Trump displays the National Guard as Los Angeles’s protests against immigration agents continue

Los Angeles, June 7 (Reuters) – The administration of President Donald Trump said he would deploy 2,000 national guard troops on Saturday when federal agents in Los Angeles face a few hundred protesters during a second day of protests after immigration reades.

The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegesh, warned that the Pentagon was prepared to mobilize active service troops “if violence continues” in Los Angeles, saying that the Marines in the nearby Camp Pendleton were “on a maximum alert.”

Federal security agents on Saturday faced protesters in the Paramount area in southeastern Los Angeles, where some protesters showed Mexican flags. A second protest in the center of Los Angeles on Saturday night attracted about 60 people, who sang slogans, including “ice outside Los Angeles!”

Trump signed a presidential memorandum to deploy the National Guard troops to “address the anarchy that has been allowed to be stirred,” said the White House in a statement. Trump’s border tsar, Tom Homan, told News that the National Guard would deploy in Los Angeles on Saturday.

The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, described the decision as “intentional inflammation.” He published in X that Trump was deploying the National Guard “not because there is a police scarcity, but because they want a show,” adding: “Do not give them violence. Never use. Talk peacefully.”

Newsom said it was “upset behavior” for Hegseth “to threaten to deploy active duty marines on American soil against his own citizens.”

Trump published on his real social platform that if Newsom and the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, cannot do their job, “then the federal government will intervene and solve the problem, the riots and looters, the way in which it must be resolved!”

The protests face Los Angeles, where census data suggests that a significant part of the population is Hispanic and born abroad, against Trump’s Republican White House, which has made the energetic measures against immigration a distinctive seal of its second mandate.

Kevin Dietsch through Getty Images

‘Violent insurrection’

“Insurrectionists who transport foreign flags are attacking immigration agents, while half of the United States political leadership has decided that the border application is evil,” published Vice President JD Vance in X late on Saturday.

The White House assistant, Stephen Miller, a hard immigration alineator, described protests as a “violent insurrection.”

The administration has not invoked the insurrection law, two US officials said to Reuters based on anonymity. One said that the National Guard troops can be deployed rapidly, within 24 hours in some cases, and that the military were working to obtain the 2,000 troops.

The 1807 law empowers a president to deploy the US Army to enforce the law and suppress events such as civil disorder. The last time it was invoked was during the Los Angeles riots in 1992 at the request of the governor of California.

The video images of the Paramount protest showed dozens of uniform security personnel with gas masks in the Paramount protest, aligned on a road full of pumping shopping cars while small boats exploded in gas clouds. The authorities began to stop some protesters, according to Reuters witnesses.

The Los Angeles police published in X that “several people have been arrested for not dispersing after multiple warnings were issued.” He did not give more details.

There was no official information of any arrest.

“Now they know that they cannot go anywhere in this country where our people are, and try to kidnap our workers, our people, they cannot do it without organized and fierce resistance,” said the protester Ron Gochez, 44.

A first round of protests began on Friday night after the Immigration and Customs Compliance agents carried out application operations in the city and arrested at least 44 people for alleged immigration violations.

The National Security Department said in a statement that there were about “1,000 uprooters” in Friday’s protests.

Reuters could not verify the DHS account. Angelica Salas, executive director of the Immigrant Rights Organization, Chirla, said the lawyers had not had access to the detainees on Friday, what she called “very worrying.”

Anadolu through Getty Images

Trump’s immigration repression

Trump has pledged to deport a record number of people in the country illegally and block the border between the United States and Mexico, and the White House establishes a goal for ICE to arrest at least 3,000 migrants per day.

But the repression of radical immigration has also caught the persons legally residing in the country, including some with permanent residence, and has led to legal challenges.

ICE, the Department of National Security and the Los Angeles Police Department did not respond to requests for comments on protests or if there were immigration writings on Saturday.

The television news images on Friday showed unmarked vehicles that resemble military transport and trucks loaded with uniformed federal agents that transmit through the streets of Los Angeles as part of the immigration application operation.

The raids occurred in Home Depot stores, where street vendors and daily workers were collected, as well as in a clothing factory and a warehouse, Chirla Salas said.

Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, condemned immigration raids.

“I am deeply angry about what has happened,” Bass said in a statement. “These tactics sow terror in our communities and interrupt the basic security principles in our city. We will not defend this.”

(Sandra Stojanovic and Omar Younis report; additional reports from Lucia Mutikani, Alexandra Ulmer, Michael Martina and Idrees Ali; writing of Alexandra Ulmer and Lucia Mutikani; Diane Craft, Deepa Babington, Michelle Nichols and William Mallar)