4000 guardsmen, 700 marines, one irate governor: What's next for Los Angeles?

Sydney Morning Herald

19 hours ago

It started small. On Friday (US time), US federal agents entered stores across Los Angeles where suspected undocumented immigrants worked. The raids sent out a ripple of alarm among the workers' communities and advocates. Outside one place, a group chanted and threw eggs. Federal agents arrived in riot gear to break up the crowd.
This might have been an isolated incident were it not for months of simmering tensions over the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration. Later that afternoon, hundreds of protesters were chanting outside the Los Angeles Federal Building. The next day, word spread on social media that officials were visiting another store in LA's south-east. There, several hundred people clashed with officials. By night-time, according to the Department of Homeland Security, more than 1000 protesters had surrounded a federal building and assaulted officers, slashed tyres and defaced buildings.
The scenes prompted President Donald Trump to instruct the federal government to co-opt 'at least 2000' members of the California National Guard – 'to address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester', the White House said. Some 700 Marines are now set to be deployed too. Trump has also called up another 2000 guardsmen.
Amid all of this, a power struggle has erupted. Trump's involvement has infuriated California's Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who argues it is a 'serious breach of state sovereignty'. Newsom says there 'was no heads up whatsoever' that the National Guard would be invoked, and claims the president's move is 'putting fuel on this fire'. He has launched a legal challenge to Trump's order. Trump's 'border tsar', Tom Homan, has even threatened to arrest Newsom, a move Newsom has dared him to follow through with and Trump has said 'would be a great thing'.
Trump, for his part, has called on Newsom to apologise and claims the federal involvement is appropriate. 'These are not protesters, they are troublemakers and insurrectionists,' he said on his social media platform.
Why did the protests start? How did the National Guard become involved? And who's on the right side of the law?
Why are there protests in LA? What's got people so angry?
'Wanting to control the border and then seeing what's happening in the streets of the cities are two different things,' says Bruce Wolpe at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre, 'and I think this is very tense, and very hard to watch.' The recent raids on businesses were by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, in the Fashion and Westlake districts and in Paramount, south of LA, where most of the population is Hispanic.
At one clothing wholesaler, a worker told The New York Times, about 20 to 30 workers were lined up against a wall, interviewed and asked for their identification. Some were let go; others stayed with the agents. Officials said 44 unauthorised immigrants were arrested at one place on Friday while another 77 were arrested in the greater LA area. Across the US, raids have been ongoing. ICE officials detained 15 people working on a New Orleans flood control project earlier in June, and arrested 1461 people in Massachusetts in May.
'People who are nearby the activity are having an incredibly different day than those who are maybe five or 10 miles away.'
By Sunday, protests in LA had grown, with some demonstrators setting on fire several self-driving taxis and blocking a freeway. Officials fired tear gas and rubber bullets and set off flash bangs. So where did the anger kick off? 'It depends how far you want to go back in history, but I think there was absolutely an increase in ICE's presence and activities,' says law professor Jessica Levinson at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. 'And, as a result, there were protests and that provided the perfect stew for what some view as the Trump administration escalating this conflict by federalising the National Guard.' People initially involved in the protests appeared to be from immigrants' rights groups, but, says Levinson, 'it looks like it has expanded out, perhaps more generally, to people who are unhappy with either law enforcement and/or the current administration'.
Still, it's worth noting the scale of the disorder. Levinson, a lifelong LA resident, recalls the 1992 riots in the city, which followed the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a 25-year-old African American. Those riots led president George H.W. Bush to activate the National Guard at the request of governor Pete Wilson and mayor Tom Bradley. Back then, whole neighbourhoods were engulfed in the chaos, the sky was filled with helicopters and buildings burned. 'At this point, it looks like the activity is more localised,' Levinson says of these protests.
After New York, Los Angeles is the US's second-most populous city, with nearly 4 million inhabitants (The greater LA area has about 12.9 million residents). But the activity has mostly been confined to the downtown area. 'People who are nearby the activity are having an incredibly different day than those who are maybe five or 10 miles away. For them, unless they've turned on the TV – it sounds strange to say – but it's probably business as usual.'
Why did Trump send in the National Guard?
