The Pentagon announced this week that an additional 1,000 National Guard troops will be released from Los Angeles.
The scaling back of troops has been going on for a couple of weeks, with this latest withdrawal leaving only about 250 National Guard members in the city.
At one point, nearly 5,000 National Guard troops were deployed to L.A. with orders to protect the federal buildings and federal agents who were conducting immigration raids as massive protests over those operations erupted for several days in the Downtown area.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass called the withdrawal a “win” on an X post Wednesday, but said she will continue to pressure until “ALL troops are out of L.A.,” and recently called the deployment a “political stunt.”
“The troops have never been involved in crowd control, never involved in the protests. They have been guarding a building. We never needed the National Guard in the first place. This is a political stunt,” Bass said on Face the Nation about a week ago.
The Trump administration stood by its immigration operations this week, vowing they will continue throughout the country.
“If the message we want to send is this … OK, cross the border illegally. It’s a crime, don’t worry about it. Have due process at billions of dollars of taxpayers’ expense and have a federal judge order you deported, but don’t worry about it, we’re not going to deport you unless you’re convicted of a serious crime. If that’s the message we send to the whole world, you’re never going to fix this problem, ” White House Border Czar Tom Homan said on Fox Business.
A new report suggests that deportations have had an effect on the private sector, with businesses seeing a 3.1% drop in people showing up to work immediately after the raids began.
“If people are afraid to leave their house, they aren’t spending money, which generates less business,” Edward Flores, associate professor of sociology and faculty director of the UC Merced labor center, told the Los Angeles Times. “There should be a lot of concern for the downstream effects.”
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