Exclusive: Nearly one-third of National Guard drug enforcement team were pulled to go to L.A.
SACRAMENTO — Nearly a third of the California National Guard troops who had been doing drug enforcement work have been pulled away as part of President Donald Trump's deployment of troops to Los Angeles, according to data from CalGuard.
Of the 447 National Guard members on the Counterdrug Task Force, 142 have been pulled off of the assignment as part of the Los Angeles deployment, according to CalGuard.
'This is a huge hit to the invaluable work they do on drug interdiction at ports of entry along the border and statewide,' said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Newsom has argued that the deployment was unnecessary and diverted National Guard troops from important firefighting and drug enforcement work.
'You just pulled National Guard I placed at the border who were stopping fentanyl smuggling,' Newsom wrote on social media earlier this month in response to a post from a Trump administration official. 'Now they're twiddling their thumbs in LA.'
Newsom has been fighting in court to regain control of the National Guard troops, who are normally under his command. That litigation is ongoing, and federal appeals court judges have so far allowed Trump to retain control of the troops while the case proceeds.
The president's deployment has drawn widespread criticism from Democrats. Less than 20% of the nearly 5,000 National Guard and Marine troops deployed to Los Angeles were actually on the ground in the city last week, the Chronicle previously reported. A former National Guard commander said that rate was very low and made him skeptical that pulling more than 4,000 troops from their other jobs was necessary.
The Counterdrug Task Force does work at the border, as well as in other parts of the state. The deployment has also pulled more than half of soldiers off the state's firefighting task force and the CalGuard youth and community task force, which runs residential high school programs for struggling teens.
'We will be doing our best to backfill with other soldiers and other service members, (but) it does get tricky with some of these specialized folks,' said Lt. Carl Trujillo, a spokesperson for CalGuard. 'Not just anybody can step into that counter-drug role, you have to have security clearance, you have to have special skill sets.'
The same is true for the firefighting task force, he said. Those soldiers must have extensive experience on a firefighting crew to meet the requirements for that assignment.
Trump has argued that the deployment quelled violence in Los Angeles. It's not clear how much longer he intends to continue the deployment now that protests in the city have quieted significantly. Lawyers for the Trump administration wrote in a legal brief on Monday that the length of the deployment was not yet known. In the meantime, the Trump administration has said that the troops are assisting with immigration raids. Some National Guard members were part of a raid on a suspected marijuana farm in rural Riverside County, more than 130 miles from the protests, Trump administration lawyers told a federal judge Monday.
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