logo
Past National Guard deployments in LA: What to know

Past National Guard deployments in LA: What to know

While Vice President J.D. Vance has referred to the protesters as "insurrectionists" and senior White House aide Stephen Miller described the protests as a "violent insurrection," President Donald Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act.
Under the 1807 law, the president may have the legal authority to dispatch the military or federalize the Guard in states that cannot control insurrections under or are defying federal law.
In June 2020, USA TODAY reported that Trump had considered invoking the Insurrection Act over protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a former Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck on a street corner in May 2020. Protestors clashed with police across the country, including in Los Angeles, which prompted then-Mayor Eric Garcetti to ask Newsom for members of the Guard to be sent to the city.
At the time, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and others urged against deploying domestic troops to quell civil unrest.
In 1994, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake - known as the Northridge earthquake - shook the San Fernando Valley, which is about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The earthquake caused an estimated $20 billion in residential damages, according to the California Earthquake Authority. The Guard was sent as part of the disaster assistance operation.
The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was in 1992 by former President George H.W. Bush, when the acquittal of the Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King sparked civil unrest in Los Angeles, which left more than 60 people dead and 2,300 injured, according to the Bill of Rights Institute. Thousands of members of the Guard, the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps were deployed in the city.
In 1965, nearly 14,000 Guard troops were sent to Los Angeles amid the Watts riots at the request of the California lieutenant governor, according to Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute.
Contributing: Reuters

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

When it comes to the LA riots, not even the law seems to stop Donald Trump
When it comes to the LA riots, not even the law seems to stop Donald Trump

The Independent

time25 minutes ago

  • The Independent

When it comes to the LA riots, not even the law seems to stop Donald Trump

There are several important things to keep in mind in relation to Donald Trump and Los Angeles. First of all, Los Angeles is what is called a 'sanctuary city' – as is my hometown of Chicago and my second hometown, New York City. These are cities that do not conduct immigration raids, nor do they conform to the latest missive from Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE). Second is that Trump detests LA, just as he does NYC and Chicago. These are bastions not only of the Democratic Party, but also of those who detest the Republican Party, and especially its latest iteration under Donald J Trump. For a man who has been on American TV for decades in one incarnation or another and who possesses that level of narcissism, to be loathed by the country's major cities and media outlets, is a low blow. And remember: coming down that escalator during his first campaign for POTUS, he called immigrants 'by and large rapists' – that is those capable of rape. We can assume that everyone is an aider and abettor. He and especially his special advisor, Stephen Miller, believe that immigrants – especially from what used to be called 'The Third World' – are less than human. Miller's anti-immigrant stance must make his own Yiddish-speaking ancestor turn in her grave and Trump's Bavarian roots shake a bit. But this is neither here nor there in Maga world. His supporters turned out in their droves to return 'The Donald' to the Oval Office for a second time – allowing him to continue his spree in defying the Constitution he swore to uphold. In other words, he is the president of a body of small sovereign nations which elected him to the post of running and protecting the federal government. Not to deploy the US Marines. The POTUS is not elected by the general vote, because if that were true, Hillary Clinton would have entered the White House. She beat him in that area. Trump was instead elected by the Electoral College, the number of votes assigned to each state. Trump won that. Twice. The states have enormous constitutional power, much of which has been ceded to the executive branch over the decades. The National Guard of each state is under the command of the governor of the state. The President of the United States does not interfere with the National Guard usually. The last time this was done was during the Civil Rights in the 1960s, when Lyndon Baines Johnson federalised the National Guard in the South to ensure the adherence to civil rights legislation. Donald Trump has no legal authority to nationalise the National Guard if the governor does not want him to do so. He is also prohibited from sending the United States military on to American soil under The Posse Comitatus Act. The title of the Act comes from the legal concept – a concept under which a sheriff can conscript anyone to enforce the peace. This idea was thrown out in 1878. Trump believes, nevertheless, that he can override this and do as he pleases. It may take the Supreme Court – packed with conservatives and two genuine Trump-enablers – to sort this one out. The other thing to keep in mind that the people who voted for Donald Trump voted for this: vigorous elimination of what they see as illegal immigration. First Amendment rights in relation to the protesters be damned. 'Habeas Corpus' – the right of a person to face their accusers and a bedrock of the American jurisprudence system – can go away, too. Trump feels mandated to do what he's doing and will continue to do so. It will not stop the peaceful protests, protected under the First Amendment, nor a state's right not to have federal mobilisation on its soil. Will the governor of California, Gavin Newsom – a Democrat and a potential rival of Donald Trump (don't count Trump out of trying for a third term, even though the Constitution bans him) – be placed under arrest by the guy enforcing the arrest of fruit vendors at gunpoint – a meatball named Tom Horman – who threatens to put the media-friendly governor in cuffs? Donald Trump, who has been on US television screens for over three decades, did not survive by not knowing what the people want. Even down to the possibility that a US Marine may be deployed in his or her own neighbourhood.