On June 7, Trump took the extraordinary step of calling into federal service the National Guard. Separate from the regular armed forces (and not to be confused with those forces' reserves), the National Guard is a state-based organisation mostly of part-timers that, in times of peace, reports into each states' governor's office. It can come under federal control only in specific circumstances.
The Guard dates back almost to the founding of America's first colonies. In 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony General Court decreed that all able-bodied males aged 16 to 60 were required to undergo military training and could be called upon to defend lives and property against domestic and foreign incursions. Today the Guard plays various roles, such as helping civilians during natural disasters. California might, for example, mobilise its state national guard to rescue earthquake victims or fight fires, as it did with the recent outbreak of wildfires in Los Angeles.
Very occasionally, the Guard has been called on to maintain law and order, as it was during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Before that, it was 'federalised' mostly in the civil rights era, such as to help quell unrest when schools in Alabama were desegregated in 1963 and during riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. This time, Trump has given the Guard the relatively specific task of protecting immigration officers and federal property that might be at risk from damage. His White House memorandum says, 'to carry out this mission, the deployed military personnel may perform those military protective activities that the secretary of defense determines are reasonably necessary to ensure the protection and safety of federal personnel and property'.
To do this legally, Trump has cited section 12406, under Title 10 of the US Code, which grants presidential authority over the National Guard if there is 'a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States'. This is an unusual move. According to California's Attorney-General, Rob Bonta, section 12406 has only been used once before: in 1970, when president Richard Nixon used the National Guard to deliver the mail during a postal strike.
Trump has now ordered up a total 4000 members of the National Guard and, so far, 1700 members of the California Army National Guard's 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team have been deployed in the greater Los Angeles area.
On Monday, the United States Northern Command said it was also deploying a battalion of 700 marines to LA to protect federal property and personnel. The legal basis for this was unclear: the action would not be covered under Section 12406, which deals only with the National Guard.
Generally, federal law bans the use of regular military in domestic affairs unless a president has invoked another, beefier, statute called the Insurrection Act. It grants the power to suppress 'any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy'. Trump has not done this, nor is it clear that he could have grounds to do so, at least so far. Were the Insurrection Act to be used in LA now, says Jessica Levinson, 'You would have some real legal questions as to whether or not the prerequisite facts are really there – whether or not we are truly looking at the type of rebellion or the type of lawless activity that the Insurrection Act envisions.' (The act was last invoked during the LA riots in 1992.)
Why is Trump's move so controversial?
Not only is a president calling out the National Guard rare but, in recent decades, it has only happened with the consent of the relevant state governor. Indeed, Section 12406 clearly states that orders made by the president to command a National Guard 'shall be issued through the governors of the States' – which appears to say that a governor's consent is required or, at the very least, that the governor is informed and co-opted into the process.
LBJ spoke to Alabama's governor, the outspoken segregationist George Wallace, to ensure the National Guard would be on hand to protect the protesters ...
The last time a US president deployed a state national guard without the express co-operation of the governor was in 1965 in Deep South Alabama. On the eve of what was to be a massive civil rights march, from the city of Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King Jr, president Lyndon Johnson spoke to Alabama's governor, the outspoken segregationist George Wallace, to ensure the National Guard would be on hand to protect the protesters, who had previously been brutalised by local state troopers. Wallace first seemed to agree, saying he would 'consider' the request. But he then backtracked, saying the state didn't have the funds and that Johnson should deploy federal troops instead.
In the end, a frustrated LBJ did a bit of both. He federalised some of Alabama's National Guard and also sent in federal military police. A deft politician, he framed the episode as a 'request' from Wallace, telling a press conference 'it has been rare in our history for the governor and the legislature of a sovereign state to decline to exercise their responsibility and to request that duty be assumed by the federal government'.
This time, however, Trump appears to have entirely bypassed the office of Governor Gavin Newsom, with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth issuing orders to the California National Guard directly. Newsom, in turn, has publicly denounced Trump's action and has accused him of inflaming a situation that would have been under control. 'Let's get this straight,' Newsom posted on social media. '1) Local law enforcement didn't need help. 2) Trump sent troops anyway – to manufacture chaos and violence. 3) Trump succeeded. 4) Now things are destabilised and we need to send in more law enforcement just to clean up Trump's mess.'
