Vice President JD Vance is traveling to Los Angeles Friday on a last-minute tour of facilities established for the Trump administration's mass deportation push and the crackdown on protests against those efforts using National Guard soldiers and active duty Marines.
Vance’s office said he will fly to the country’s second-largest city on Friday to “tour a multi-agency Federal Joint Operations Center, a Federal Mobile Command Center, meet with leadership and Marines and deliver brief remarks.”
The announcement of his visit to California was made on Friday morning, and Vance’s office did not release any information on the exact timing of his departure from Washington nor that of his planned arrival in California or the venue for his remarks.
Although the White House traditionally makes the president and vice president’s schedule public during travel within the United States, a source familiar with the administration’s plans said the last-minute nature of the announcements and the lack of information about the trip was due to what they described as safety concerns.
Vance’s visit to the country’s second-largest city comes less than a day after the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals sided with the Trump administration by allowing President Donald Trump to maintain control over 4,000 National Guard soldiers called into federal service as a result of mass protests against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom had filed a lawsuit seeking to return the Guard to state control, arguing that Trump was bound to issue orders through him as the state’s chief executive, and U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer had previously issued an order directing the Guard back under Newsom’s control after he found that Trump’s actions “were illegal—both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
After hearing the government’s appeal, the judges said Trump could maintain control while the case moves forward, citing a federal law allowing the federalization of the Guard when “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
They wrote that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth notifying the Adjutant General of the California National Guard, “likely satisfied the statute’s procedural requirement that federalization orders be issued ‘through’ the Governor.”
The Trump administration is expected to continue aggressive deportation efforts in Los Angeles, as well as other large cities run by Democratic mayors as part of what the president has described as an effort to punish those cities for their failure to implement harsh anti-immigrant policies.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump said he was ordering Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside."
"These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens," the president added.
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