Surprised? NOT!

Trump broke the law when he deployed troops to Los Angeles, judge rules

Judge Charles Breyer warned that Trump appeared intent on ‘creating a national police force with the President as its chief.’

By Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein

A federal judge has declared President Donald Trump’s use of military troops in Los Angeles illegal, barring the Pentagon from using National Guard members and Marines from performing police functions, like arrests and crowd control.

In a 52-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer warned that Trump appears intent on “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”

Trump billed his deployment of troops to Los Angeles, starting in early June, as a way of bolstering immigration enforcement efforts amid protests in the city against the president’s deportation agenda. Though Trump has now withdrawn all but 300 of those troops, he is mulling sending troops to other major cities, such as Chicago. He has also deployed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., under a separate legal authority from the one he used in Los Angeles.

Breyer, a Clinton appointee based in San Francisco, concluded that Trump’s L.A. deployment — an operation overseen by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — violated a longstanding law meant to prevent domestic law enforcement by the military: the Posse Comitatus Act. His decision followed a four-day trial last month that included testimony from the Pentagon officials overseeing the troop deployment in Los Angeles.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bars the military from enforcing domestic laws without explicit permission from Congress. But Breyer said that despite this restriction, the Pentagon “systematically used armed soldiers” to perform police functions. And he noted that Trump has expressed his desire to use similar tactics in other cities across the country.

Breyer’s ruling bars the Pentagon from “ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California” from “engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants,” without demonstrating they have permission from Congress.

Breyer put his ruling on hold until Sept. 12 to allow the Trump administration to appeal.

The ruling is a win for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who brought the lawsuit. But it could be short-lived.

An earlier decision from Breyer against Trump’s call-up of National Guard troops was quickly lifted by a federal appeals court. In that earlier decision, in June, Breyer had found that the deployment was unlawful because there was little sign that the situation in southern California met criteria Congress has specified for federalizing a state’s military forces, such as danger of a rebellion or difficulty in executing federal law.

The new ruling is based on a separate legal argument that the troops’ actions during the deployment have exceeded the bounds of what federal law permits.

The judge said a California National Guard contingent, known as Task Force 51, had clearly violated those limits by engaging in routine law enforcement actions under the orders of Pentagon leadership.

“The violations were not one-off acts by individual servicemembers but were rather the function of systematic and willful orders to troops to execute domestic law,” he wrote.

“Task Force 51 was expressly instructed that it could engage in certain law enforcement activities: setting up protective perimeters, traffic blockades, crowd control, and the like,” Breyer continued. “That instruction was incorrect. There is no exception to the Posse Comitatus Act for such conduct. … The record is replete with evidence that Task Force 51 executed domestic law in these prohibited ways.”

Breyer also reiterated his earlier conclusion that Trump’s claimed basis for deploying the troops in the first place was contrived.

“There was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law,” the judge wrote, adding, “This was intentional — Defendants instigated a months-long deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles for the purpose of establishing a military presence there and enforcing federal law.”

Breyer stressed that he was not ordering a withdrawal of the roughly 300 troops that remain in Los Angeles, but simply that they only perform functions authorized by federal law.

“Federal troops can continue to protect federal property in a manner consistent with the Posse Comitatus Act,” the judge wrote.