Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass blamed the increasingly aggressive protests on Trump’s decision to deploy the Guard, calling it a move designed to enflame tensions. They’ve both urged protesters to remain peaceful.“What we’re seeing in Los Angeles is chaos that is provoked by the administration,” she said in an afternoon press conference. “This is about another agenda, this isn’t about public safety.”But McDonnell, the LAPD chief, said the protests were following a similar pattern for episodes of civil unrest, with things ramping up in the second and third days.He pushed back against claims by the Trump administration that the LAPD had failed to help federal authorities when protests broke out Friday after a series of immigration raids. His department responded as quickly as it could, and had not been notified in advance of the raids and therefore was not pre-positioned for protests, he said.Newsom, meanwhile, has repeatedly said that California authorities had the situation under control. He mocked Trump for posting a congratulatory message to the Guard on social media before troops had even arrived in Los Angeles, and said on MSNBC that Trump never floated deploying the Guard during a Friday phone call. He called Trump a “stone cold liar.”The admonishments did not deter the administration.“It’s a bald-faced lie for Newsom to claim there was no problem in Los Angeles before President Trump got involved,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.Deployment follows days of protestThe arrival of the National Guard followed two days of protests that began Friday in downtown Los Angeles before spreading on Saturday to Paramount, a heavily Latino city south of the city, and neighboring Compton.Federal agents arrested immigrants in LA’s fashion district, in a Home Depot parking lot and at several other locations on Friday. The next day, they were staging at a Department of Homeland Security office near another Home Depot in Paramount, which drew out protesters who suspected another raid. Federal authorities later said there was no enforcement activity at that Home Depot.The weeklong tally of immigrant arrests in the LA area climbed above 100, federal authorities said. Many more were arrested while protesting, including a prominent union leader who was accused of impeding law enforcement.The protests did not reach the size of past demonstrations that brought the National Guard to Los Angeles, including the Watts and Rodney King riots, and the 2020 protests against police violence, in which Newsom requested the assistance of federal troops.The last time the National Guard was activated without a governor’s permission was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Trump says there will be ‘very strong law and order’In a directive Saturday, Trump invoked a legal provision allowing him to deploy federal service members when there is ”a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”He said he had authorized the deployment of 2,000 members of the National Guard.Trump told reporters as he prepared to board Air Force One in Morristown, New Jersey, Sunday that there were “violent people” in Los Angeles “and they’re not gonna get away with it.”Asked if he planned to send U.S. troops to Los Angeles, Trump replied: “We’re gonna have troops everywhere. We’re not going to let this happen to our country.” He didn’t elaborate.About 500 Marines stationed at Twentynine Palms, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) east of Los Angeles were in a “prepared to deploy status” Sunday afternoon, according to the U.S. Northern Command.
Source link
