The Trump administration released about 150 National Guard troops on Tuesday in the first pullback since it dispatched a military force to the Los Angeles area last month, allowing the soldiers to return to regular duty fighting wildfires in California.
President Trump began deploying thousands of troops on June 7 to respond to protests against federal immigration raids in the region. Almost 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines remain under his control for domestic responsibilities in Los Angeles.
The drawdown announcement by the U.S. Northern Command, which is overseeing the president’s military response in California, came two weeks after Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles ended a nighttime curfew because the most vigorous, and sometimes violent, protests had ended in the downtown core.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has for weeks condemned the Trump administration’s commandeering of thousands of state troops in response to a handful of demonstrations, a move that the governor said was based on politics, not public safety. Mayor Bass, in a separate news conference on Tuesday, called the president’s actions “an all-out assault on Los Angeles.”
After a series of immigration raids in early June drew protests, the Republican president federalized about 4,000members of the California National Guard without the permission of the Democratic governor, a high-profile critic, and dispatched more than 700 active-duty Marines to the region. Since then, most have been consigned to a large tent city erected near Long Beach, Calif., on a military base in the Los Angeles suburb of Los Alamitos, with troops either accompanying immigration workers as backup on enforcement actions or guarding federal facilities.
The governor has called on Mr. Trump to end the entire mission, and the state has taken legal action against the administration, saying that the deployment has misused thousands of emergency personnel, law enforcement officers, teachers and other critical workers who are needed in other capacities, both in the labor force and by the California National Guard.
State data shared by Mr. Newsom’s office indicate that the troops now on federal duty in the Los Angeles area include 385 medical workers, 355 law enforcement and corrections officials, 158 civil servants, 170 tech workers, 158 teachers, 370 service workers, 97 agriculture workers and 361 people in the building trades.
The small but significant pullback announced Tuesday involved specialized California National Guard troops who would ordinarily be working on wildfire prevention at this time of year.
“This is just the theater of the absurd,” Mr. Newsom said at a news conference moments before the Northern Command’s announcement. “You’ve got men and women literally not even assigned, sitting there in their barracks doing nothing, when they were doing something as important as preparing for wildfire season.”
The governor charged that fewer than 20 percent of the troops called up through Mr. Trump’s order had been given work assignments.
Federal officials have said the troops are necessary to ensure the safety of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who have been ordered to round up and deport people who are in the United States without authorization. Homeland Security officials said last month that the troops were accompanying federal enforcement officers on raids in Southern California; social media posts by the administration have shown a few troops providing security for immigration agents at any given time.
The governor said that California needed its National Guard troops back to work on fire prevention and firefighting as hot, dry weather set in across much of the state, adding that eight of the 14 California National Guard teams that normally focus on firefighting had been “degraded” by being reassigned to Mr. Trump’s mission in Los Angeles.
The U.S. Northern Command did not mention the governor in its statement. Rather, it said that the troops had been released at the recommendation of Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, and approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
California officials said that they had been told that the firefighting crews, part of a National Guard unit known as Joint Task Force Rattlesnake that works under the direction of the state’s fire protection agency, Cal Fire, would be back in the field by next week. More than 3,200 wildfires have been reported in California since the start of the year.
“This is huge,” Col. Brandon Hill of the California National Guard said. “We need these men and women back.”
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
Laurel Rosenhall is a Sacramento-based reporter covering California politics and government for The Times.
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