LOS ANGELES: About 200 Marines have moved into Los Angeles and will protect federal property, personnel, the commander in charge says.
Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, commander of Task Force 51 who is overseeing the 4,700 troops deployed, said Friday that the Marines have finished training on civil disturbance.
Sherman said the Marines would take over their operations at noon local time in downtown Los Angeles.
The development comes a day after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked a federal judge’s order that had directed President Donald Trump to return control of National Guard troops to California, shortly after a federal judge had ruled the Guard deployment was illegal and both violated the Tenth Amendment and exceeded Trump’s statutory authority
The federal judge's temporary restraining order said the Guard deployment was illegal and both violated the Tenth Amendment and exceeded President Donald Trump's statutory authority.
The order applied only to the National Guard troops and not Marines who were also deployed to the LA protests. The judge said he would not rule on the Marines because they were not out on the streets yet.
Gov. Gavin Newsom who had asked the judge for an emergency stop to troops helping carry out immigration raids, had praised the order before it was blocked saying “today was really about a test of democracy, and today we passed the test" and had said he would be redeploying Guard soldiers to “what they were doing before Donald Trump commandeered them.”
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump thanked the appeals court Friday morning.
“If I didn’t send the Military into Los Angeles, that city would be burning to the ground right now,” he said.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said the president acted within his powers and that the federal judge's order “puts our brave federal officials in danger. The district court has no authority to usurp the President’s authority as Commander in Chief."
The developments unfolded as protests continued in cities nationwide and the country braced for major demonstrations against Trump over the weekend.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the immigration raids that fueled the protests would move forward and agents have thousands of targets.
“This is only going to continue until we have peace on the streets of Los Angeles,” she said during a news conference that was interrupted by shouting from U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who was forcibly removed from the event.
Newsom has warned that the military intervention is part of a broader effort by Trump to overturn norms at the heart of the nation’s democracy. He also said sending Guard troops on the raids has further inflamed tensions in LA.
So far the protests have been centered mostly in downtown near City Hall and a federal detention center where some immigrants are being held. Much of the sprawling city has been spared from the protests.
On the third night of an 8 p.m. curfew, Los Angeles police arrested several demonstrators who refused orders to leave a street downtown. Earlier in the night, officers with the Department of Homeland Security deployed flash bangs to disperse a crowd that had gathered near the jail, sending protesters sprinting away.
Those incidents were outliers. As with the past two nights, the hourslong demonstrations remained peaceful and upbeat, drawing a few hundred attendees who marched through downtown chanting, dancing and poking fun at the Trump administration’s characterization of the city as a “war zone.”
Elsewhere, demonstrations have picked up across the U.S., emerging in more than a dozen major cities. Some have led to clashes with police and hundreds have been arrested.