Trump could give National Guard, Marines more power in L.A. Here's how.

Washington Post

3 days ago

The 700 active-duty Marines and 4,000 National Guard members ordered to Los Angeles are limited by law in what they can do to manage protests that are almost always handled by local law enforcement.
But if President Donald Trump invokes a more than 200-year-old law called the Insurrection Act, their powers could expand significantly.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday at the White House, the president signaled he is willing to consider it. 'If there's an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it,' he said.
Trump has already invoked a section of U.S. code that allows the president to bypass a governor's authority over the National Guard and call those troops into federal service when he considers it necessary to repel an invasion or quell serious domestic unrest. It's the first time in about 60 years that a president has taken this action without a governor's consent.
Even so, the Marines and National Guard sent to Los Angeles cannot perform law enforcement tasks, like detaining people or dispersing protesters on the street, said David Janovsky, acting director of the Constitution Project at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.
If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, the military could be empowered to perform all functions of law enforcement, including detaining protesters, Janovsky said.
The Insurrection Act, dating to 1807 and amended over the years, grants the president powers to bypass Congress and deploy armed forces or the National Guard within the United States to suppress armed rebellion, riots or other extreme circumstances, and perform law enforcement activities, such as making arrests or performing searches. It temporarily suspends the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
George H.W. Bush was the most recent U.S. president to use the Insurrection Act to order National Guard troops — at the request of California's governor — when riots engulfed Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Black motorist Rodney King. The act has been invoked other times in U.S. history, including to deal with labor unrest and to protect Black Americans from the Ku Klux Klan.
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs to be able to do its job safely in Los Angeles. 'We have deployed National Guard and Marines to protect them in the execution of their duties because we ought to be able to enforce immigration law in this country,' Hegseth said Tuesday.
The National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles are trained in 'de-escalation, crowd control, and standing rules for the use of force' and are currently charged with 'protecting federal personnel and federal property,' U.S. Northern Command, which oversees operations in North America, said in a statement Monday. Members of the California National Guard have been seen standing guard outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles.
Without invoking the Insurrection Act, 'there's a very big, open question about what [the deployment] actually allows in practice, other than, like, maybe standing in a circle outside a federal building,' Janovsky said. 'But certainly in the absence of a further authorization, I think it's a very constrained mission at this point.'
The mobilization is already being challenged. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) sued Trump over the federalization of the California National Guard to respond to the Los Angeles protests, calling the move 'an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism,' and on Tuesday he filed an emergency motion to block National Guard troops and active-duty Marines from enforcing immigration and local law in Los Angeles.
If the Insurrection Act is invoked, military personnel would be subject to the same constitutional and legal restrictions as law enforcement, Janovsky said.
'It's not carte blanche to ignore the First Amendment or the Fourth Amendment,' he said. 'If someone is arrested, they retain their right to a trial, all of those things.'
Rachel VanLandingham, co-associate dean of research at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and an expert in military law, said using active-duty troops to help police in situations they're not trained for poses serious risks.
'At least with the National Guard, there's some training to do law enforcement because they know they may be called up to do it,' VanLandingham said. 'Whereas the Marines … their crowd-control training is within a war zone, not in downtown Los Angeles against peaceful protesters.'
Justin Jouvenal, Alex Horton, Marianne LeVine and Amy B Wang contributed to this report.