Could Trump's deportation strategy presage a more dramatic crackdown?
Could Trump's deportation strategy presage a more dramatic crackdown?

Channel 4

time2 hours ago

  • Channel 4

Could Trump's deportation strategy presage a more dramatic crackdown?

It was only a matter of time before the Trump administration's scorched earth deportation strategy was met with fire and fury . And no surprise that it happened here, on the streets of Los Angeles, a city that's emblematic of the deep cultural diversity of America. In one of the neighbourhoods that Trump's ICE agents raided, the population is more than 70 per cent Latino. People who have worked in the garment industry in the town of Paramount for more than a decade – suddenly ripped from the factory floor, taken into custody and separated from their families. Trump's immigration czar Tom Homan even admitted some of those arrested weren't criminals. In other words, just law-abiding, hard working people in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong paperwork. It's all part of the shock and awe strategy that many believe is designed to spread fear into the heart of the immigrant community. And for the first time, anger too. In a Truth Social post, the president said Los Angeles 'has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals', and 'violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations.' It's no wonder people think Trump is revelling in the scenes unfolding on LA's streets. The protests tick every box for the Maga brigade. Illegal aliens and criminals – as they see it – running amok in a deeply blue Democratic city with radical left lunatics in charge but unable to cope. And to cap it all, Trump's nemesis, the slick California governor Gavin Newsom, is sitting right in the centre. Many suspect that Trump only ordered 2,000 National Guards to LA to fan the flames. The protests had been largely calm to that point, but taking the rare step of bypassing Newsom and deploying the troops over his head was always going to antagonise an already febrile situation. And it worked. But beyond throwing red meat to his base, this is also about testing the power of the presidency. So far, Trump has chosen not to invoke the Insurrection Act, meaning the National Guard is only there to protect the LA police, immigration officers and government buildings. They're not there to engage directly with the protesters themselves. But the Democrats feel that's exactly what could come next; US troops, trained for military operations in active war zones, being authorised to turn against the American people. LA's mayor Karen Bass says in that sense, her city is being used as a 'test case' for the administration expanding its powers over local governments. 'I don't think our city should be used for an experiment,' she told reporters last night. She was speaking after the Pentagon announced it had deployed 700 US Marines to LA as back-up, along with an additional 2,000 National Guard. Gavin Newsom has said what Trump is doing is illegal, immoral and unconstitutional. And he described the Marines' involvement as un-American. U.S. Marines have served honorably across multiple wars in defense of democracy. They are heroes. They shouldn't be deployed on American soil facing their own countrymen to fulfill the deranged fantasy of a dictatorial President. This is un-American. — Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 9, 2025 But contrast that with Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller who says what's happening in LA is 'a fight to save civilization' and you can see why the stakes are so high and why LA could be a testbed for an even more dramatic immigration crackdown to come. Trump suggests he would support arrest of California Governor 'I've been hit' – photographer on being shot covering LA unrest National guard in LA as Trump attempts ICE protest crackdown

Trump is deliberately ratcheting up violence in Los Angeles
Trump is deliberately ratcheting up violence in Los Angeles

