There were two whiplash court rulings Thursday night on Donald Trump’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles, where protests over his immigration crackdown have raged the past week: first, District Judge Charles Breyer found that the president was illegally “exceeding the scope of his statutory authority” in activating National Guard troops in the city and ordered him to return control of the troops to Governor Gavin Newsom. Then, a couple hours later, an appeals court blocked the earlier decision and allowed Trump to maintain control of the California guard until a hearing Tuesday—to take place after more anti-Trump protests are set to be held across the country this weekend.
But the legal wrangling doesn’t seem to matter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who ordered the deployment of 4,000 California National Guard troops, as well as 700 Marines, to quell demonstrations in America’s second largest city. Asked during a hearing Thursday on Capitol Hill if he’d abide by the court decision deeming the deployments unlawful, Hegseth refused to commit: “We should not have local judges determining foreign policy or national security policy for the country,” he said.
“You’re not willing to say you would respect those decisions?” Democrat House member Ro Khanna pressed.
“What I’m saying,” Hegseth repeated, “is local district judges shouldn’t make foreign policy.”
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Such responses have become standard among Trump administration officials when the judicial branch has pushed back on tariffs to immigration. “We are living under a judicial tyranny,” Stephen Miller has claimed. It reflects the view of Trump and his allies that he should be able to do whatever he wants, regardless of the law. “This is not normal,” Newsom, who has been in a standoff with Trump over the LA protests, wrote of Hegseth’s suggestion he’d ignore lower court decisions.
That much was clear earlier Thursday, when California Senator Alex Padilla tried to ask a question of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a press conference. Though he identified himself, the Democrat was forcibly removed from the room by Secret Service and FBI agents, pinned to the ground in the hallway, and handcuffed.
“Hands off!” Padilla said, as he was pushed out.
“If they’re willing to do this to me, a United States senator representing the state of California, just imagine how it’s going with their immigration enforcement on the streets,” Padilla said on MSNBC Thursday evening. “We’re at a point of no return,” Senator Chris Murphy said on Morning Joe Friday, noting that most Republicans have implied Padilla “deserved what he got simply because he was disrespectful” to Trump. “What a world we live in today.”
Indeed, many Republicans accused Padilla of making a “spectacle of himself.” House Speaker Mike Johnson called for him to be censured. One GOP lawmaker—Warren Davidson, of Ohio—even suggested Padilla, one of the highest ranking Hispanic officials in the country, was a member of the “Cartel Caucus.” But at least a couple Republicans have expressed concern over the matter; Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who’d previously acknowledged her own fear of retaliation from the Trump administration, said that Padilla’s treatment was “shocking at every level”: “It’s not the America I know,” she said.
While the Padilla incident has—deservedly—commanded plenty of attention, it’s worth noting what Noem was saying just before officials forced him out of the room: “We are not going away,” the DHS secretary said of the administration’s actions in Los Angeles. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
Noem’s words echo Hegseth’s suggestion that the courts are overstepping their authority, with both asserting that they don’t intend to let anything stop them from enforcing Trump’s will. “This is the stuff of dictatorships,” Democratic Senator Brian Schatz said Thursday, after Padilla’s removal. “There is no context that justifies this action.”
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