The Trump administration illegally used thousands of military troops in Southern California, a federal judge said on Tuesday, in a ruling that accused the president of effectively turning nearly 5,000 Marines and National Guard soldiers into a national police force.
The ruling, by Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, came more than two months into a contentious deployment that was set off by immigration protests in June and has since dwindled to about 300 National Guard soldiers. The judge ordered that the remaining troops should either be released or limited to guarding federal buildings.
The judge found that President Trump’s deployment had exceeded the limits of federal laws that generally prohibit the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
The decision was a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a possible presidential candidate who filed the lawsuit and who has rebuked Mr. Trump for sending the military into Los Angeles. But the Justice Department, which defended the Trump administration in the lawsuit, is expected to appeal the decision and could receive more favorable consideration from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Judge Breyer’s ruling was the latest in a series of judicial battles over claims of expansive unilateral powers by the administration. Mr. Trump and administration officials have deported people without due process, imposed widespread and unpopular tariffs and rolled back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers that have been disputed in federal court.
The president also declared crime in Washington, D.C., to be an emergency in order to send federal troops there in August, although crime rates in the nation’s capital have actually been falling and local officials said the deployment was not needed. Since then, Mr. Trump has publicly mused about sending the National Guard into other Democratic-led cities. Federal law gives the White House more latitude to conduct local law enforcement in the District of Columbia than in the states.
The decision on Tuesday arose from the president’s deployment this summer of about 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, where demonstrations had erupted over immigration raids.
In an executive order that was issued on June 7 over the objections of Mr. Newsom, who normally controls the state’s National Guard troops, the president wrote that “violent protests” had grown into “a form of rebellion,” and that the military was needed to “temporarily protect” federal agents and property.
City officials in Los Angeles vehemently disputed the president’s justification, noting that the police had been capably handling the protests, which were mostly confined to a few blocks in downtown Los Angeles near government buildings.
The White House, the officials said, had unnecessarily inflamed local outrage by sending masked and armed immigration agents into workplaces in a liberal city where immigrants make up roughly a third of the population, and then had used the ensuing demonstrations as a pretext to send in the military.
A 19th-century law, the Posse Comitatus Act, generally prohibits the use of the U.S. military for domestic civilian law enforcement, absent an insurrection. But the president did not invoke the Insurrection Act. Rather, he argued that an overarching federal law, Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which lays out the role of the armed forces, allowed him to commandeer National Guard units to execute federal law.
The administration contended that the troops were needed in California for federal agents to do their jobs because protesters were impeding their efforts. California officials quickly challenged the deployment, and Judge Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, temporarily blocked it in June.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ruled that the judge had erred. The protests had been violent enough, they found, that the president could at least make an argument for deployment, and legal precedent required them to give “a great level of deference” to the president in weighing the facts underlying his executive order.
The decision allowed the troops to remain under the president’s control, pending a decision on a secondary request by the state to restrict how the troops could be used. Lawyers for California demanded that the military be limited, at most, to guarding federal buildings, and the appeals court determined that the administration’s use of the troops remained subject to judicial review.
By mid-June, the protests in Los Angeles had largely ended, but instead of releasing the troops, the administration kept them on duty in a sprawling tent city near Long Beach. The administration sent soldiers and Marines out with federal agents executing search and arrest warrants and conducting immigration raids.
Mr. Newsom challenged the administration’s claim that the troops were not conducting law enforcement. During a three-day hearing in August before Judge Breyer’s order, lawyers for California showed numerous photographs of armed National Guard troops engaged in what appeared to be police work — forming security perimeters around cannabis farms and workplaces where raids were being conducted, or wielding batons behind police tape as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents handcuffed people.
In at least two instances, the state’s lawyers noted, members of the deployment briefly detained people. One occasion was early in the deployment in Carpinteria, when National Guard troops prevented a protester from entering an area where a raid was in progress. The other episode occurred later, when Marines held a man for about a half-hour after he tried to enter a Los Angeles federal building.
A field agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles testified that, for at least the first month of the deployment, about 75 percent of ICE operations involved federalized troops.
Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, a 33-year Army veteran who led the task force overseeing the Los Angeles deployment, testified that troops took great care not to cross the line into law enforcement. But the line was fraught.
The general testified at length, for example, about a mission, code-named Operation Excalibur, in which federal immigration agents on foot and on horseback marched through MacArthur Park, a Los Angeles landmark in a neighborhood now largely home to immigrant families with low incomes.
General Sherman said the administration initially wanted to conduct the mission on Father’s Day and to stage troops and military equipment in the middle of the park in a “show of presence,” but he objected. The placement of troops, he said, seemed to inappropriately involve the military in what appeared to be a risky and low-value operation.
Only after federal officials planned to reposition the troops outside the park did he recommend approval. But when he expressed his concerns, he said, Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol chief who is overseeing the federal immigration crackdown in Southern California, questioned his loyalty to the country.
The mission, which General Sherman said was ultimately approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was postponed twice before taking place on July 7. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles condemned it as a callous act of political theater that terrified children in the park as well as social workers who were providing services to homeless people.
Scores of National Guard troops drove to the area and stayed for about 20 minutes in case trouble erupted, the general testified, but never left their trucks.
Trump administration lawyers argued that California’s lawsuit was moot because the Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute that cannot be enforced with a civil lawsuit.
Moreover, even absent an insurrection, Eric Hamilton of the Justice Department argued, presidents have the inherent power to deploy the military to protect federal property and employees.
The Justice Department lawyers defended how the troops were used during the deployment, saying they violated no law and served a “purely protective function” for federal agents who were facing daily assaults from protesters.
Judge Breyer sharply pushed back, questioning how anyone could limit the power of the White House if the president could legally dispatch the military to enforce any conceivable federal function.
Normally, he noted, local law enforcement officers protect public employees going about their duty. Shouldn’t the president have to prove that a threat exists and rises to a specific threshold in order to summon the military?
“Where are the limits?” Judge Breyer repeatedly asked.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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