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Hundreds of California National Guard soldiers are deployed in downtown Los Angeles in an escalation of the Trump administration’s rolling immigration enforcement action throughout Southern California.
Their deployment comes over the objections of California leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, who say that local law enforcement agencies are more than capable of keeping the peace in the city. He sent a letter on Sunday afternoon to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth requesting that the administration withdraw the troops and questioning the legality of their deployment. The National Guard is usually called in at the request of a state’s governor; a president has not deployed troops without a governor’s requests since 1965.
“There is currently no need for the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles, and to do so in this unlawful manner and for such a lengthy period is a serious breach of state sovereignty that seems intentionally designed to inflame the situation,” Newsom’s legal affairs secretary, David Sapp, wrote in the letter.
The governor had previously spoken to Trump on the phone for about 40 minutes on Friday night, a spokesperson said.
This morning, rifle-toting National Guard soldiers patrolled a federal building downtown. They also brought heavy military vehicles.
Tensions intensified by midafternoon, when a protesters neared the complex. Los Angeles Police Department officers pushed them away from the building and fired dozens of less-than-lethal rounds into the crowd.
The deployment followed two days of unrest after immigration sweeps downtown and in the city of Paramount. In one incident, officers arrested David Huerta, the leader of a California janitors’ union, who was protesting a raid. He remains in custody.
Trump’s order deploying the troops cited “incidents of violence and disorder” following immigration enforcement actions and the Border Patrol on social media has called attention to an incident in which someone threw rocks at their vehicles in Paramount, breaking a window.
After the raids, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement published a list of what they called “the worst of the worst” offenders caught in the immigration raids. The release also accused “California politicians and rioters” of “defending heinous illegal alien criminals.”
The escalation could be a turning point for a state where Democratic politicians had started the year fairly quiet on Trump’s immigration crackdowns, at least compared to his first time in office. With the state facing a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, lawmakers and Newsom were antsy about losing federal funding, and Newsom especially was depending on a relatively harmonious relationship with the federal government to secure aid for Los Angeles wildfire recovery.
But California Democrats have since struck a more defiant tone.
Last week they advanced numerous bills to discourage warrantless ICE visits to hospitals, schools and shelters. Over the weekend, they condemned the raids and sided with protesters, especially after federal agents arrested prominent union president Huerta on Friday during a clash with protesters outside an immigration raid of a garment company’s warehouse.
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, a Salinas Democrat, called the raids “an authoritarian assault on our immigrant communities.”
“We will not allow (Los Angeles) to become a staging ground for political terror,” he wrote in a statement.
His counterpart in the state Senate, Healdsburg Democrat Mike McGuire, said the National Guard deployment “reeks of fascism.”
Bill Essayli, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California – which includes Los Angeles – told KNBC-TV that immigration enforcement agents were under duress while conducting raids in Paramount and Compton.
“You have thousands of people forming and gathering in crowds, rioting, attacking our agents, throwing rocks, throwing eggs, throwing Molotov cocktails,” Essayli told the news station.
Marissa Nuncio, director of the Los Angeles-based Garment Worker Center, said garment workers were reeling after immigration enforcement agents detained 20 of them in a raid at Ambiance Apparel in the city’s Fashion District on Friday. The amassing of troops downtown made her members worry about a second raid.
The Garment Worker Center held a know-your-rights seminar on Saturday, one day after the raid.
Attendees “wanted to know, how can we stop this,” Nuncio said. “How can we resist these attacks on our community? They wanted to know if it’s safe to go to work, to go to church, to go to the clinic.”
Garment workers are particularly vulnerable because they are often employed in illegal production facilities that pop up and then disappear overnight. They’re paid by the piece, usually 5 cents to 12 cents per piece of clothing, a controversial practice that has drawn scrutiny from the Legislature.
Their weekly take-home pay is about $300, or $5.50 per hour, paid in cash.
“We feel the best we can do is inform workers of what’s going on,” Nuncio said, “and remind them that they have power in their rights.”
CalMatters reporter Joe Garcia contributed to this story.