Trump Federalizes California's National Guard Over Newsom's Objection — First Time Since 1965 — and Sends 700 Marines Into Los Angeles

What Happened, in Order

On Friday and Saturday, June 6 and 7, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a series of worksite raids in downtown Los Angeles — at a Home Depot, at the apparel-district garment factories, and at parking lots near a federal detention facility. The raids, ordered out of the White House as part of the administration’s ramp-up to 3,000 ICE arrests per day, swept up dozens of workers in front of crowds of family members and onlookers. Protests began the same afternoon. Some were peaceful. Others involved property damage, set fires, and clashes with the Los Angeles Police Department, which had jurisdiction and was managing the response.

On the evening of June 7, the President bypassed the governor of California. Trump signed a formal memorandum titled “Department of Defense Security for the Protection of Department of Homeland Security Functions” invoking 10 U.S.C. § 12406 — a Cold War-era statute permitting federalization of a state’s National Guard during an “invasion,” “rebellion,” or when “regular forces” cannot execute federal law — and called 2,000 California Guard members into federal service for sixty days under a unit designated Joint Task Force 51. Two days later, on June 9, he doubled the call-up to 4,000 Guard members and ordered the Pentagon to deploy 700 active-duty Marines from Camp Pendleton to Los Angeles to “protect federal personnel and property.” The Marines arrived in the city the following day.

Governor Gavin Newsom had not requested either. The Los Angeles Police Chief had not requested either. Mayor Karen Bass had not requested either. All three publicly opposed the deployments.

The First Time Since Selma

The headline historians reached for was accurate. The last time a U.S. president federalized a state’s National Guard over the governor’s express objection was 1965 — when Lyndon Johnson did it to protect civil-rights marchers in Alabama from the policy of segregationist Governor George Wallace, who refused to deploy state troops to defend Black demonstrators.

Trump’s invocation reversed that polarity. The civilian protesters in Los Angeles were protesting the federal government’s actions against their neighbors. The local authorities, far from refusing to enforce civil-rights law, were actively managing the protests and arresting individual rioters when needed. The President’s stated justification — that California was unable to maintain order — was untrue on its face. The actual justification was political. The protests had become a televised obstacle to the administration’s mass-deportation rollout, and the White House wanted footage of federal troops on American streets enforcing it.

The Legal Authority Was Not There

Section 12406 is not the Insurrection Act. It does not authorize troops to engage in civilian law enforcement. The president’s memorandum nominally restricted the Guard and Marines to protecting “federal functions” and federal property. In practice, photographs and video from the deployment showed Guard members forming perimeters around ICE arrest operations and Marines guarding the path of immigration buses through Los Angeles streets — the line between “protecting federal personnel” and conducting domestic policing was being erased in real time.

California Governor Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the federal government the following Monday. On June 12, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer — a senior judge who had served on the bench through three Republican and three Democratic administrations — ruled that Trump’s federalization was unlawful, exceeded the statutory predicates of 12406, and ordered control of the troops returned to the State of California. The Ninth Circuit immediately stayed the order to give the administration one week to appeal. The legal fight ran through the rest of 2025; in December, a separate federal court ruling found that the administration’s continued use of the deployment to maintain a standing federal force in California cities was itself unconstitutional.

By then, the troops had already been in Los Angeles for half a year.

What the Deployment Was Really For

The administration sold the move on cable as a response to “rioters” and “anarchists.” A more honest reading is available in the Axios reporting from that week: the White House and congressional Republicans used the televised images of the LA deployment to whip votes for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included $150 billion in new immigration-enforcement funding. Vote against the bill, members were told, and you are voting with the LA rioters. The deployment manufactured the political pressure the legislation needed.

It also normalized something. After June 2025, the question of whether active-duty Marines could be sent into an American city to back up an executive-branch deportation campaign over the governor’s objection moved from “constitutional crisis” to “ongoing political dispute pending appeal.” That shift is the deliverable. Each future use of military force in a domestic enforcement role becomes easier to defend because Los Angeles in 2025 set the floor.

The Pattern

The same administration that pardoned the January 6 defendants in January, that fired the USAID Inspector General in February, and that signed the CECOT deportation order in March now had photographs of Marines on Los Angeles streets. Each step alone could be litigated. Taken together, they describe a federal executive accumulating the legal and material tools — military deployable inside the United States, civil-service protections stripped, courts slow to enforce orders, an attorney general willing to argue anything — that any future authoritarian project requires. The Los Angeles deployment is what that project looks like when it stops asking permission.