The Trump administration announced Saturday that the National Guard was sent to Los Angeles – Operation Gavin Newsom said he opposed it. President Trump activates the guards by using powers that are rarely called.
In a memo to the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, Trump said he was summoning the National Guard to the federal government under a rule called 10 to “temporarily protect ICE and other U.S. government personnel who perform federal functions.”
What is Title 10?
Title 10 Regulations activate the National Guard to serve the federal forces. Such Title 10 Order Can be used to deploy National Guard members in the United States or outside the country.
“It’s really chilling to protest without being asked by the governor,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the leading U.S. constitutional scholars.
“It is using military at home to stop dissent,” said Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School. “Of course, it conveys a message about how the administration will respond to the protests. It’s very scary to see that.”
Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s “Border Tsar” announced plans to send national guards in an interview with Fox News on Saturday Continue to face immigration agents In the raid.
“It’s about enforcing the law,” Homan said. “We won’t apologize for it. We are stepping up.”
“We are already ahead of the game. We have mobilized,” he added. “We are going to take the National Guard tonight. We will continue to do our job. We will back down these guys.”
In his memorandumTrump cited “many incidents of violence and chaos” and said federal immigration detention centers were threatened.
“In the scope of the direct suppression of the enforcement of the law, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the U.S. government,” the president’s memo said.
Trump calls on the federal government to have at least 2,000 National Guards for 60 days, or “at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense.”
Newsom criticized the federal action, saying local law enforcement has been mobilized and that dispatching troops is a “purposely inflammatory” move and that “only escalates tensions.”
The governor called the president and they spoke for about 40 minutes, the governor’s office said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warns Post on X “If violence continues, the active Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized – they are on high alert.”
Newsom denounced this as a threat to deploy Marines against U.S. citizens, saying: “It’s a strange behavior.”
Other seldom used
Critics raised concerns that Trump might also try to invoke the 1807 Uprising Act to activate troops as part of his campaign to expel a large number of undocumented immigrants.
The President has the powers provided for in the Uprising Act to suppress “any insurgency, domestic violence, illegal combination or conspiracy” with the National Guard troops of the federal states, “and thus hinder the enforcement of the law” so that any part of the state deprives the constitutional rights and the state government of the state that cannot protect that right and the state government.
The American Civil Liberties Union said Trump’s use of military at home is misleading and dangerous.
“President Trump has made arrangements for protests, incitement and abuse of power for the protests,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Program. “By taking this action, the Trump administration is putting Angelenoz in danger, posing legal and moral danger to the troops, and recklessly ruining our fundamental democratic principle that the military should not police civilians.”
According to the ACLU, the 10th National Guard activation has Rare in history Congress prohibits the provision of “direct assistance” to civilian law enforcement by forces deployed under the law – under separate provisions under Title 10 and the Posse Comitatus Act.
However, the Rebellion Act is considered an exception prohibited under the POSSE COMITATUS Act.
In 1958, President Eisenhower invoked the Uprising Act to deploy troops to Arkansas to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision to terminate apartheid in schools and defend black students.
Chemerinsky said that invoking the Rebellion Act and nationalizing the National Guard into an extreme situation, in which case there is no other option to maintain peace. Chemerinsky said he was concerned that the Trump administration was seeking to “transmit a message to protesters about the federal government’s willingness to use federal forces to calm the protests.”
“There is nothing that President Trump has to justify this as a violent confrontation with protesters – the Uprising Act or some form of martial law,” Senator Adam Schiff said in a social media post.
In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George HW Bush to use the National Guard to calm unrest in Los Angeles after police beat Rodney King for not guilty. This is under different provisions of federal law that allow the president to use military power in the United States. This provision applies if required by the governor or the legislature.
Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Law, said the president “is giving a broad view of the authority to execute.”
“If the president does use the Uprising Act, we will see a large legal battle over the next few hours, days and weeks about whether these situations can be used with these broadly authoritative grants,” Levinson said.
She noted that although Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass described the incidents as protests, the president described it as a violent uprising.
“When the president uses emergency powers, everyone should stop, and the governor and mayor said, please don’t, we don’t need that,” Levinson said.
The Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement that Saturday’s demonstrations “maintain peace…we praise all those responsible for exercising First Amendment rights.”
Chemerinsky wrote in an opinion article that the use of the military to quell the protests was “related to foreign dictators” and that any military deployment in the domestic situation “should be regarded as the last resort of the United States.”
“Unfortunately, President Trump may have legal authority to do this,” Chemerinsky wrote.
“This is not to deny that some of the anti-ICE protests have turned violent. But they are limited in size and there is no reason to believe that law enforcement cannot control them,” Chemerinsky said. “In the context of everything we see from the Trump administration’s authoritarian actions, this recent action should make us even more scared.”
California political editor Phil Willon contributed to the report.
