The Trump administration illegally deployed thousands of national guard troops in Los Angeles earlier this summer amid widespread protests against its immigration enforcement actions, a federal judged said on Tuesday.
Judge Charles Breyer ruled in a case brought by the state of California that Donald Trump’s administration violated federal law by sending troops to accompany federal agents on raids.
In the order, set to take effect on 12 September, Breyer cited the president’s threats to send national guard troops to other cities across the country, “thus creating a national police force with the president as its chief”.
In a statement, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, praised the court’s ruling as a win for democracy and constitutional limits on presidential power, declaring: “No president is a king — not even Trump.”
On social media, he marked the legal win with a Trumpian-style post: “DONALD TRUMP LOSES AGAIN,” adding, “The courts agree – his militarization of our streets and use of the military against US citizens is ILLEGAL.”
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, dismissed the ruling as judicial overreach and accused a “rogue judge” of trying to “usurp” Trump’s authority to respond to unrest and violence in American cities.
“President Trump saved Los Angeles, which was overrun by deranged leftist lunatics sowing mass chaos until he stepped in,” Kelly said in a statement, vowing the legal fight was not over. The administration was expected to appeal the decision.
The decision stems from a lawsuit filed by Newsom in June, arguing that troops sent to Los Angeles in June were violating a law prohibiting use of US military troops to participate in domestic law enforcement. At the time, Newsom called Trump’s actions an “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”.
Lawyers for Trump’s administration have argued the law in question – known as the Posse Comitatus Act, passed by Congress in 1878 – does not apply because the troops were protecting federal officers, not enforcing laws.
Breyer – who was appointed to the federal bench by former president Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration – ruled the deployment violated the 1878 law. He paused his order until Friday, allowing time for the Trump administration to appeal his decision.
“This was intentional – Defendants instigated a months-long deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles for the purpose of establishing a military presence there and enforcing federal law. Such conduct is a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act,” Breyer wrote in the judgment.
In his ruling, Breyer did not order the withdrawal of the remaining troops, but barred the Pentagon from ordering troops to engage in “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants”. About 300 troops remain on the streets of LA, down from the thousands of guard members and hundreds of marines sent by the Trump administration in June.
Following Breyer’s decision, Newsom on Tuesday filed a preliminary injunction seeking to block the Trump administration’s extension of the soldiers’ deployment through the November election. Citing the ruling, the governor argued: “There was never a need and there is not a need now for soldiers to be deployed against their communities.”
The case comes as the Trump administration is executing a broad crackdown on immigration and has targeted Democratic-run cities, threatening the use of the national guard and increasing the number of federal agents involved in operations.
Trump has already deployed the guard as part of his unprecedented law enforcement takeover in Washington DC, where the US president has direct legal control. And in recent days the president has ramped up his threats of further national guard deployments in Chicago, Baltimore, New York, San Francisco and Oakland.
“Usurping local law enforcement and militarizing our cities erodes public trust and jeopardizes public safety,” the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, told reporters on Tuesday. “Trump has made it clear that southern California was round one.”
Bonta said Breyer’s ruling should make the president “think twice” about sending troops into other American cities, vowing: “If Trump repeats this play, so will we.”
Trump’s decision to deploy national guard troops into Los Angeles, against the wishes of state and local officials, sent shock waves through American politics. Newsom, and other Democratic leaders have sharply criticized the move, describing it as an alarming abuse of power.
Trump ordered the deployment of 2,000 national guard troops in June after two days of clashes between demonstrators and US immigration authorities. The decision marked a swift escalation in a broad immigration crackdown following raids across the country, which have triggered protests.
Trump’s federalization of guard troops was the first time a US president had used such power since the 1992 LA riots, when widespread violence broke out in reaction to the acquittal of four white police officers for brutally beating the Black motorist Rodney King. Notably, the request to federalize the national guard troops in 1992 came at the behest of the governor and mayor, in stark contrast to Trump’s unilateral decision this summer, when there was nowhere near the same degree of unrest in LA.
Trump did it again on 11 August, ordering more than 2,200 soldiers from states including Mississippi and Louisiana to Washington DC after his declaration of a “crime emergency” in the US capital. The US Department of Transportation also assumed management of Union Station, Washington’s main railway terminal, from Amtrak, citing safety concerns and infrastructure needs.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
