Trump Deploys Marines to L.A.
700 Marines dispatched: President Donald Trump sent 700 Marines to California, where riots and protests against immigration raids are still going on, to protect federal property and personnel. This follows the deployment of the National Guard and several days of protests in San Francisco and Los Angeles that local and state police have struggled to get under control. Of course, the administration hasn’t decided what the rules of engagement are just yet. Or where the deployed troops should sleep:
You sent your troops here without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep.
Here they are — being forced to sleep on the floor, piled on top of one another.
If anyone is treating our troops disrespectfully, it is you @realDonaldTrump. https://t.co/4i8VIiYZLr pic.twitter.com/sUYD2KHu6O
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 9, 2025
“A statement by the U.S. Northern Command said that 2,100 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines will protect federal personnel and property under the command of Task Force 51, the headquarters that has been assigned the mission,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The forces have been trained in de-escalation, crowd control, and standing rules for the use of force, the command said.” But California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has objected to these deployments, saying this is escalatory and a violation of state sovereignty. And yesterday, the state sued the Trump administration over its deployment of state troops and U.S. Marines, calling it “illegal.”
Bloomberg notes:
The law strictly limits the federal deployment of troops within US borders. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, along with amendments and supporting regulations, generally bars the use of the active-duty U.S. military—the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines—from carrying out domestic law enforcement.
Important exceptions to the 1878 law are contained in the 1807 Insurrection Act and its modern iterations, which allow the president, without congressional approval, to employ the military for domestic use in certain circumstances. The Insurrection Act has been used very rarely to deploy troops under federal control domestically without a request from a state government, with examples mostly dating from the Civil Rights era.
So this might explain Trump’s use of insurrectionist language: He’s giving himself legal room, and he’s already made clear he loves using statutes from the 18th and 19th centuries, meant for times of war, to expand his own power. “The people who are causing the problems are bad people, they are insurrectionists,” the president told a group of reporters Monday. He added that Newsom, a vociferous critic of the administration’s actions, is “a nice guy” but also “grossly incompetent.”
Border czar Tom Homan has been making the TV rounds, promising arrests for anyone who obstructs Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ability to do its job—hinting that even public officials might meet a sorry fate.
“Come and get me, tough guy,” Newsom had told Homan, antagonizing him a bit. “I’d do it if I were Tom,” said the president. But like so much of partisan politics right now, all that appears to have been bluster. “There’s no intention to arrest” California’s governor, Homan backtracked yesterday.
RFK Jr.’s big shakeup:Â Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just fired the entire 17-member Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), which reports its findings to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “to avoid conflicts of interest” and to “restore public trust in vaccines.”
“The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust,” writes Kennedy in The Wall Street Journal. “Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning. Some would try to explain this away by blaming misinformation or antiscience at
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