Trump deploys National Guard as Los Angeles protests against immigration agents continue
News Mania Desk / Piyal Chatterjee / 8th June 2025
The administration of President Donald Trump announced it would send 2,000 National Guard troops on Saturday as federal agents in Los Angeles confronted several hundred protesters during a second day of demonstrations after immigration raids.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that the Pentagon was prepared to mobilize active-duty troops “if violence continues” in Los Angeles, saying the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton were “on high alert.”
Federal security agents on Saturday confronted protesters in the Paramount area in southeast Los Angeles, where some demonstrators displayed Mexican flags. A second protest in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday night attracted some 60 people, who chanted slogans including “ICE out of L.A.!”
Trump signed a presidential memorandum to deploy the National Guard troops to “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester,” the White House said in a statement. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News that the National Guard would be deployed in Los Angeles on Saturday.
California Governor Gavin Newsom called the decision “purposefully inflammatory.” He posted on X that Trump was deploying the National Guard “not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” adding: “Don’t give them one. Never use violence. Speak out peacefully.”
Newsom said it was “deranged behavior” for Hegseth to be “threatening to deploy active-duty Marines on American soil against its own citizens.”
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that if Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass can’t do their jobs “then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”
The demonstrations contrast Democratic-controlled Los Angeles, where census data indicates a large segment of the populace is Hispanic and foreign-born, with Trump’s Republican administration, which has emphasized strict immigration enforcement as a key element of his second term.
