The protests in Los Angeles, entering their eighth day on Friday, have spurred President Trump to deploy National Guard troops to the city, an extraordinary move that he has justified with a number of dubious claims.
The demonstrations against the president’s widening crackdown on immigration have led to clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement. But many of Mr. Trump’s claims follow a yearslong pattern of expressing skepticism and contempt toward protesters and are not rooted in fact. They seek to portray the protests as fraudulent, the deployment of troops as lauded and the city in need of liberation.
Here’s a fact check.
What Was Said
“These people are agitators, they’re paid, they’re professionals, they’re insurrectionists, they’re troublemakers. They’re all of those things. But I believe they’re paid.”
— at a bill signing on Thursday
This lacks evidence. For years, Mr. Trump has accused those protesting his political candidacy and aims as “paid” and their demonstrations as inorganic. But he and his allies have provided scant evidence.
Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, on Wednesday cited Mr. Trump’s “common sense” and images of “very professionalized masks and rioting equipment” as proof of his claims. A day later, the interim U.S. attorney for the Central District of California announced that the F.B.I. had arrested a man for distributing face shields to “suspected rioters.” The complaint against the man, Alejandro Theodoro Orellana, accuses him of conspiracy to commit civil disorder, but does not name any group he is affiliated with or indicate that he was paying protesters.
In an interview with Fox News, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, cited “ads put up on Craigslist offering people thousands of dollars a week to go out and conduct these violent and dangerous riots.” That appeared to be a reference to an ad posted on Craigslist on June 5 in the Los Angeles area looking for “THE TOUGHEST dudes in the area” and offering $6,500 to $12,500 a week in payment. As numerous news outlets have noted, a pair of pranksters who host a YouTube show called “Goofcon 1” had placed the ad, and in an episode a day later, they called people who responded.
“I literally had no idea it was ever going to be connected to the riots,” one of the YouTube show hosts told The Associated Press. “It was a really weird coincidence.”
What Was Said
“I can tell you that what we have — what we have is a situation in Los Angeles that was caused by gross incompetence. They didn’t have the police to handle it. The police were asking us to come in. They were very late. We had to go in to save a lot of ICE officers as you know, who were held up. They were holed up in a building and they were being attacked and the military went in, the National Guard went in and got them.”
“In fact, the police chief said so much if you look at what his statements were, he said, we’re very lucky to have had that.”
— at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Wednesday
False. There is no public record of the local police requesting National Guard troops or Marines. In fact, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department has repeatedly said that the agency did not need the deployment to help maintain peace and order. Mr. Trump also inaccurately described the sequence of events involving federal officers and the National Guard’s role in the protests so far.
On Friday, June 6, demonstrators gathered outside a federal building in Los Angeles to protest immigration raids. Federal officers fired pepper balls at the crowds before local law enforcement arrived. Mr. Trump may have been referring to that incident when he claimed that immigration officers were “holed up in a building,” but at this point, the National Guard and military were not involved.
That day, the acting director of ICE accused the L.A.P.D. of taking over two hours to respond, “despite being called multiple times.” The police department countered that local officers began dispersing the crowd within 55 minutes of receiving the call, arguing that traffic congestion, the decision by federal officers to deploy irritants and the lack of proactive coordination “created a hazardous environment” and delayed the response.
Protesters gathered again the next day, as tensions escalated between protesters and law enforcement. Mr. Trump issued a memo that evening, sending at least 2,000 National Guard troops to the city. The Los Angeles Police Department released a statement about an hour later commending “all those who exercised their First Amendment rights responsibly” and noting that the protests in the city that day occurred peacefully and without incident.
But as protests continued into the early hours of Sunday, June 8, demonstrators clashed with the police and officers began using munitions to disperse the crowds. Mr. Trump posted on his social media platform at about 2:40 a.m. Eastern time thanking the National Guard for doing a “great job.” But the Guard had not yet arrived in Los Angeles. The Washington Post reported that members began arriving in the city at around 9 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday.
At a news conference that day, Jim McDonnell, the chief of the L.A.P.D., said that the local authorities and the normal process for activating the National Guard had been bypassed. Asked whether the police needed the Guard’s presence, Mr. McDonnell said that he did not know enough about the Guard’s role and capabilities to answer and that although the police would have not requested the Guard initially, “looking at the violence tonight, I think we’ve got to make a reassessment.”
Mr. McDonnell grew more emphatic throughout the week in pushing back against claims of a police need for the Guard and military.
On Monday, June 9, as protests and clashes continued, Mr. McDonnell said in a statement that his agency had not yet received any formal notification about the deployment of Marines and that it would pose “a significant logistical and operational challenge.”
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, he again raised the typical protocol of first marshaling internal sources and then requesting help from other law enforcement partners in Southern California. “We’re at that level now, and we’re nowhere near a level where we would be reaching out to the governor, for National Guard, at this stage.”
The police chief also pushed back on the notion that the National Guard was responsible for the relative calm since Sunday, telling CBS on Wednesday that members of the Guard “have a different mission” in supporting immigration enforcement operations while the police were responsible for maintaining the peace and “protecting the residents of Los Angeles.”
“We don’t need the National Guard, and they’re not here to help us right now,” he said. “They’re here to help facilitate what the federal agencies are doing on the immigration front.”
What Was Said
“Within the span of a few decades, Los Angeles has gone from being one of the cleanest, safest and most beautiful cities on Earth to being a trash heap with entire neighborhoods under the control of transnational gangs and criminal networks.”
— at Fort Bragg in North Carolina on Tuesday
False. Crime in Los Angeles has declined since peaking in the 1990s and though gangs are active in several neighborhoods, their influence, overall, has also waned.
A White House spokeswoman cited several local news reports about gang violence in the city.
But historical data collected by the F.B.I. shows that the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office together reported more than 100,000 violent crime offenses a year and nearly 300,000 property crime offenses in the early 1990s. Those numbers have since declined by more than 50 percent to about 37,000 violent crimes and about 126,000 property crimes in 2023, even as the population in the county increased by more than a million people.
Gang-specific crime, too, has declined. The county recorded about 700 to 800 gang-related homicides annually in the 1990s, compared with 180 in 2023. L.A.P.D. reported more than 11,000 gang-related crimes in 2005, compared with 1,300 in 2024.
“There is also no evidence that ‘entire neighborhoods are under the control of transnational gangs,’” said Lidia Nuño, a criminology professor at Texas State University who has researched the gang MS-13 in Los Angeles.
While there are hundreds of gangs and cliques in the Los Angeles area, there is no clear evidence of their transnational capacity, she said, noting that some like MS-13 are native to the United States and operate independently from their South and Central American counterparts.
In a 2014 article, Sam Quinones, an expert on gangs and an independent journalist, detailed the retreat of gangs from public view across Southern California. Mr. Quinones said in an interview that in recent years, there had been a resurgence in gang graffiti — “though still nothing compared to the gang graffiti of the 1980s and early 1990s” — a rise in tent encampments, and the spread of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
Still, “gangs do not wield the same public control they once did in Los Angeles,” he added.
“Parks are free of their presence, for example,” he said. “It’s also true, as I said in the piece, that they haven’t gone away; they’re just not as public,” he noted, saying that gangs still exert significant influence in areas like Skid Row.
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
Linda Qiu is a reporter who specializes in fact-checking statements made by politicians and public figures. She has been reporting and fact-checking public figures for nearly a decade.
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