The U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said National Guard troops deployed against protests over immigrations raids would stay in Los Angeles despite objections of the governor and local leaders. He also claimed his controversial move, widely eliciting accusations of authoritarianism, has already “stopped the violence” in the second-largest U.S. city.
Trump decided to deploy the National Guard over the week, defying objections from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who have warned that the action only serves to inflame tensions caused by the president's mass deportation raids. Roughly 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 U.S. Marines have been deployed under Trump's orders.
Meanwhile, protests have spread to other cities across the country, including far-flung New York, Dallas, and Austin in response to the federal crackdown on the mass demonstrations that have occasionally devolved into violence. But Trump maintained that his actions were justified when speaking with reporters at the White House, variously blaming people he said could be described as "paid insurrectionists or agitators or troublemakers, you can call it whatever you want."
"Los Angeles was under siege until we got there. The police were unable to handle it," Trump said. "This morning, it's very calm. We'll see what happens later. But they know if they go there, they're not going to get anywhere, because we have the National Guard that we backed it up with a number of Marines."
Newsom announced Monday that the country's most populous state is suing the Trump administration over the president's action, which he said threatens state sovereignty.
"The illegal order he signed could allow him to send the military into ANY STATE HE WISHES," Newsom said on X.
"Every governor - red or blue - should reject this outrageous overreach," he added, referring respectively to states led by Trump's Republican Party or Newsom's own Democratic Party.
"There's a lot of hyperbole out there. This isn't that," he said. "This is an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism that threatens the foundation of our republic. We cannot let it stand."
Trump said the National Guard would remain in Los Angeles "until there's no danger," but he later claimed to have "stopped the violence in LA."
"By doing what I did, I stopped the violence in LA," he said. "That would have been an unbelievable tragedy. We would be talking, I don't know that we would even be here right now. It would have been so bad, I'd probably maybe be out there. I don't know."
Asked if he would invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump continued to hold the door open to using one of the most exceptional laws on the books to activate the military in response to domestic unrest.
"If there's an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We'll see. But I can tell you less, last night was terrible. The night before that was terrible," he said. "These are, you could not use the word insurrection, but you could also use the word. These are very dangerous people. They're bad people. They were met with heavy force, and they folded."
Protests erupted on Friday after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided local businesses and detained hundreds of people suspected of living in the U.S. illegally.
The Trump administration has continued to carry out the raids in defiance of the community's opposition.
Critics of the raids say ICE is going after law-abiding undocumented migrants, a vital part of the community and the local economy, rather than the criminals that Trump pledged to deport while campaigning last year to return to the White House.