'We're also seeing the Trump administration call on old laws that presidents didn't typically use before to try and implement his policy agenda.'
Trump's intervention is also controversial because the protests in LA may not be severe enough to qualify as the outright 'rebellion' that the statute demands, or meet either of the other two conditions that can be met, such as invasion by a foreign nation. 'It's like, 'I don't really care what the local authorities say, we're going to have law and order',' says Bruce Wolpe. 'I think that's the basis in his thinking for proceeding to be hard line and carry out his policies of rounding up and deporting people.'
There is some evidence this intervention has been considered for some time. Last year Trump said he would 'launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out' and that he could see himself 'using the National Guard and, if necessary, I'd have to go a step further'. Policies to secure the border were a key part Trump's campaign, when he called crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in the country 'Biden migrant crime'.
The president, says Levinson, 'was pretty clear on the campaign trail that he would be aggressively using the National Guard if he thought that the facts necessitated it. The president used explicit comments that he was going to be comfortable using his authority to call in the National Guard, whether or not governors and mayors wanted it.' More broadly, she says, 'What we've been seeing for the last six months since the inauguration is that the Trump administration is embracing a very broad view of executive authority. We're also seeing the Trump administration call on old laws that presidents didn't typically use before to try and implement his policy agenda.'
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Trump may, in part, also be relying on an old theory of protective power, which is inherent to presidential authority but does not include law enforcement, suggests Chris Mirasola of the University of Houston Law Centre. Trump's memorandum, he notes, says the deployed military personnel 'may perform those military protective activities that the secretary of defence determines are reasonably necessary to ensure the protection and safety of federal personnel and property'. Mirasola writes: 'There have been no meaningful challenges to the protective power that I'm aware of and this is an area where courts have traditionally been exceedingly deferential to the executive branch.'
What might happen next?
On Monday, California Attorney-General Bonta filed a lawsuit asking a court to set aside Trump's order as unlawful, arguing that Trump had 'repeatedly invoked emergency powers to exceed the bounds of lawful executive authority'. He said Trump's federalisation of the state's National Guard was illegal: it did not meet the requirements of Section 12406 because it had failed to involve Governor Newsom and because it violated the Tenth Amendment, which protects state rights.
Experts we spoke with were unsure whether such a challenge would succeed. 'I think that would probably be an uphill battle,' says Levinson. 'Frankly, the more chaos we see, the more I think a judge would be likely to uphold that authority.' Is Trump's action overtly unconstitutional? It may come down to what constitutes rebellion, suggests John Hart, an emeritus professor of American politics and former head of department at the Australian National University. 'To what extent does a protest eventually become a rebellion? My view is that that will be decided in the courts.'
'People are frustrated, people are scared. We all very recently lived through the wildfires, and we don't know if this is going to be contained or if it's going to spread.'
Constitution aside, Hart says, 'What is clear is that the action is inflammatory because it's not necessary. There's no indication that the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) can't deal with this on their own.' Los Angeles is on a knife edge, says Levinson. 'I don't know if things will calm down, in which case we will have the National Guard here for some period of time; or I don't know if things will escalate and if the Trump administration will use the escalation as a reason to take even more power. So people are frustrated, people are scared. We all very recently lived through the wildfires, and we don't know if this is going to be contained or if it's going to spread in a way that we just haven't seen in recent history.'
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At the time of writing, more protests were planned in cities across the US. People have a constitutional right to protest, says Wolpe, but only peacefully: 'I really hope that the governor and the mayor are working together with community groups to say, 'Absolutely, express yourself, but we're not going to trash the city of Los Angeles and harm innocent people.' And if they can do that, then that would really show that what Trump did was an overreach and unnecessary. If they can do that, I think they would go a long way to defusing this.' LA Mayor Karen Bass has accused the federal government of using her city as a 'test case' and an 'experiment'. 'Don't buy into Trump's chaos,' she urged Angelenos on social media. 'Rise to the moment.'
Meanwhile, national guardsmen have tear gas and rubber bullets, which can only escalate the tension, says Hart. Someone might lose their cool, he worries, and turn on a guardsman. 'And then all hell will break loose.'