfully stepped in to protect federal law enforcement officers," Jackson told Military.com in an emailed statement. "If Democrat leaders in other cities allow the same violence to occur against federal law enforcement, President Trump will always step in to protect them."
But California National Guard officials have noted to Military.com that very few of their personnel are actively engaged in the mission, with only about 100 of them on the streets at a given time.
While it's standard for military operations to be heavy on back-end support, the disparity of the missions is especially conspicuous to some troops, who described being on the mission but not having any role in it.
One soldier deployed as part of the mission described the assignment less as a high-stakes operation and more as an extended vacation. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said he hasn't been tasked with supporting law enforcement and spends most of his hours playing his Switch 2, Nintendo's new game console.
"Most of us have just been doing our own thing or unit-level training," one California Guard official noted, adding some units are doing training unrelated to the mission or college work. "Some guys are really busy, but most of us aren't doing anything related to what's going on."
In many instances, the National Guard serves more as a visible symbol meant to project strength and political stagecraft. Such deployments can offer governors -- or in this case, a president -- a chance to appear decisive in the face of perceived unrest or to score political points.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, preemptively announced the mobilization of 5,000 Guardsmen ahead of last weekend's anti-Trump "No Kings Day" demonstrations. But the troops ultimately were never utilized nor played a significant role in assisting local law enforcement.
The splashy deployments also come with a cost.
As Abbott deployed his state's Guard amid protests, the number of those troops on Operation Lone Star, the state's long-standing mission on the southern border, has actually decreased.
Notably, some of those Texas Guardsmen are also deputized to perform immigration enforcement under 287(g) agreements.
In addition to the Guardsmen, there are also around 7,000 active-duty troops supporting Joint Task Force-Southern Border, part of Trump's mandate to dramatically increase the military presence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The border operations are another example of the military's swiftly increasing role in immigration enforcement. Trump has long claimed migrants are invading the U.S., mainly from the southern border, and promised to carry out the largest mass deportation effort in the country's history.
The troops are patrolling new military zones created from federally controlled border land, which are now tied to nearby military bases like Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and Fort Bliss, Texas. The creation of the zones allows service members, under the supervision of Border Patrol agents, to approach trespassers as they would on a military base, despite it being vast desert land.
Long-Term Problems Loom
Meanwhile, experts say that blurring the line between military and police, as well as pushing the bounds of the military's typically nonpartisan nature, will have costs in the long term.
For Cohn, some of the immediate harms included readiness of troops.
"The more members of the military are being used for these missions and deployed to these missions, the less they are available for other missions, the less they are training for other missions," she said.
Another harm is to morale. "These are not missions that the average member of the military wants to do or enjoys -- they tend to be very sort of psychologically and emotionally stressful," Cohn said.
Finally, several experts noted that this mission runs the risk of harming the recruiting wins that the services have achieved after years of struggle -- something the Trump administration has been quick to take credit for.
"The likelihood of this mission being a recruiting boon is very, very low. ... The likelihood of it being a recruiting problem is higher," Cohn said.
"They value appearance of force, muscularity, power," Maurer said of the Trump administration, "dare I say, kind of like a business might -- over values of healthy civil-military relationships, and Constitution above party, and due process over speed."
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