National Guard to Deploy to L.A. as More Protests Are Planned

Mr. Hegseth welcomed the president’s decision as “common sense” and said that Marines at Camp Pendleton, about 100 miles south of Los Angeles, were on high alert. They could be deployed to deal with any violence, he said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Raising and lowering the alert status for active duty troops is within the purview of the defense secretary, but actually deploying those troops can be done only by the president. To do so, Mr. Trump would need to invoke the Insurrection Act because deploying active duty troops on American streets is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits direct involvement of federal troops in law enforcement.

That did not stop Mr. Hegseth from threatening to deploy Marines, though he did so from his personal social media account and not his official secretary of defense account.

Mr. Newsom said in a post on social media overnight that Mr. Hegseth was “threatening to deploy active-duty Marines on American soil against its own citizens.” He added, “This is deranged behavior.”

Mr. Hegseth responded on Sunday morning, “Deranged=Allowing your city to burn & law enforcement to be attacked.” He added: “The National Guard, and Marines if need be, stand with ICE,” a reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mr. Hegseth’s predecessors, including during the first Trump administration, have tried to keep the active duty military off American streets. In 2020, when Mr. Trump wanted to deploy the 82nd Airborne to rein in Black Lives Matter protesters, Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary at the time, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked him out of it. Mr. Esper broke publicly with Mr. Trump over the issue, telling reporters that the deployment of active duty troops in a domestic law enforcement role “should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”

Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But the order signed by Mr. Trump on Saturday cites a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Mr. Trump’s directive also authorized the secretary of defense to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.”

It is rare for the Marines to be deployed for law enforcement purposes. In 1992, President George Bush, at the request of California’s governor, sent Marines from Camp Pendleton to suppress riots in Los Angeles.

“Since January, people have lived in fear,” said Jose Luis Solache, a state lawmaker who represents the area. “We saw a decline in our schools’ attendance, we saw a decline in people going to work.”

Los Angeles County includes wealthy enclaves like Malibu and Beverly Hills, but also many communities like Paramount that have for decades attracted Latino immigrants who clean hotel rooms in tourist districts, manufacture clothes or work at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Paramount is one of about two dozen cities ringing Los Angeles’s southeastern border, collectively known as “the Gateway Cities.” Some 82 percent of Paramount’s more than 51,000 residents are Hispanic and about 36 percent are foreign-born, according to census data. Its median household income is $70,900; across Los Angeles County, that number is roughly $87,800.

“All these cities — Bell Gardens, Bellflower, Paramount — they are full of working-class Latinos that were able to have a piece of the middle class,” said Hugo Soto-Martinez, a Los Angeles City Council member who previously worked as a labor organizer in the area. “They’re like Latino suburbs.”

Trump administration officials have said that the federal government’s immigration crackdown will increasingly focus on workplaces.

Angelica Salas, the executive director of CHIRLA, an immigrant rights group in Los Angeles, said that the Paramount area’s dense concentration of immigrants, including undocumented ones, most likely made it a ripe target for immigration enforcement raids.

“They don’t care to go to a workplace or have warrants,” Ms. Salas said of federal immigration enforcement authorities. “They just care that brown people are there.”

Paramount and other Gateway Cities weren’t always destinations for working families. In the early 20th century, they were agricultural areas.

The two villages that would later combine to form Paramount were known as “the Milk Shed of Los Angeles,” according to a city history on its website. In 1948, the city, which wouldn’t be officially incorporated until 1957, was named Paramount for a main street running through town.

The area was developed in the decades that followed. Factories and warehouses spread, alongside homes. According to the city history, in the early 1980s, a think tank called Paramount an “urban disaster area.”

But in recent years, Paramount has been revitalized as the children of immigrants have sought out more affordable homes and opened businesses. Now, young people catch up over elaborate horchata and coffee concoctions at Horchateria Rio Luna and belt their favorite songs during karaoke nights at Casa Adelita.

The demonstrations began on Friday after an immigration raid at a clothing wholesaler near downtown Los Angeles. Protests continued on Saturday in downtown and across the region. Federal agents responded with military-style rifles and flash-bang grenades, and then President Trump ordered the National Guard to be sent on Saturday.

More than 100 people were arrested on Friday, with at least 20 more arrests on Saturday, Mr. Essayli said, mostly in the largely Latino and working-class suburb of Paramount.

