“This isn’t about public safety,” Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on X on Monday. “It’s about stroking a dangerous President’s ego.” Hours earlier, California had filed a lawsuit asserting that President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles, without the governor’s consent, was illegal.
TRT World, drawing on Reuters, described the Guard deployment as the first time in decades that a president activated the Guard without a request from a sitting governor. Trump had activated 4,000 Guard troops to deal with protests over a series of immigration raids that began on Friday.
Marines arrive
The confrontation escalated again within a day. Trump ordered roughly 700 Marines based in Southern California into the city. About half arrived on Monday night, a US official told Reuters, and the rest were due on Tuesday. They were tasked with guarding federal property temporarily until the full contingent of Guard troops arrived. Using active-duty military to respond to civil disturbances is extremely rare.
Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said in a statement that the department had not been told Marines were coming, and that their arrival “presents a significant logistical and operational challenge” for police. Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was “gravely troubled.” In his words: “we do not want the military conducting law enforcement on U.S. soil.”
On the streets
Over the weekend, protesters threw rocks and other objects at officers and vehicles and set several cars ablaze. Police answered with pepper balls, flash bang grenades and tear gas. Monday’s demonstrations were largely peaceful, local officials said, although Mayor Karen Bass told KABC that more than 100 people were arrested that day, while the majority of protesters were non-violent.
Hundreds gathered outside a federal detention centre in downtown Los Angeles, chanting “free them all.” National Guard forces formed a human barricade to keep people out of the building. Late in the evening, police began dispersing the crowd with gas canisters and arrested some protesters. At dusk, officers had running confrontations with protesters in Little Tokyo.
The protests spread. Demonstrators gathered at the Santa Ana Federal building in Orange County after raids there, and protests were reported in at least nine other US cities, including New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. In Austin, Texas, police fired non-lethal munitions and detained several people.
Two accounts of the same streets
Trump justified sending troops by describing the protests as a violent occupation of the city. Newsom and Bass said that portrayal was grossly exaggerated, and Newsom argued the Guard deployment had only inflamed the situation. On Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump claimed Los Angeles would be “burning to the ground right now” had he not acted. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pledged more operations to round up suspected immigration violators.
