California plans to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday, accusing the US president of “unlawfully” federalizing the state’s national guard to quell immigration protests in Los Angeles.
Previewing the lawsuit, the attorney general, Rob Bonta, claimed the extraordinary deployment of troops had “trampled” the state’s sovereignty, overriding objections by the governor Gavin Newsom and “against the wishes of law enforcement on the ground”. Bonta said the lawsuit will ask the court to declare Trump’s mobilization of the guard unlawful and will seek a restraining order to halt the use of its troops to manage the protests.
“We don’t take lightly to the president abusing his authority and unlawfully mobilizing California national guard troops,” the attorney general said during a virtual news conference on Monday. Later, Reuters reported that the Pentagon planned to temporarily deploy about 700 marines to Los Angeles, an extraordinary escalation by the federal government.
Democratic officials have argued that local law enforcement agencies had been adequately managing the protests, which began on Friday in response to a series of immigration enforcement operations across the LA area.
“This was not inevitable,” Bonta said, arguing that the demonstrations had largely dissipated by the time Trump, on Saturday, announced his plans to assert federal control over at least 2,000 national guard troops for at least 60 days, which Bonta said inflamed the situation. On Sunday, roughly 300 California national guard troops arrived in Los Angeles, prompting an outpouring of anger and fear among residents.
Trump’s call-up order “skipped over multiple rational, common sense, strategic steps that should have been deployed to quell unrest and prevent escalation”, he said.
Bonta said his office would file the suit later on Monday.
Newsom has accused Trump of intentionally sewing chaos, claiming Trump “wants a civil war on the streets” and appealing for protesters not to give the administration the spectacle of violence it is hoping to stoke.
“This is a manufactured crisis to allow him to take over a state militia, damaging the very foundation of our republic,” Newsom said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Every governor, red or blue, should reject this outrageous overreach. This is beyond incompetence – this is him intentionally causing chaos, terrorizing communities, and endangering the principles of our great democracy.”
On Sunday, Newsom formally requested that Trump rescind his order and return command of the guard to his office. In a letter to the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the governor’s legal affairs secretary, David Sapp, argued there was “currently no need” for such intervention by the federal government and that local law enforcement was capable of “safeguarding public safety”.
In a rhetorical back and forth between Newsom and Trump, longtime political foes who clashed repeatedly during Trump’s first administration, Trump said he endorsed a threat by his “border czar” Tom Homan to arrest Democratic leaders in California if they impeded law enforcement, including Newsom. “Gavin likes the publicity but I think it would be a great thing,” Trump told reporters on Monday.
Newsom responded to the taunt on Twitter/X, calling Trump’s support for the arrest of a sitting governor “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”.
The Trump administration has said that the unrest in Los Angeles amounts to a “form of rebellion” against the authority of the United States government. But the order does not invoke the Insurrection Act. Instead, it cites a rarely used section of federal law, known as Title 10, that allows the president to federalize national guard units in circumstances where there is a “rebellion or danger of rebellion” or the president is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.
“There was no risk of rebellion, no threat of foreign invasion, no inability for the federal government to enforce federal laws,” Bonta told reporters on Monday.
The statute has been invoked only once in modern history, Bonta noted, in 1970, when president Richard Nixon mobilized the nationalguard to deliver the mail during a strike by the postal service. The last time a president activated the national guard without a request from the state’s governor was in 1965, when president Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.
In 1992,George HW Bush sent troops to LA to calm widespread civil unrest following the acquittal of four white police officers for brutally beating Black motorist Rodney King. But in that case both the California governor and the mayor of Los Angeles requested the federal intervention.