“They threw rocks at the officers,” Mr. Essayli said. “We had Molotov cocktails thrown. We had all kinds of assaults on agents. The state has an obligation to maintain order and maintain public safety, and they’re unable to do that right now in Los Angeles. So the federal government will send in resources to regain order.”

Local authorities did not ask for federal assistance, and California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said in a social media post that his office had been in touch with local law enforcement and had been told that “they have the resources they need to meet the moment.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed back against the president’s order, calling it “purposefully inflammatory.” Mr. Trump had federalized the National Guard “not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” Mr. Newsom said.

“The governor doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Mr. Essayli, a former Republican state legislator who before his federal appointment in April was a frequent critic of Mr. Newsom, a Democrat. “It’s all about a political narrative for him. But we’re not doing politics here, we’re doing public safety. We’re out arresting violent criminals, illegal aliens who are in the country unlawfully, who have criminal records.”

A spokesman for Mr. Newsom, Izzy Gardon, said Mr. Trump knew that California authorities had longstanding processes in place for handling civil unrest without military intervention.

“Mr. Essayli may still be learning the ropes of his new job, but even a rookie should know the president doesn’t need to commandeer 2,000 soldiers to respond to a few hundred protesters — especially before using the standard mutual aid process,” Mr. Gardon said.

Mr. Essayli blamed the Saturday protests on “false reporting” that federal agents were about to conduct a sweep at a Home Depot in Paramount and arrest those who could not prove they were in the country legally. He said the agents were setting up to work with a nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to execute arrest warrants or judicial orders for removal for people who had been previously deported.

“We were staging for our operations and people spotted the vehicles there, and just made assumptions that weren’t true,” he said.

Mr. Essayli would not say where the National Guard troops would be sent when they arrive on Sunday. “But they’re going to primarily be focused on protecting federal property, so I think you can expect to see them at least in downtown L.A.”

He said much would depend “on where these agitators are congregating” and blamed the state’s “sanctuary” law for the public’s outrage and confusion. California law bars local law enforcement agencies from conducting federal immigration enforcement, but does allow them to detain undocumented criminals for federal deportation if the detainees have been convicted of any one of hundreds of serious offenses.

“The problem is, people have been conditioned to believe that there is an actual sanctuary from immigration laws in California,” Mr. Essayli said. “That is not true. Immigration laws are applicable and will be enforced.”

Adam Schiff, the other California senator, also a Democrat, said on social media that the move “will erode trust in the National Guard and set a dangerous precedent for unilateral misuse of the guard across the country.”

Mr. Schiff urged demonstrators to remain peaceful.

“There is nothing President Trump would like more than a violent confrontation with protestors to justify the unjustifiable — invocation of the Insurrection Act or some form of martial law,” he wrote.

The Los Angeles Police Department said that demonstrations in the city of Los Angeles on Saturday were peaceful. But protesters in other areas, including Compton and Paramount, were more confrontational. Some burned cars, lobbed fireworks at police officers and spray painted government buildings.

California Republicans were quick to blame the violence on Democrats.

“Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass have a real habit of letting Los Angeles burn,” wrote Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican. That was an apparent reference to how Governor Newsom and Ms. Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, responded to the wildfires that devastated two communities in January.

Representative Kevin Kiley, a California Republican, criticized sanctuary policies that limit law enforcement’s ability to coordinate with immigration officials.

“If Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom would rather ICE not conduct targeted immigration operations, there’s a simple solution: stop being a sanctuary city and sanctuary state,” he wrote, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Cooperate with federal authorities and stop egging on violent agitators.”

Arriving at the bakery, she walked over to the nearby intersection of Atlantic Avenue and East Alondra Boulevard, where she was exposed to pepper spray.

“I’ve never seen this much chaos,” Mrs. Moran, 39, said as she touched her face that had been irritated by the spray. “My grandfather and uncle were bakers, and so is my father,” she added. “We are a Latino-owned bakery, and lots of our clients are Latinos. So we feel for them. This is not right.”

By early evening, a large group of protesters had gathered in the shopping strip in front of her bakery. A rock bounced off one of the windows. She decided to close up early, lock the door and pray that her business would not be vandalized by the growing number of people who were throwing items at police, starting fires, and setting off what appeared to be fireworks.

Mrs. Moran said she had empathy for undocumented immigrants and hoped the violent protests settled down.

