California on Monday filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, accusing the US president of “unlawfully” federalizing the state’s national guard to quell immigration protests in Los Angeles.
Trump’s extraordinary deployment of troops to Los Angeles exceeds federal authority and violates the 10th amendment in an “unprecedented usurpation” of state powers, according to the court filing.
“The Governor of the State of California and the State of California bring this action to protect the State against the illegal actions of the President, Secretary of Defense, and Department of Defense to deploy members of the California National Guard, without lawful authority, and in violation of the Constitution,” the complaint states.
Previewing the suitearlier on Monday, the attorney general, Rob Bonta, said the move “trampled” the state’s sovereignty, overriding objections by the governor Gavin Newsom and going “against the wishes of law enforcement on the ground”. Bonta said the legal action will ask the court to declare Trump’s call deployment of the guard unlawful and will seek a restraining order to halt the use of its troops to manage the protests.
“We don’t take lightly to the president abusing his authority and unlawfully mobilizing California national guard troops,” the attorney general said during a virtual news conference on Monday.
The announcement came hours before the US military said it was activating a battalion of 700 marines to Los Angeles to protect federal property and personnel. On Monday evening, Newsom said he had been informed that Trump was deploying an additional 2,000 national guard troops to the city.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly did not address specifics of the lawsuit, saying in a statement that California should “prosecute the anti-Ice rioters” and accusing the governor of being “more focused on saving face than protecting law enforcement and holding criminals accountable”.
“As the president said, Newsom should thank him for restoring law and order,” Kelly said.
Democratic officials have argued that local law enforcement agencies had been adequately managing the protests, which began on Friday in response to a series of immigration enforcement operations across the LA area.
“This was not inevitable,” Bonta said, arguing that the demonstrations had largely dissipated by the time Trump, on Saturday, announced his plans to assert federal control over at least 2,000 national guard troops for at least 60 days, which Bonta said inflamed the situation. On Sunday, roughly 300 California national guard troops arrived in Los Angeles, prompting an outpouring of anger and fear among residents.
Trump’s call-up order “skipped over multiple rational, common sense, strategic steps that should have been deployed to quell unrest and prevent escalation”, he said.
Newsom has accused Trump of intentionally sowing chaos, claiming Trump “wants a civil war on the streets” and appealing for protesters not to give the administration the spectacle of violence it is hoping to stoke.
“This is a manufactured crisis to allow him to take over a state militia, damaging the very foundation of our republic,” Newsom said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Every governor, red or blue, should reject this outrageous overreach. This is beyond incompetence – this is him intentionally causing chaos, terrorizing communities, and endangering the principles of our great democracy.”
On Sunday, Newsom formally requested that Trump rescind his order and return command of the guard to his office. In a letter to the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the governor’s legal affairs secretary, David Sapp, argued there was “currently no need” for such intervention by the federal government and that local law enforcement was capable of “safeguarding public safety”.
In the court filing, California alleges that Hegseth acted “unlawfully” by circumventing the governor when he ordered the national guard into federal service.
“Trump and Hegseth jumped from zero to 60,” Bonta said. “Bypassing law enforcement expertise and evaluation, they threw caution to the wind and sidelined strategy in an unnecessary and inflammatory escalation that only further spurred unrest.”
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In a rhetorical back and forth between Newsom and Trump, longtime political foes who clashed repeatedly during Trump’s first administration, Trump said he endorsed a threat by his “border czar” Tom Homan to arrest Democratic leaders in California if they impeded law enforcement, including Newsom. “Gavin likes the publicity but I think it would be a great thing,” Trump told reporters on Monday.
Newsom responded to the taunt on Twitter/X, calling Trump’s support for the arrest of a sitting governor “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”.
The Trump administration has said that the immigration protests in Los Angeles amount to a “form of rebellion” against the authority of the United States government.
The order does not invoke the Insurrection Act, the 1807 law that allows the president to deploy US soldiers to police streets during times of rebellion or unrest. Instead, it cites a rarely used section of federal law, known as Title 10, that allows the president to federalize national guard units in circumstances where there is a “rebellion or danger of rebellion” or the president is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.
“There was no risk of rebellion, no threat of foreign invasion, no inability for the federal government to enforce federal laws,” Bonta said. He told reporters his office had studied the Insurrection Act and was prepared to respond should Trump later invoke it as a legal authority to deploy the US military. “We’re prepared for all of it,” he said.
The statute has been invoked only once in modern history, Bonta noted, in 1970, when president Richard Nixon mobilized the nationalguard to deliver the mail during a strike by the postal service. The last time a president activated the national guard without a request from the state’s governor was in 1965, when president Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.
In 1992, George HW Bush sent troops to LA to calm widespread civil unrest following the acquittal of four white police officers for brutally beating Black motorist Rodney King. But in that case both the California governor and the mayor of Los Angeles requested the federal intervention.