The Guardian

time6 hours ago

  • The Guardian

Trump is deliberately ratcheting up violence in Los Angeles

Donald Trump was on his way to Camp David for a meeting with military leaders on Sunday when he was asked by reporters about possibly invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing direct military involvement in civilian law enforcement. Demonstrations against Trump's draconian immigration arrests had been growing in Los Angeles, and some of them had turned violent. Trump's answer? 'We're going to have troops everywhere,' he said. I know Trump is 'a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag', to borrow the words of the Republican senator Rand Paul, and that this president governs using misdirection, evasion, and (especially) exaggeration, but we should still be worried by this prospect he raises of sending 'troops everywhere'. Already, Trump and his administration have taken the unprecedented steps of calling up thousands of national guard soldiers to Los Angeles against the wishes of the California governor, of deploying a battalion of hundreds of marines to 'assist' law enforcement in Los Angeles, and of seeking to ban the use of masks by protesters while defending the use of masks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Needless to say, none of this would be happening if these times were normal. What makes this moment abnormal is not the fact that Los Angeles witnessed days of mostly peaceful protests against massive and destructive immigration arrests. We've seen such protests countless times before in this country. Nor is it the fact that pockets of such protests turned violent. That too is hardly an aberration in our national history. What makes these times abnormal is the administration's deliberate escalation of the violence, a naked attempt to ratchet up conflict to justify the imposition of greater force and repression over the American people. The Steady State, a non-partisan coalition of more than 280 former national security professionals, has issued a warning over these events. 'The use of federal military force in the absence of local or state requests, paired with contradictory mandates targeting protestors, is a hallmark of authoritarian drift,' the statement reads. 'Our members – many of whom have served in fragile democracies abroad – have seen this pattern before. What begins as provocative posturing can rapidly metastasize into something far more dangerous.' The hypocrisy of this administration is simply unbearable. If you're an actual insurrectionist, such as those who participated in the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol by destroying federal property and attacking law enforcement officers, you'll receive a pardon or a commutation of your sentence. But if you join the protests against Ice raids in Los Angeles, you face military opposition. Then there's Stephen Miller. The White House deputy chief of staff unironically posts on social media that 'this is a fight to save civilization' with no apparent awareness that it is this administration that is destroying our way of life, only to replace it with something far more violent and sinister. Are we about to see Trump invoke the Insurrection Act? It's certainly possible. On the White House lawn on Monday, Trump explicitly called the protesters in Los Angeles 'insurrectionists', perhaps preparing the rhetorical groundwork for invoking the act. And by invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump would be able to use the US military as a law enforcement entity inside the borders of the United States – a danger to American liberty. The Insurrection Act has been used about 30 times throughout American history, with the last time being in Los Angeles in 1992. Then, the governor, Pete Wilson, asked the federal government for help as civil disturbances grew after the acquittal of four white police officers who brutally beat Rodney King, a Black man, during a traffic arrest. The only time a president has invoked the Insurrection Act against a governor's wishes has been when Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama in 1965. But Johnson used the troops to protect civil rights protesters. Now, Trump may use the same act to punish immigration rights protesters. One part of the Insurrection Act allows the president to send troops to suppress 'any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy' in a state that 'opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws'. According to Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center, '[t]his provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law'. No doubt, Trump finds that provision to be enticing. What we're discovering during this administration is how much of American law is written with so little precision. Custom and the belief in the separation of powers have traditionally reigned in the practice of the executive branch. Not so with Trump, who is dead set on grabbing as much power as quickly as possible, and all for himself as the leader of the executive branch. To think that this power grab won't include exercising his control of the military by deploying 'troops everywhere', whether now or at another point in the future, is naive. Such a form of governance, with power concentrated in an individual, is certainly a form of tyranny. But tyranny, as Hannah Arendt reminds us in On Violence, is also 'the most violent and least powerful of forms of government'. And while a government may have the means to inflict mass violence, it is ultimately the people who hold the power. These are the lessons we need to be studying, and implementing on our streets everywhere, while we still can. Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store