Gov. Gavin Newsom of California sharply criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that active duty Marines could be mobilized as part of the federal government’s response to protests against immigration raids in the Los Angeles area.
Mr. Hegseth’s suggestion came on Saturday after President Trump ordered at least 2,000 National Guard members to assist immigration agents following two days of clashes with demonstrators. Some of the demonstrations have been unruly, but local officials had not asked for federal assistance and Mr. Trump issued the order under a rarely used law to bypass Mr. Newsom’s authority.
Mr. Hegseth welcomed the president’s decision as “common sense” and said that Marines at Camp Pendleton, about 100 miles south of Los Angeles, were on high alert. They could be deployed to deal with any violence, he said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Raising and lowering the alert status for active duty troops is within the purview of the defense secretary, but actually deploying those troops can be done only by the president. To do so, Mr. Trump would need to invoke the Insurrection Act because deploying active duty troops on American streets is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits direct involvement of federal troops in law enforcement.
That did not stop Mr. Hegseth from threatening to deploy Marines, though he did so from his personal social media account and not his official secretary of defense account.
Mr. Newsom said in a post on social media overnight that Mr. Hegseth was “threatening to deploy active-duty Marines on American soil against its own citizens.” He added, “This is deranged behavior.”
Mr. Hegseth responded on Sunday morning, “Deranged=Allowing your city to burn & law enforcement to be attacked.” He added: “The National Guard, and Marines if need be, stand with ICE,” a reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Mr. Hegseth’s predecessors, including during the first Trump administration, have tried to keep the active duty military off American streets. In 2020, when Mr. Trump wanted to deploy the 82nd Airborne to rein in Black Lives Matters protesters, Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary at the time, Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked him out of it. Mr. Esper broke publicly with Mr. Trump over the issue, telling reporters that the deployment of active duty troops in a domestic law enforcement role “should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”
Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But the order signed by Mr. Trump on Saturday cites a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
Mr. Trump’s directive also authorized the secretary of defense to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.”
It is rare for the Marines to be deployed for law enforcement purposes. In 1992, President George Bush, at the request of California’s governor, sent Marines from Camp Pendleton to suppress riots in Los Angeles.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg is a London-based reporter on the Live team at The Times, which covers breaking and developing news.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
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