A federal appeals court will hear arguments Tuesday to determine whether President Trump, against the wishes of Gov. Gavin Newsom, can keep using California’s National Guard to protect immigration enforcement agents and quell protesters in Los Angeles.
The hearing, convened by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, comes at a time when local organizers have vowed to continue protesting against immigration raids, though demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles have quieted since the weekend.
A district court judge last week determined that Mr. Trump’s use of the National Guard was illegal and ordered the president to return control of the forces to Mr. Newsom.
But the Trump administration immediately appealed the ruling, and the Ninth Circuit panel stayed the lower court decision while it considers the matter. The panel consists of two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
It may ultimately be up to the Supreme Court whether a president can bypass governors to deploy the National Guard in states under the law Mr. Trump invoked. The outcome of the case could carry significant implications for limits on the use of the military force on domestic soil.
Protests erupted earlier this month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out workplace raids in Los Angeles as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Democratic leaders and activists have criticized ICE for raiding Southern California workplaces and carrying out indiscriminate sweeps in heavily Latino neighborhoods rather than focusing on people with serious criminal histories.
In response to the backlash, Mr. Trump invoked a rarely used statute to take federal control of the National Guard in the name of guarding immigration agents and facilities against protesters. Governor Newsom objected to that step, saying that it was needlessly inflammatory and that local and state law enforcement agencies could handle unruly elements within the larger group of protesters. Some demonstrations included a segment of people who vandalized property, threw objects and started fires, but most protesters were peaceful.
In downtown Los Angeles on Monday, things had returned to close to the normal state of semi-bustle two days after the “No Kings” rally drew tens of thousands of protesters angered by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns. Evidence of a week of protest was everywhere, with anti-ICE graffiti on buildings and anti-Trump signs scattered around.
Many storefronts in Little Tokyo, which was hit hard last week by vandalism, remained boarded up. But packs of Japanese tourists in matching Shohei Ohtani baseball jerseys were milling around, taking pictures under a looming mural of the star before he made his Dodgers pitching debut on Monday night.
Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles announced on Monday that she was loosening the downtown curfew so that it would begin two hours later, at 10 p.m. rather than 8 p.m. It would still last until 6 a.m.
“The curfew, coupled with ongoing crime prevention efforts, have been largely successful in protecting stores, restaurants, businesses and residential communities from bad actors who do not care about the immigrant community,” Ms. Bass said in a statement.
The city seemed to be taking a breath. Police officers were no longer stationed in significant numbers outside Los Angeles City Hall. Many of the places where federal troops had been positioned last week were no longer under guard.
One exception was a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs ambulatory care center, east of City Hall. A dozen Marines were stationed there on Monday in full battle gear, rifles close at hand. Last week, National Guard troops, protecting the same spot, had attracted hundreds of angry protesters. Now there were four or five of them. One woman, dressed in traditional Aztec garb, burned incense and occasionally blew out a call of defiance on a shell.
The mobilization last week was the first time the federal government had sent troops under federal control into a state over the clear objections of its governor since 1963, when President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to carry out the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama, which that state’s governor, George Wallace, was resisting.
(President Lyndon B. Johnson also federalized the state’s National Guard to protect civil rights marchers in 1965 without a formal request from Governor Wallace, but the governor did not object in that instance.)
But Mr. Kennedy used the Insurrection Act. Mr. Trump invoked a different statute as authority for his move, a rarely used law that allows a president to take federal control of a state’s National Guard under certain conditions but says such mobilization orders must go “through” governors.
In following through on Mr. Trump’s order, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, sent a directive taking control of California’s militia to the general who oversees it — bypassing Mr. Newsom. Citing that procedural foul, Judge Charles Breyer, of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, ruled last week that the move was illegal. The Trump administration argued that it had satisfied the requirement because the general acts on behalf of the governor in commanding the National Guard.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have separately activated about 700 active-duty Marines to assist in protecting immigration enforcement activities. The state had asked Judge Breyer to limit them to protecting federal buildings and to ban them from going out in the field to accompany ICE agents on raids, citing a 19th-century law that generally bars using the military for law enforcement unless the Insurrection Act is invoked.
But because the Marines had not yet been deployed into the city at the time of Thursday’s hearing, Judge Breyer said it would be premature for him to issue any such order. The Marines have since gone into Los Angeles and were videotaped detaining a man who was trying to enter a federal building. It turned out he was trying to run an errand at the Veterans Affairs office.
“The deployment of armed military personnel, skilled in warfare against external enemies, on domestic soil” has inflamed tensions and fear in Los Angeles, city officials argued in a friend of the court brief supporting the district court’s decision to grant Mr. Newsom’s request for a restraining order.
Officials from dozens of other cities across the nation signed onto a similar brief arguing that local police departments have long-established protocols for handling unrest and that the presence of military forces who are not coordinating with them heightens the risk of danger to officers and the public.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Laurel Rosenhall is a Sacramento-based reporter covering California politics and government for The Times.
Richard Fausset, based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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