Trump Is Right to Activate National Guard in Los Angeles

After a day and a half of rioting in Los Angeles County, President Donald Trump activated the National Guard to protect federal officers and property. The riots were triggered by ICE’s attempts on Friday, June 6, to arrest a few dozen illegal aliens.

The president’s mobilization order, signed on Saturday, June 7, was clarifying and precise: “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.”

L.A.’s illegal-alien riots have provided Trump with a picture-perfect opportunity to deliver on his central campaign promises: the era of tolerating arson, looting, destruction of property, and attacks on law enforcement is over; the era of enabling endemic immigration lawlessness is over. And that picture-perfect opportunity has filled the Democratic establishment with impotent rage.

It is fitting that Los Angeles would be the staging ground for the White House’s affirmation of law and order. California leads the country in its contempt for immigration law in particular, and for public order more generally. From October 1, 2022, to February 6, 2025, California’s jails and prisons refused to allow ICE agents to take custody of 13,025 illegal-alien criminals—over half of all such refusals nationwide. By comparison, Illinois was a distant second, with 2,946 refusals, and New York State, with a “mere” 873 refusals, was sixth. Jails controlled by the Los Angeles Police Department and by the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department released 1,037 illegal-alien criminals over that period, including six homicide suspects or convicts, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

California’s cradle-to-grave welfare subsidies for illegal aliens and its widespread sanctuary policies have made the state a magnet for border-crossing migrants. That longstanding encouragement of immigration lawlessness has bred a sense of entitlement. The illegal-alien riots serve as an object lesson in Broken Windows theory: tolerate lawlessness in one sphere of activity, and you will cultivate it in another.

California’s Democratic officials and sanctuary activists take it as a given that ICE has no right to make immigration arrests at or around workplaces—which is where the Friday enforcement actions took place. This no-workplace enforcement principle, made up out of thin air, is just a site-specific variant of a broader rule that the open-borders lobby has willed into existence: the government may not create anxiety in illegal aliens.

For decades, the mainstream media has denounced any hint of enforcement in the interior of the country because the mere possibility of being picked up by ICE, however remote, was making the illegal-alien “community” “fearful.” Apparently, there is not just an entitlement not to be deported once you cross the border illegally but also an entitlement to be free from any concern that you might be deported. Since, therefore, ICE’s enforcement efforts were illegitimate—notwithstanding that agents acted pursuant to judicial warrants—radical resistance to those efforts was necessary.

California is also ground zero for the toleration of crime and disorder. Vagrants rule the streets in many parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and other cities. Three of the country’s most influential pro-decriminalization, anti-incarceration district attorneys—Chesa Boudin in San Franscisco, George Gascón in Los Angeles, and Pamela Price in Oakland—presided in California until recent electoral defeats. Southern California is the home of street takeovers—whereby large groups commandeer major intersections to race cars, often followed by looting of nearby convenience stores. The use of SUVs to ram into luxury stores and bodegas alike in order to clear out the merchandise seemed to originate in California after the George Floyd race riots, as did follow-home robberies, whereby thieves spot Rolex and other fine jewelry-wearers at restaurants and follow them home to assault them.

So when Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass says, as she did on MSNBC on Tuesday morning, “I’m going to do everything I can to keep Angelenos safe, no matter how they came here,” when California governor Gavin Newsom says in a fundraising appeal on Tuesday morning: “Keeping Californians safe has always been our number one priority,” many Californians will chortle bitterly. Of course, to be fair to Bass, her solicitude was directed to the city’s large illegal-alien population, not to its law-abiding citizens, in the same way that Bass and her fellow government officials direct their primary concern to the state’s homeless population and criminals, not to taxpaying, hardworking residents.

Given the double whammy of California’s pervasive border and street lawlessness, the illegal-alien riots were overdetermined. The list of targets and tactics will be familiar from the George Floyd race riots. Anarchists hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks, and bottles at law enforcement personnel; they positioned themselves on freeway overpasses to drop concrete blocks, electric scooters, and fireworks on California Highway Patrol officers on the road below. They dragged concrete, shopping carts, and street furniture into intersections to impede traffic. They shut down part of a freeway. They set fires in the middle of streets; they torched cars; they ransacked stores. At least four driverless Waymo taxis were summoned to their fiery execution, having been ritually prepared for conflagration by ecstatic layers of graffiti. Graffiti also covered Los Angeles’s beloved Disney Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, because the will to destroy that has been given free rein in American society is insatiable.

As with the George Floyd race riots, the media and Democratic politicians dismissed this mayhem as “relatively minor” (in Mayor Bass’s words) and localized. Not all of Los Angeles was teetering on collapse; thus, a forceful response to where the collapse was occurring must be overwrought.

As with the George Floyd riots, apologists for the chaos performed a causal sleight-of-hand: it was the response to the violence that was responsible for the violence, and not vice versa. Time and again, California’s leaders blamed Trump’s decision to mobilize the National Guard as the provocation for the riots. Governor Newsom blasted the deployment as “purposefully inflammatory” and a move that “will only escalate tensions.”

But the violence preceded the mobilization. And giving rioters and looters the implicit authority to abort any law enforcement response on the ground that that response will only inflame them further is a recipe for nonstop anarchy. The rhetoric around the National Guard deployment—to date a mere 300 officers—has been hyperbolic. The guard members have merely stood in front of federal buildings in downtown Los Angeles, staying in the background. They are not proactively engaging with the rioters. There are no tanks or other assault vehicles.

