A federal judge’s ruling that President Trump has been using troops illegally to perform law enforcement functions in Los Angeles will — if it stands — pose impediments to any plans Mr. Trump may have for sending the military into the streets of other cities, like Chicago.
Mr. Trump has made those threats in the context of his anti-crime operation in Washington, D.C., which has involved both civilian federal agents and National Guard troops under federal control. But because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has greater latitude to use the Guard there.
The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, makes it illegal to use federal troops for domestic policing under normal circumstances. So to keep from running afoul of that law, Mr. Trump would now need an additional legal rationale for deploying troops to cities like Chicago.
One potential model for Mr. Trump might be the reasoning his administration offered for sending troops to Los Angeles over the summer, ostensibly to protect federal agents and facilities. But on Thursday, Judge Charles Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco held that the administration has been using those troops too expansively.
The judge barred the federal government from using troops anywhere in California to engage in “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.” The order is scheduled to take effect Sept. 12.
There are reasons for caution at this stage. An appeals court has already overturned an earlier decision by Judge Breyer, in which he tried to strike down Mr. Trump’s assertion of federal control of California National Guard troops over the objections of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. The Trump administration is likely to ask a higher court to reverse the latest decision as well.
But if other courts adopt Judge Breyer’s reasoning, it would limit Mr. Trump’s ability to use the operation in Los Angeles as a precedent to justify deploying federal troops into other cities to fight crime.
Democratic governors far from California said on Tuesday that the judge’s ruling was a victory for them as well.
“This ruling confirms what the American people already knew — this deployment was never about public safety,” said Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who has spoken out against Mr. Trump’s domestic use of the military. “It was yet another political stunt from President Trump intended to intimidate and punish anyone who disagrees with him.”
On Tuesday afternoon, speaking from the Oval Office, Mr. Trump denounced shootings in Chicago and said: “I would love to receive calls from governors and mayors saying they need help. We’ll help them. We have a lot of people. We have a great force. We have a great military force.”
During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, during his first term, Mr. Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that creates an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act and gives presidents the emergency power to use federal troops on domestic soil to restore law and order. But his aides talked him out of invoking the 1807 law.
Mr. Trump declared during the 2024 presidential campaign that if he returned to power, he would send troops into the streets of Democratic-run cities without waiting to be asked. So far he has done it twice, in Los Angeles and in Washington, but on both occasions he has relied on narrower legal authority, without invoking the Insurrection Act.
In his ruling on Tuesday, Judge Breyer suggested that there may be a reason: If presidents invoke that law to unilaterally send troops into the streets, without any request for assistance from a state governor, courts could review whether federal intervention was necessary.
The Trump administration’s demurral from invoking the Insurrection Act in the Los Angeles matter, the judge wrote, “is, perhaps, a tacit admission that President Trump would be unable to make the showing, required under the Insurrection Act, to rebut the presumption that state and local officials in Los Angeles were unable or unwilling to act.”
The last time the Insurrection Act was used was in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush sent federal troops to Los Angeles to help quash rioting that broke out following a jury’s acquittal of white police officers who had been videotaped beating a Black motorist, Rodney King. In that case, however, both the mayor and the governor requested the federal assistance.
Presidents have not invoked the act to use troops unilaterally without the consent of state governors since the era of the civil rights movement.
After sending troops and federal agents into the streets of Washington last month to crack down on crime, however, Mr. Trump suggested he wanted to do the same in Chicago and New York, and was willing to use active-duty troops on city streets.
In response, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, accused Mr. Trump of “searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.”
Last week, in a televised cabinet meeting, Mr. Trump then asserted he had “the right to do anything I want to do” in Chicago.
“I’m the president of the United States,” he said. “If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”
Referring to Mr. Pritzker, Mr. Trump said: “it would be nice if they’d call and they say, ‘Would you do it?’”
Mr. Trump’s continued threats have raised the question of whether he could claim that crime in Chicago threatens federal functions there, as he did in Los Angeles, as a basis for sending in troops without risking a legal fight over invoking the Insurrection Act without a request for assistance.
In June, after protests erupted in Los Angeles, and sometimes became violent, over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, Mr. Trump federalized part of the California National Guard and dispatched Guard troops and active-duty Marines. The stated purpose was to protect federal buildings, officials and functions.
But Judge Breyer found in his ruling that once the troops were deployed, the administration used them far too expansively — including by sending them out to accompany immigration and drug enforcement agents on operations across the region, to set up protective perimeters, blockade traffic, and perform crowd control, where there was no anticipated threat to the safety of federal agents.
The judge accused Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of engaging in “a top-down, systemic effort to use the military to perform law enforcement functions” and “instigated a monthslong deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles for the purpose of establishing a military presence there and enforcing federal law,” he wrote. “Such conduct is a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.”
The judge said the remaining troops under federal control in Los Angeles — about 300 National Guard troops — may remain there and “continue to protect federal property in a manner consistent with the Posse Comitatus Act.”
He did not spell out any concrete steps he thought they could take under that standard.
David W. Chen contributed reporting from New York.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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