California’s Gavin Newsom asks Trump to remove National Guard from Los Angeles
Gov. Gavin Newsom asked the Trump administration on Sunday to rescind its move to deploy 2,000 California National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to subdue immigration protests, accusing the White House of illegally overriding his authority and intentionally inflaming tensions with protesters.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Newsom accused the federal government of “breaching state sovereignty” by citing a rarely-used federal statute to override his authority and mobilize state militia members to protect federal immigration officials as they carried out mass raids and arrested suspected undocumented residents.
“We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved,” Newsom said. As of Sunday evening, he was in Los Angeles meeting with law enforcement and local officials, according to an aide.
The last time a president called in the National Guard without a governor’s cooperation was in 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson ordered troops to protect civil rights demonstrators in Alabama.
Three hundred members of the San Diego-based California National Guard 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team arrived in the Los Angeles area Sunday morning to guard Homeland Security employees and buildings in three locations, according to U.S. Northern Command.
For three days, Angelenos have been protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, which resulted in at least 118 arrests and drew rebukes from politicians including Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass after officials injured a state labor leader while arresting him for allegedly blocking a van.
Trump released a memorandum Saturday night invoking Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services, which lets federal authorities take over state militia like the California National Guard in times of “rebellion or danger of rebellion” against the U.S. government. The memorandum allows Hegseth to deploy guard members for up to 60 days; he has also said he would deploy Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton, which Newsom called “deranged.”
The protests came weeks after Trump doubled down on unspecified threats to cut off federal funding to California if it did not bar a transgender athlete from competing at a state track meet and Congress voted to rescind rules allowing the state to set its own air pollution standards.
“In dynamic and fluid situations such as the one in Los Angeles, state and local authorities are the most appropriate ones to evaluate the need to safeguard life and property,” Newsom wrote to Hegseth.
“There is currently no need for the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles and to do so in this unlawful manner and for such a lengthy manner is a serious breach of state sovereignty that seems intentionally designed to inflame the situation, while simultaneously depriving the state from deploying these personnel and resources where they are truly required.”
White House officials told the New York Times the two spoke on Friday, when Trump told Newsom to order local police to restore order.
Trump falsely claimed on social media late Sunday afternoon that Los Angeles had been overrun by undocumented migrants and that “insurrectionist mobs were attacking federal agents” carrying out deportations.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Newsom’s letter.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, a Los Angeles resident, said in a statement she was “appalled” at the federal administration for deploying the National Guard.
“The administration’s actions are not about public safety — they’re about stoking fear,” she said. “Deploying the National Guard is a dangerous escalation meant to provoke chaos. In addition to the recent ICE raids in Southern California and across our nation, it is part of the Trump administration’s cruel, calculated agenda to spread panic and division.”
This story was originally published June 8, 2025 at 4:32 PM with the headline "California’s Gavin Newsom asks Trump to remove National Guard from Los Angeles."
