As President Trump announced on Monday he was deploying National Guard troops to fight crime in the nation’s capital, lawyers with his Justice Department were preparing to defend his use of the Guard in Los Angeles.
Starting in early June, the Trump administration sent nearly 5,000 federal troops to Southern California over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom, citing protests over immigration raids in the region. The deployment was fraught with problems and lawsuits from the start, and a three-day trial began Monday in San Francisco federal court for a suit by state officials to end the activation.
Since July 1, the Pentagon has released most of the roughly 4,000 members of the California National Guard who were federalized, along with 700 Marines. A sprawling tent city that was erected in June to house thousands of soldiers at a military base south of Los Angeles in Los Alamitos is being dismantled. Only about 300 troops remain.
Testifying in federal court on Monday, William Harrington, who until last week was the deputy chief of staff for the Army task force with tactical control over the Guard troops, said that those still on duty in Los Angeles were “supporting the request for assistance” from federal law enforcement agents.
But officials at the California National Guard and the military’s Northern Command, which is overseeing the force, said earlier Monday that the remaining troops were mostly on standby or guarding federal buildings and not being used for immigration enforcement.
The Los Angeles protests lasted several days in early June and were largely confined to a section of downtown. Democratic leaders in the state said the administration had provoked them by sending masked and armed federal agents into workplaces to detain immigrants who otherwise had no criminal records, then used the subsequent public outrage as a pretext to intervene militarily.
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The post Trump’s Use of National Guard in L.A. Remains Contentious appeared first on New York Times.
