United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 National Guard troops from Los Angeles, roughly half the federal troops deployed to the city, the Pentagon said.
President Donald Trump ordered some 4,000 National Guard and 700 Marines into Los Angeles in early June to help enforce federal immigration raids amid widespread protests.
According to Department of Homeland Security figures, cited by NBC Los Angeles, the raids have led to the arrest of 2,792 undocumented immigrants.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell on Tuesday confirmed the release of 2,000 California National Guardsmen “from the federal protection mission”. He claimed the move was because “the lawlessness in Los Angeles is subsiding”.
Mayor Karen Bass described the withdrawal as a “retreat”, crediting the success of peaceful protests and legal actions.
“This happened because the people of Los Angeles stood united and stood strong,” Bass said.
“We organised peaceful protests, we came together at rallies, we took the Trump administration to court. All of this led to today’s retreat,” the Democratic mayor said.
She referred to a lawsuit the city joined that led to an order from a federal judge barring immigration officers from detaining people based solely on their race or for speaking Spanish.
Federal troops deployed to Los Angeles are authorised to detain people who pose a threat to federal personnel or property, but only until police can arrest them.
Military officials are not allowed to carry out arrests themselves.
Responding to the withdrawal of some of the troops, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said that “thousands of members are still federalised in Los Angeles for no reason and unable to carry out their critical duties across the state”.
“End this theatre and send everyone home,” he added in a post on social media.
Despite legal challenges, a US appeals court has let Trump retain control of California’s National Guard, the first to be deployed by a US president against the wishes of a state governor since 1965.
Newsom’s office said in late June that California National Guard firefighting crews were “operating at just 40 percent capacity due to Trump’s illegal Guard deployment”, as fires were “popping up across the state” months after devastating fires tore through Los Angeles.
Originally a part of the Mexican empire, Los Angeles continues to have a large population of people with Central and South American origins. The Californian capital is also one of several so-called “sanctuary” cities in the US, offering protection from deportation to hundreds of thousands of undocumented people living there.
Trump has promised to deport millions of people in the country without documentation and has executed raids at work sites, including farms that were largely exempted from enforcement during his first term. The administration has faced dozens of lawsuits across the country challenging its tactics.
Trump has also increasingly turned to the military in his immigration crackdown.
In addition to sending troops to Los Angeles, thousands of active-duty troops have been deployed to the border with Mexico, and the Pentagon has created military zones in the border area.
The zones are intended to allow the Trump administration to use troops to detain migrants without invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act that empowers a president to deploy the US military to suppress events such as civil disorder.
Source: Aljazeera
Leave a Reply