Washington — President Trump signed a memorandum over the weekend deploying the National Guard to, as he says, protect federal immigration officials and other federal law enforcement in Los Angeles amid heated protests over immigration raids, citing Title 10 of the federal code.
Large-scale but concentrated protests have broken out throughout L.A. County, including in the Westlake District, downtown L.A. and Paramount, following a widespread operation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week. A federal law enforcement official told CBS News that multiple federal law enforcement officers have been injured during confrontations with protesters.
“In light of these incidents and credible threats of continued violence,” as the memo said, the president issued instructions to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, to authorize the National Guard to post up in Los Angeles.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he doesn’t want or need the National Guard there, and his administration on Monday announced it had filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the deployment, arguing it violated state sovereignty.
Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said 39 people were arrested over the weekend, as of Sunday evening.
The military has put about 700 Marines on high alert to possibly deploy to Los Angeles, three U.S. officials told CBS News.
What did President Trump order regarding the National Guard?
The presidential memorandum Mr. Trump issued Saturday said at least 2,000 National Guard troops would be deployed to Los Angeles, and those soldiers are now arriving in the area. The president has charged National Guard personnel with protecting ICE officials and other federal authorities and employees. They have not been granted the authority to arrest civilians.
“In light of these incidents and credible threats of continued violence, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby call into federal service members and units of the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to temporarily protect ICE and other United States government personnel who are performing federal functions, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations,” the memorandum said.
The memo says the National Guard personnel will be there for 60 days “or at the discretion of the secretary of defense.” The majority of National Guard troops being deployed, according to a Defense Department official, are with the California National Guard.
The memo also said the defense secretary may employ “any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.”
What is Title 10 authority?
The federal code Mr. Trump cited, 10 U.S.C. 12406, says “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,” in the event that “the United States, or any of the commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation; there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States; or the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
Loyola University Law professor and CBS News contributor Jessica Levinson told CBS Los Angeles that Title 10 allows the president to “call up the National Guard to provide some sort of backup, some personnel assistance, to ICE and other federal law enforcement.”
Mr. Trump has insisted on social media that Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have not been up to the job of protecting the city, despite their disagreement.
“Governor Gavin Newscum and ‘Mayor’ Bass should apologize to the people of Los Angeles for the absolutely horrible job that they have done, and this now includes the ongoing L.A. riots,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday morning.
“Let’s get this straight,” Newsom wrote on X Sunday. ” 1) Local law enforcement didn’t need help. 2) Trump sent troops anyway — to manufacture chaos and violence. 3) Trump succeeded. 4) Now things are destabilized and we need to send in more law enforcement just to clean up Trump’s mess.”
Bass has been critical of the immigration raids and of Mr. Trump’s handling of the situation.
“Angelenos — don’t engage in violence and chaos. Don’t give the administration what they want,” she wrote on X.
Mr. Trump also invoked Title 10 authority to deploy U.S. troops to the U.S.-Mexico border after his inauguration in January.
Does Title 10 give Trump the authority to deploy the National Guard?
Newsom insists that the president “illegally acted to federalize the National Guard.”
Loyola’s Levinson assessed that the president likely has the authority to call out the National Guard in a merely supportive role as described in the memorandum. Levinson told CBS Los Angeles it’s important to “be careful as to which authority the president is using and what that allows the National Guard to do.”
“This is very different than if he does ultimately invoke the Insurrection Act,” Levinson told CBS Los Angeles. “That is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which says in general that the military should not act as a domestic law enforcement force or body. And so, what we’re looking at here is, does the president keep this at Title 10, which essentially, again allows the National Guard to come in in a supporting role only. Or, are we looking at invoking the Insurrection Act, which is an exception to the general rule that the military really can’t act like a domestic police force. That would provide the National Guard with a lot more substantive authority, and that would, I would offer, be something that I don’t think historically we’ve ever seen where you have a president against the wishes of the governor and the mayor sending in the National Guard in to send some potentially extensive functions.”
A 1971 Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion on the president’s authority to use troops, written in light of the Mayday protests, said federal law “does not prevent the use of troops to protect the functioning of the government by assuring the availability of federal employees to carry out their assigned duties and that troops may therefore be utilized to prevent traffic obstructions designed to prevent the access of employees to their agencies.” The opinion also says that “if serious violence occurs beyond the control of police, the president could also, upon proper request, invoke his authority to use troops pursuant to 10 U.S.C. §§ 331–334.”
Steve Vladeck, professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on national security law, said in his Substack newsletter “One First” that the president’s move “is a big deal” but also “not as drastic an escalation (or abuse) as many had feared, at least not yet.”
Vladeck said the federal code the White House cited “provides no additional substantive authority that the federal government did not already possess.”
“There’s nothing these troops will be allowed to do that, for example, the ICE officers against whom these protests have been directed could not do themselves,” he wrote. “And because of the Posse Comitatus Act, the reverse is not true; there is plenty that these troops cannot legally do that the ICE officers can.”
How is Title 10 authority different from the Insurrection Act?
Mr. Trump invoked the Title 10 authority, which allows the president to call the military and National Guard of any state “as he considers necessary to repel the invasion, suppress the rebellion, or execute those laws.” Protecting federal law enforcement in California, Levinson suggested, may be a valid use of that authority. Under Title 10, U.S. military personnel are not supposed to act as law enforcement officers against American civilians.
It’s a different situation than if he had invoked the Insurrection Act, which goes much further than Title 10. In normal circumstances, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act barring U.S. soldiers from acting like law enforcement in the U.S.
But the Insurrection Act, first enacted in 1792, allows the president to deploy the military inside the U.S. to help civilian law enforcement with law enforcement duties. The Insurrection Act can be invoked if a state’s legislature or sometimes governor requests federal aid to suppress an insurrection in the state. And it can be invoked over a state’s objections in order to “enforce the laws” of the U.S. or “suppress rebellion” when “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” make it “impracticable” to enforce federal law in that state by the “ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.
The Brennan Center argues the Insurrection Act should be used only in crises, and says the law is too vague in its language, leaving room for abuse. The law doesn’t define “insurrection,” “rebellion” or “domestic violence,” they note.
In 1992, former President George H.W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act to deploy thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell riots after a jury acquitted police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King. But he was acting at the request of state officials.
Deploying the National Guard often falls to state governors
Deploying the National Guard to respond to incidents or natural disasters often falls to state governors, as they’re in charge of their state’s National Guard.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, for instance, deployed the National Guard in 2020 when protests broke out over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Critics of Walz said he didn’t call in the National Guard soon enough.
Governors often deploy the National Guard to the sites of natural disasters like hurricanes and floods.
But while it’s not a frequent occurrence, presidents have federalized the National Guard before. Bush federalized the National Guard in 1992, and in 1965, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized Alabama’s National Guard in order to protect civil rights demonstrators in Montgomery, without the cooperation of Alabama’s governor.
What are the concerns with deploying the National Guard and what happens next?
Vladeck warned that, even though the National Guard’s authority is limited in scope for now, there are risks with deploying the soldiers. One risk is “the very real possibility that having federal troops on the ground will only raise the risk of escalating violence, not decrease it,” he wrote.
Vladeck also warned that “domestic use of the military can nevertheless be corrosive—to the morale of the troops involved, all of a sudden, in policing their own; to the relationship between local/state governments and the federal government; and to the broader relationship between the military and civil society.”
Melissa Quinn,
Austin Turner,
Dean Fioresi and
Camilo Montoya-Galvez
contributed to this report.
