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LOS ANGELES (CN) — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said on Tuesday that the city has been made into an test ground for the Trump administration to see what would happen if the federal government imposes its authority on a local government and sends in the troops.
“They’re talking about spending over a $100 million with this deployment,” Bass said at a news conference. “Which is why I say that I feel like we have all been in Los Angeles a part of a grand experiment to see what happens when the federal government decides they want to roll up on a state, or roll up on a city, and take over.”
The Trump administration has sent as many as 4,000 California National Guard troops and 700 Marines to LA in response to the protests that erupted last week over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids of downtown LA businesses for migrant workers and of Home Depot parking lots where day laborers gather to get hired.
California Governor Gavin Newsom sued Trump Monday in federal court over the president’s mobilization of the National Guard.
On Tuesday, the governor asked the court for an emergency temporary restraining order to block Trump and the Department of Defense from expanding the current mission of federalized Cal Guard personnel and Marines. This mission, according to Newsom, orders soldiers to engage in unlawful civilian law enforcement activities in communities across the region, beyond just guarding federal buildings.
“The federal government is now turning the military against American citizens," Newsom said in a statement. “Sending trained warfighters onto the streets is unprecedented and threatens the very core of our democracy. Donald Trump is behaving like a tyrant, not a president. We ask the court to immediately block these unlawful actions.”
Though Newsom has asked for the restraining order by 1 p.m. Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer, a Clinton appointee, set a hearing on the motion for Thursday.
Bass at Tuesday’s press conference concurred with the governor that there was no need for the military to keep order in LA.
“This is just absolutely unnecessary,” she said. “People have asked me what are the Marines going to do when they get here. That is a good question. I have no idea.”
The National Guard, she said, has only one assignment: to protect the federal building downtown. At the city’s other federal building in Westwood, on LA’s westside, nothing was happening at all.
Los Angeles, the mayor said, has created a unified command under the LA Police Department that can call upon the resources of the LA County Sheriff and neighboring cities’ police department to quell any unrest and violence if needed, and the city doesn’t require federal troops to do so.
The deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles will cost at least $134 million and last at least the next 60 days, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers Tuesday.
The protests against the ICE raids have lasted for the last four days and have been focused around a relatively small segment of the civic center downtown where the federal building is located. Protests also occurred near the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail where many of the immigrants detained by ICE are held.
On Tuesday afternoon, police and media outnumbered the small groups of protesters outside the federal building. Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol officers blocked off streets around the Metropolitan Detention Center while a small contingent of the California National Guard stood on the steps in front of the entrance of the federal building.
A group of protesters briefly disrupted traffic on the 101 Freeway that runs through the downtown area.
In the early evening a larger group of peaceful demonstrators made their way down Temple Street, where in addition to the federal building, city and county buildings are located, to a downtown park where a interfaith vigil is to be held.
The mayor declared a curfew for downtown starting at 8 p.m. Tuesday night.
Bass condemned the reported looting and the graffiti blanketing blocks of downtown, but stressed that the chaos was a direct result of the ICE raids and the administration’s heavy-handed response to the protests. About 100 people were arrested overnight by the police.
“On Thursday of last week, Los Angeles was peaceful — there was nothing going on here that warranted a federal intervention that took place the very next day,” the mayor said.
“When the administration started, they said that this was about crime,” she added. “They were going after violent felons, drug dealers, and I don’t know how that matches with the scenes that we saw of people at Home Depot running through the parking lot because they were afraid they were going to get arrested.”
According to reports, top White House aide Stephen Miller reportedly pushed immigration officials to ramp up the number of immigration arrests in a May meeting.
Trump on Tuesday said that LA would be burning if the administration hadn’t sent in the National Guard and blamed Newsom for not keeping order in the city.
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