An appeals court paused a federal judge’s initial ruling that Donald Trump’s takeover of the California National Guard was illegal, which ordered the president to return control back to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“The Appeals Court ruled last night that I can use the National Guard to keep our cities, in this case Los Angeles, safe. If I didn’t send the Military into Los Angeles, that city would be burning to the ground right now,” Trump celebrated on Truth Social on Friday. “We saved L.A. Thank you for the Decision!!!”
Prior to the late Thursday reversal, it was a rare victory for the Golden State amid Trump’s drastically escalating response to protests against ICE raids throughout Los Angeles. Still, Judge Charles R. Breyer had stayed his order until noon Friday, giving the Trump administration ample time to file an emergency appeal.
Trump federalized the California National Guard on Saturday and deployed them to ‘support’ ICE personnel, after multiple protests sprung up in locations in and around Los Angeles in response to a sudden increase in ICE raids over the weekend. The state filed a lawsuit against the deployment on Tuesday, and Newsom has alleged that Trump’s actions starting with the increased ICE raids were intended to cause unrest specifically to justify further escalation from the administration.
The administration has since repeatedly exaggerated the scope and scale of the protests and even told outright falsehoods about the situation in order to justify the escalation.
The decision also came just hours after the shocking scene at the Wilshire Federal Building, where late Thursday morning California Sen. Alex Padilla was violently shoved onto the ground by DHS agents on live television after trying to enter the room where Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was holding a press conference. Padilla was dragged out of the room and later handcuffed.
During her remarks, among other things Noem continued to state falsehoods about what is happening in Los Angeles, and openly said her goal was to illegally overthrow the city’s government for, quite literally, purely ideological reasons.
