Score one for the Constitution.
A federal judge has put a temporary halt to President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, finding the president violated a bedrock American law known as the Posse Comitatus Act.
Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer issued the preliminary injunction Tuesday after a three-day bench trial.
An appeal from the Justice Department is forthcoming.
The ruling was clear right from the start. “Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote before detailing the actions of the Trump administration in sending troops to LA to ostensibly quash a rebellion, in the form of protests over immigration raids.
“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” Breyer acknowledged. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
“In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act,” he wrote, adding that the law was violated “willfully” and that the Defense Department “knowingly contradicted their own training materials which listed 12 functions that the Posse Comitatus Act bars the military from performing.”
Per the judge’s order, the Trump administration will be blocked from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws,” unless it can show “a valid constitutional or statutory exception” to the act.
At the height of Trump’s response, there were over 4,000 National Guard and 700 Marines deployed to LA, prompting Newsom to sue the administration. Currently, there are about 300 troops left in Los Angeles.
Breyer’s order on Tuesday only applies to California. But any attempt by the president to deploy troops elsewhere to assist with civilian law enforcement, as Trump has suggested he will do in Chicago, could now face major legal headwinds.
To send in Marines and grab hold of California’s National Guard, Trump issued a broad memo in June that invoked an obscure statute known as Section 12406 that he claimed essentially allowed him to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act if there is an ongoing rebellion against the U.S. government or the government’s authority to enforce federal laws. To justify its use, Trump asserted that the protests in response to immigration raids led by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement qualified as “rebellion.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Newsom, however, argued that the deployment was a drastic overreach into the state’s sovereign powers and altogether unnecessary. Usually, National Guard troops are only deployed at the behest of state or city officials. At trial, intelligence and security assessment reports from federal and local enforcement confirmed that concerns for life and property were low before and after raids were conducted and troops were deployed.
Breyer had issued a temporary restraining order in June that blocked the administration’s seizure of the California National Guard, finding that Trump likely broke the law when he commandeered those troops. Breyer found the president’s conduct was “both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment.” Judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals swiftly blocked Breyer’s order, however, and California challenged the decision, leading to the trial in San Francisco last month.
Bonta heralded the ruling as a victory not only for California but the Constitution at large.
“Today’s ruling affirms that President Trump is not King, and the power of the executive is not boundless. For more than two months, the President has engaged in political theater, using National Guard troops and Marines as pawns to further his anti-immigrant agenda. In doing so, he trampled on one of the very basic foundations of our democracy: That our military be apolitical and the activities of troops on U.S. soil be extremely limited to ensure civil liberties and protect against military overreach,” Bonta said Tuesday.
When reached for comment, the Defense Department referred all questions to the White House; the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
According to Breyer’s order, the evidence at trial made clear that the Trump administration had used the military to “bolster” operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration as well as the Department of Homeland Security and used military personnel to enforce the law, including by forming armed perimeters and blockades, engaging in crowd control. Often, the judge noted, there were greater numbers of military personnel at various sites than there were civilian law enforcement agents, and the point of the troops’ presence was to “demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”
The violations of the Posse Comitatus Act were “part of a top-down, systemic effort by Defendants to use military troops to execute various sectors of federal law (the drug laws and immigration laws at least) across hundreds of miles over the course of several months — and counting,” Breyer wrote.
So-called “exceptions” that troops received were made to “excuse unlawful military conduct,” Breyer added, noting that these instructions “came ‘all the way from the top’ of the Department of Defense.”
Trump and Hegseth’s actions and their shared intent to call troops into federal service elsewhere effectively created a “national police force with the President as its chief,” the judge bristled.
Breyer’s order bans troops in California from making arrests, apprehending people, conducting searches or seizures or engaging in security or traffic patrols, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection and interrogation. They are also prohibited from acting as informants. But this prohibition won’t go into effect until Sept. 12. This gives the administration time to formally appeal.
