California's Gavin Newsom demands Trump withdraw national guard troops from LA

The Guardian

6 hours ago

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, on Sunday evening formally requested that the Trump administration rescind the deployment of national guards troops in Los Angeles.
In a letter to the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, Newsom called the deployment unlawful, and asked for the troops to be put back under the state's command.
'There is currently no need for the national guard to be deployed in Los Angeles, and to do so in this unlawful manner and for such a lengthy period is a serious breach of state sovereignty that seems intentionally designed to inflame the situation,' Newsom wrote.
'We didn't have a problem until Trump got involved,' the governor tweeted. 'This is a serious breach of state sovereignty – inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they're actually needed. Rescind the order. Return control to California.'
The national guard began deploying to Los Angeles on Sunday morning, after Trump the previous day invoked title 10 authority, a federal law that allows the president to federalize national guard troops. Trump's federalization of the guard troops is the first time an American president has used such power since the 1992 LA riots.
Trump's order came after two days of protests against US immigration authorities, which had led to confrontations between demonstrators and law enforcement. While the clashes were tense, with injuries among both police and demonstrators, they were concentrated in specific neighborhoods, with much of the rest of the city remaining unaffected.
Authorities said about 30 people were arrested on Saturday, including three on suspicion of assaulting an officer. The Los Angeles county sheriff's office said three deputies sustained minor injuries.
On Sunday, about a dozen national guard members, along with Department of Homeland Security personnel, pushed back a group of demonstrators that had amassed outside a federal building in downtown Los Angeles.
The White House has portrayed the unrest as widespread, saying in a statement that 'everyone saw the chaos, violence and lawlessness'. Administration officials have accused California leaders on failing to crack down sufficiently.
Trump, in a social media post on Sunday, called the demonstrators 'violent, insurrectionist mobs' and said he was directing his cabinet officers 'to take all such action necessary' to stop what he called 'riots'.
Democratic governors in a joint statement condemned Trump's deployment of the California national guard as an 'alarming abuse of power'.
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'Governors are the commanders in chief of their national guard and the federal government activating them in their own borders without consulting or working with a state's governor is ineffective and dangerous,' they wrote.
The Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass said the deployment of the national guard was 'the last thing Los Angeles needs', and said she has received little information about how long troops will remain the city.
Bass said on Sunday she had discouraged the administration from bringing in the national guard. 'We do not need to see our city torn apart,' she said, adding that people were 'terrified'.
Trump's move has been followed by the threat of even more escalation. On Saturday, Hegseth raised the possibility of deploying US marines to Los Angeles.
The US Northern Command said in a statement on Sunday that 500 marines from Twentynine Palms, California, about two hours east of Los Angeles, are in 'prepared to deploy status should they be necessary to augment and support the DoD's protection of federal property and personnel efforts'.