Trump was also criticized for not having followed his own precedent during the George Floyd riots, when he ultimately abjured from calling out the National Guard or the military. How well did that work out?

The failure to crush the 2020 riots as soon as they broke out led to months of copycat hot rioting, followed by years of slow-motion cold riots in the form of organized violent looting, rampant shoplifting, and random assaults on elderly passersby. Trump was right to conclude that standing by during violence only allows it to spread.

Reporters and pundits fumed that Trump had set a trap.

“This is the fight the administration wants to have,” said an MSNBC correspondent. “It wants to make the case that the President is stepping in on the side of law and order.”

In almost identical language, the BBC complained that the speed with which Trump reacted to what it called “largely peaceful” protests “suggests that this is a fight his administration is prepared for—and even eager to have.” Trump promised on the campaign trail that he would not “tolerate left-wing lawlessness on American streets and would use the full force of his presidential powers in response,” added the BBC.

These observations are meant to delegitimate Trump’s decisive actions. Here’s a suggestion: if you don’t want to give Trump the opportunity to orchestrate a defense of law and order, maintain the peace yourself.

Reality kept getting in the way of the anti-law-enforcement narrative, thanks to the co-dependent relationship between performative rioters and video-hungry media. What the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press referred to primly as “flags” waved during the riots were, as the footage revealed, in fact Mexican flags, with a few Palestinian ones thrown in for good intersectional measure.

Why were people who were wreaking havoc in order to prevent the deportation of illegal Mexican aliens back to Mexico waving Mexican flags? If Mexico so commands their allegiance, isn’t ICE providing a benefit by offering free transportation to the motherland?

Trump has referred to an “invasion” of illegal aliens. That characterization does not seem wildly off-base when one sees the ostensible fealties of the alleged invaders.

A history of normalizing, minimizing, or even celebrating violence preceded the illegal-alien riots, including the beatification of assassin Luigi Mangione, the glorification of Hamas terrorism, and the excusing of inner-city street crime routinely provided by Democratic public figures.

Even the judiciary is complicit in the erosion of respect for the law. On Monday, June 9, the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct began a hearing on whether a former trial court judge in Newton, Massachusetts (a hotbed of liberalism), assisted an illegal alien criminal in evading ICE agents in 2018. Federal prosecutors brought a similar charge this year against a Milwaukee County Circuit Judge. When judges feel entitled to defy lawful federal authority, you know we have a problem.

In the end, only 44 illegal aliens were picked up in the allegedly “mass” deportation raids in Los Angeles County. Their records include second-degree murder, assault with the intent to commit rape, assault with a deadly weapon, sexual battery, grand theft larceny, illegal weapon possession, and drug trafficking. These are the individuals whom the entirety of California’s Democratic establishment is willing to go to the mat to protect, while denouncing Trump’s efforts to defend businesses, peaceful property owners, commuters, and the police.

Others among the 44 arrestees undoubtedly “only” committed the offense of illegal entry. The idea that the absence of a broader criminal record should render an illegal alien immune from deportation is one of the founding myths of the open-borders lobby that should be definitively put to rest.

Governor Newsom sued Trump on Tuesday morning, claiming that Trump violated the U.S. Constitution—specifically, the Tenth Amendment reserving power to the states—in calling out the National Guard. Newsom had already undermined his credibility by the third paragraph of the complaint: “On Saturday, June 7, [Trump] used a protest that local authorities had under control to make another unprecedented power grab.” What was occurring in various parts of Los Angeles was rioting, not “protest.” And Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell himself conceded on Sunday night that “this thing has gotten out of control.”

The authority that Trump invoked in activating the Guard—10 U.S.C. 12406—provides 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.” Trump’s order is confined to the “temporary” protection of ICE and other federal personnel, as they enforce federal law, and to the protection of federal property in places where protests against federal enforcement have occurred or are likely to occur. Another clause of Section 10 U.S.C. 12406 holds that “orders for these purposes shall be issued through the governors of the States.” Whether a president can activate the Guard for such a limited supporting-only function without going through a governor, without invoking further legal authority, and without violating the Posse Comitatus Act is an untested question that a court will rule on after a hearing this Thursday.

Tuesday’s mobilization of the Marines to protect ICE agents is equally complex, but even more politically fraught. This latest step in the escalating feud over law and order in California risks looking excessive, notwithstanding that violence and vandalism have been spreading to other cities both within and outside of the state.

The Trump National Guard mobilization brought into relief an important distinction. There is violence, and then there is violence, in the words of the June 7 memorandum, intended to “inhibit the execution of the laws.” Both eat away at social order, but the latter is a death knell for civilization. That is why, when progressive prosecutors in California and elsewhere decriminalize resisting arrest, they are violating their most sacred oath of office.

To the disgust of the media, Trump said after the mobilization: “No one will spit on our police and our military; when they spit, we will hit.” There may be more eloquent ways to express this determination, but for many Americans, Trump’s unapologetic defense of the law this weekend represented liberation from a poisonous set of lies.

Top Photo by RINGO CHIU/AFP via Getty Images