After at least three immigration operations across Los Angeles County on Friday, protesters gathered outside a federal building that held people detained during raids that day.

As the protest grew on that evening, federal officials said they called the Los Angeles police to help control the crowd, but that the police took more than two hours to arrive.

Jim McDonnell, the chief of the Los Angeles police, said that officers arrived within 55 minutes of that call.

Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said on Saturday that his officers were “vastly outnumbered,” as hundreds of “rioters surrounded and attacked a federal building.”

Mr. Lyons said that the Los Angeles Police Department took more than two hours to respond even after being called multiple times, and he called out Mayor Karen Bass for the city’s response.

“What took place in Los Angeles yesterday was appalling,” Mr. Lyons said. “As rioters attacked federal ICE and law enforcement officers on the L.A. streets, Mayor Bass took the side of chaos and lawlessness over law enforcement.”

Ms. Bass did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday about the city’s response to Friday night’s protest.

Chief McDonnell pushed back on Mr. Lyons’s depiction of events. In a statement on Saturday, Chief McDonnell said that the police arrived within 55 minutes of being called by federal officials, and said that the response time was slowed by heavy traffic.

“Contrary to the claim that L.A.P.D. delayed its response for over two hours, our personnel mobilized and acted swiftly as condition safely allowed,” the police chief said.

The Police Department’s response was also slowed, he said, by “irritants” that federal agents had used on protesters.

Not long after Los Angeles police arrived at the protest on Friday night, the Police Department declared that the protests an unlawful assembly, and warned that those who did not disperse would be subject to arrest.

The department did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday about whether any protesters had been arrested.

The Los Angeles police have had a policy in place for decades that bars its officers from stopping someone for the sole purpose of determining someone’s immigration status. California state law also bars local and state resources from being used for federal immigration enforcement efforts.

Because the Los Angeles police and federal agencies did not coordinate ahead of the immigration operations on Friday, Chief McDonnell said, the deployment of police officers was delayed because they had not been able to “proactively plan” the possibility of civil unrest.

Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, immediately rebuked the president’s action. “That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions,” Mr. Newsom said, adding that “this is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.”

Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But the directive signed by Mr. Trump cites “10 U.S.C. 12406,” referring to a specific provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services. Part of that provision allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

It also states that the president may call into federal service “members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary to repel the invasion, suppress the rebellion, or execute those laws.”

Mr. Trump’s directive said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Saturday night that Mr. Trump was deploying the National Guard in response to “violent mobs” that she said had attacked federal law enforcement and immigration agents. The 2,000 troops would “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester,” she said.

Although some demonstrations have been unruly, local authorities in Los Angeles County did not indicate during the day that they needed federal assistance.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a post on X late on Saturday that the Pentagon was “mobilizing the National Guard IMMEDIATELY.” But he did not say when or where the troops would assemble, or identify their units.

Mr. Trump’s directive authorized the secretary of defense to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.” In Mr. Hegseth’s post on X, he said that active duty Marines were “on high alert” at Camp Pendleton, about 100 miles south of Los Angeles, and could also be mobilized.

Protests have occurred on Friday and Saturday in California to oppose federal immigration raids on workplaces. The latest is unfolding at a Home Depot in Paramount, Calif., about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

California Democrats have braced for months for the possibility that President Trump would seek to deploy U.S. troops on American soil in this way, particularly in Democratic-run jurisdictions. Privately, they have acknowledged that such a move, absent the state’s agreement, would have profound implications.

Mr. Trump suggested deploying U.S. forces in the same manner during his first term to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He opted against doing so at the time, but he has repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states.

In 2020, in the final days of Mr. Trump’s first presidential term, military helicopters were used to rout peaceful protesters demonstrating against police violence near the White House.

“For the federal government to take over the California National Guard, without the request of the governor, to put down protests is truly chilling,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is using the military domestically to stop dissent.”

The National Guard was last federalized in 1992, Ms. Goitein said, when President George H.W. Bush sent troops to Los Angeles to control riots after police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. That deployment was requested by the California’s governor at the time, Pete Wilson.

Mr. Trump and his aides have often lamented that not enough was done by Minnesota’s governor to quell protests that followed the death of Mr. Floyd in 2020.

During a campaign rally in 2023, Trump made clear he was not going to hold back in a second term. “You’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I’m not waiting,” Mr. Trump said.

Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Carol Rosenberg contributed reporting.