When President Donald Trump put 2,000 National Guard troops under his control on Saturday night and ordered them into Los Angeles, it was billed as an urgent response to quell protests. But it was also a move long in the making.
Behind the scenes, the White House and Department of Homeland Security had been working for months to find ways to use the National Guard and the military more broadly to bolster the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, multiple people familiar with the internal deliberations told CNN.
The discussions have stemmed from a desire to dramatically ramp up nationwide immigration operations and arrest more migrants than ever before — a strategy that has put intense strain on the government’s existing enforcement apparatus. The administration has tried to augment Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s capacity by pulling personnel from multiple agencies.
“It’s certainly an expansion, but it’s a needed expansion,” White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN, when asked about the involvement of National Guard in ICE operations in Los Angeles. “We’re trying to use all available resources. That’s why we’re bringing all these other different agencies — ATF, FBI, US Marshals. We got a hell of a job ahead of us.”
Homan stressed that members of the National Guard are not enforcing immigration law and are focused on serving as protection for federal property and agents who the administration says have been assaulted.
White House pressure
Even with thousands of federal agents fanning out nationwide to arrest migrants, the results have up until recently fallen well short of White House expectations, the sources said, leading to leadership shakeups at ICE and tense calls and meetings with Stephen Miller — Trump’s top aide and architect of the administration’s demands for increased arrests and deportations. ICE is now averaging around 2,000 arrests daily, up from around 1,000.
Miller has been in the White House Situation Room as Homeland Security and Pentagon officials have provided updates on the situation in Los Angeles in recent days. The message from him has been clear: The administration is not backing down, and they are to proceed with operations.
The internal discussions about leveraging the military to support immigration enforcement inside the US, rather than just on the southern border, began as early as February, when the White House and DHS started planning how to mobilize active-duty troops from consenting states as force protection for federal agents.
There have also been discussions within the administration, including at the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department, exploring whether National Guard units from Republican-led states could be used in non-consenting states since they have more latitude under state orders than when they’re federalized, according to four other sources familiar with the talks.
“They are clearly inclined to repeat the LA playbook elsewhere,” said one of the sources familiar with the matter.
CNN reached out to the White House for comment.
Trump mobilized the California National Guard against the will of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, but the troops were taken from within California, rather than deployed from another state.
But the deployment of active-duty Marines to Los Angeles to help with crowd and riot control was also an escalation that left many officials at DoD scratching their heads, people familiar with the matter said. One official said the use of the Marines was intended more as a show of force than out of necessity to control the situation on the ground.
The administration is also looking to expand its use of military facilities to hold migrants. Defense Department personnel have conducted tours with Customs and Border Protection at military bases including Travis Air Force Base in California; Camp Atterbury in Indiana; JB McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey; Dover Air Force Base in Delaware; Camp Parks in California; and Fort Walker in Virginia.
“Military bases are an option. They were an option under every president I ever worked for, so it’s no different now,” Homan said, stressing the need for more congressional funding. Trump’s massive tax and spending cuts package would provide billions in funding for immigration enforcement. The urgency: ICE detention space is almost maxed out.
As of Monday, there were about 55,000 people in ICE custody, according to federal data obtained by CNN. ICE, which relies in part on cooperation with local jails, is only funded for 41,500 beds.
“We’re close,” Homan told CNN when asked when capacity would max out. “We’re probably 95% or above.”
Request for 20K guard troops
The first public sign that the administration was planning to use the guard to help with immigration enforcement came last month, when DHS requested 20,000 guard troops from the Pentagon to help support its operations.
DHS asked for troops to help with processing, transportation support, detention support including perimeter security and emergency response inside centers, as well as helping with night operations and rural interdiction, according to the request, obtained by CNN.
The Pentagon is still deciding how many National Guard troops it will provide to DHS, a defense official said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested in testimony on Wednesday that the order Trump signed on Saturday activating the guard troops could apply to other states, in addition to California, and other National Guard units.
“Part of it was about getting ahead of the problem, so that if in other places, if there are other riots, in places where law enforcement officers are threatened, we would have the capability to surge National Guard there, if necessary,” Hegseth said on Wednesday.
Trump’s order on Saturday night putting “at least” 2,000 National Guard troops under his control did not name a specific location and was very broad — it said that the troops would be deployed “in locations where protests against (federal) functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.”
Hegseth said that “thankfully, in most of those states, you’d have a governor that recognizes the need for it, supports it and mobilizes it, him or herself. In California, unfortunately, the governor wants to play politics with it.”
Newsom, for his part, has accused the Trump administration of employing authoritarian tactics. “California may be first – but it clearly won’t end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next,” he said in an address Tuesday evening.
Immigration agents are also expected to get help from National Guard units in states where governors have provided permissions and deputized the troops to serve as a force multiplier, a defense official told CNN. In Texas, for example, Gov. Greg Abbott, a staunch Trump supporter, said on Wednesday that his state’s National Guard was ready to respond if protests emerged there.
Without Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows for the military to carry out law enforcement functions to quell a rebellion or foreign invasion, the guard cannot make arrests, though they can detain people temporarily until police arrive and provide force protection to federal personnel. ICE posted images on X on Tuesday of guard troops forming a security perimeter around ICE agents as they arrested a man in California.
“Military troops are providing protection for federal law enforcement officers as they continue operations to remove the worst of the worst from Los Angeles,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to CNN. “If any rioters attack ICE law enforcement officers, military personnel have the authority to temporarily detain them until law enforcement makes the arrest.”
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