Dive Brief:
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U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Wednesday granted a preliminary injunction ending the Trump administration’s federalization of the California National Guard. Allowing a president unchecked power to control state troops “would wholly upend the federalism that is at the heart of our system of government,” he wrote.
- Breyer stayed the order until Monday, Dec. 15, leaving room for the Trump administration to appeal. “We look forward to ultimate victory on the issue,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson said in an emailed statement.
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“The Trump administration’s deployment of troops was a deliberate attempt to create disorder in our city,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass posted on social media yesterday. “Our National Guard should support public safety, not be used against the people of Los Angeles.”
Dive Insight:
Trump ordered the deployment of 2,000 California Army National Guard soldiers to protect federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area on June 8, during protests over federal immigration enforcement raids in the city. California Gov. Gavin Newsom sued the Trump administration the next day, arguing the deployment exceeded the scope of the president’s authority.
Breyer issued a temporary restraining order, which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed pending appeal. The Ninth Circuit has held a hearing on the Trump administration’s appeal of that restraining order but hasn’t issued a ruling.
Breyer ruled Sept. 2 that the deployment violated federal law and. His ruling prohibited Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from deploying National Guard troops to other cities. “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have stated their intention to call national Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country — including Oakland and San Francisco, here in the Northern District of California — thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” Breyer wrote.
On Sept. 28, after Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek declined Trump’s request that she mobilize Oregon’s National Guard to address protests at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, Hegseth sent 200 members of the California National Guard to Portland, Oregon. On Nov. 7, U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut issued a permanent injunction barring the Trump administration from deploying any National Guard troops in Portland. That ruling is also on appeal before the Ninth Circuit, which has agreed to rehear an earlier ruling that favored the Trump administration.
In his ruling Wednesday, Breyer wrote that the Trump administration’s “shocking” interpretation of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which allows the president to call the National Guard into federal service if the U.S. is in danger of invasion or rebellion, “would validate the Founders’ ‘widespread fear [of] a national standing Army,’ which they believed ‘posed an intolerable threat to individual liberty and to the sovereignty of the separate States.’”
Saying the Trump administration “has held California National Guard troops hostage as part of its political games,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta applauded Breyer’s ruling. “Once again, a court has firmly rejected the President’s attempt to make the National Guard a traveling national police force,” he said in a statement.
