Members of California’s National Guard were seen staging early Sunday at the federal complex in downtown Los Angeles that includes the Metropolitan Detention Center, one of several sites that have seen confrontations involving hundreds of people in last two days.
The troops included members of the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, according to a social media post from the Department of Defense that showed dozens of National Guard members with long guns and an armored vehicle.
Trump has said he is deploying 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests, which he called “a form of rebellion.”
Early Sunday, the deployment was limited to a small area in downtown Los Angeles. The protests have been relatively small and limited to a downtown section. The rest of the city of 4 million people is largely unaffected.
Tensions were high after a series of sweeps by immigration authorities the previous day, as the weeklong tally of immigrant arrests in the city climbed past 100. A prominent union leader was arrested while protesting and accused of impeding law enforcement.
On Sunday morning, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the National Guard would “keep peace and allow people to be able to protest but also to keep law and order.”
In a signal of the administration’s aggressive approach, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also threatened to deploy active-duty Marines “if violence continues” in the region.
The move came over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom, marking the first time in decades that a state’s National Guard was activated without a request from its governor, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Newsom, a Democrat, said Trump’s decision to call in the National Guard was “purposefully inflammatory.” He described Hegseth’s threat to deploy Marines on American soil as “deranged behavior.”
Trump’s order came after clashes in Paramount and neighboring Compton, where a car was set on fire. Protests continued into the evening in Paramount, with several hundred demonstrators gathered near a doughnut shop, and authorities holding up barbed wire to keep the crowd back.
Crowds also gathered again outside federal buildings in downtown Los Angeles, including a detention center, where local police declared an unlawful assembly and began to arrest people.
A senior Los Angeles city official has told CBS, the BBC's US partner, that the National Guard is deployed at the federal buildings in downtown LA and Westwood.
Trump’s decision to federalise the National Guard, which is normally under state control, is unusual.
The military force’s website says it was brought under federal control using Title 10 of the US Code – the same law Trump used – during the Civil Rights era.
Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson used the National Guard to help enforce civil rights and keep public order.
The Guard was also federalised during the 1967 Detroit riot, in riots after the killing of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, and during the New York postal strike in 1970.
According to CNN, the last time a president federalised the National Guard was during the 1992 LA riots, external, after four white police officers were acquitted over the videotaped beating of a black motorist.
"There are going to be several protests today in the city of Los Angeles. The city and police are monitoring those," the official says.
The official also says the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has made 29 arrests, almost all for failing to disperse, which is a misdemeanour offence.
They add that city officials "are supportive of immigrant rights" and called the situation a "no win" for the police.If federal officials ask for help with public safety, LAPD will respond, the official says.
But they add: "They will not respond or engage in any immigration policy enforcement issue."
Many waking up in the Los Angeles area are startled by the news of the National Guard arriving here.
There have been protests on multiple days this week, all in areas where immigration raids were happening. But the LA area is huge and these protests were fairly isolated in small pockets of the city.
The county has nearly 10 million residents and covers 4,000 sq miles.
Many of my friends around town were going about their normal Saturday nights unaware of the unrest or Trump's rare move of using presidential authority to go around the governor to deploy troops here.
The areas where the protests happened both Friday and Saturday were isolated to a part of downtown LA and to Paramount, a small city in south Los Angeles County where raids were happening.Paramount is a heavily Latino area where 82% of residents are Hispanic, external.
I live close to that area and could hear the echo of "booms" as protests raged.
The National Guard last came for unrest in 2020 - amid protests after George Floyd's death - but it was not a deployment made under presidential authority.
Our mayor made the request to our governor for troops to help quell the unrest. Troops more recently came here for a natural disaster after the LA fires raged earlier this year.
US President Donald Trump has said earlier that protests that stop immigration laws being enforced "constitute a form of rebellion" against the US government.
Under Title 10 of the US Code - the collection of the general and permanent federal laws - presidents can federalise the National Guard - meaning to order the state-based troops to active duty - when there is "a rebellion or danger of a rebellion" against government authority. Trump has used this power to send 2,000 National Guard members to Los Angeles.
In a statement from the White House, Trump said National Guard members would "temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal actions".
The statement also says they will be deployed for 60 days, with the final decision resting with the US secretary of defence.
