Donald Trump vows to ‘liberate’ Los Angeles as he defends troop deployment

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Donald Trump has said his administration will “liberate” Los Angeles, as he defended the deployment of US Marines to tackle protests against his immigration crackdown in the city, saying “anarchy will not stand”.

The president was speaking a day after his government sent 700 Marines to Los Angeles in a move critics have denounced as presidential over-reach and a clear misuse of executive power.

Speaking to soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina on Tuesday, Trump described the unrest in California’s largest city as a “full-blown assault on peace, on public order and on national sovereignty, carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags”.

He added that within the span of a few decades, Los Angeles had gone from being “one of the cleanest, safest and most beautiful cities on earth to being a trash heap, with entire neighbourhoods under the control of transnational gangs and criminal networks”.

“Very simply, we will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again,” he said.

At the event to celebrate the 250th birthday of the US Army, Trump projected defiance despite a wave of criticism over his decision to deploy Marines, as well as 4,200 National Guard troops, to LA over the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom.

On Tuesday afternoon, California requested that a federal judge temporarily block National Guard members and Marines from assisting in immigration raids or enforcement of federal law.

The previous day Newsom sued Trump over his decision to take the California Guard under federal control and send its troops to the streets of Los Angeles. The lawsuit called the president’s decision an “unprecedented usurpation of state authority”.

Los Angeles has been tense since thousands of people took to the streets to protest against a crackdown on undocumented aliens by agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week that has led to dozens of detentions.

Trump said at Fort Bragg that the National Guard troops and Marines were being deployed “to protect federal law enforcement from the attacks of a vicious and violent mob”.

He accused protesters of hurling bricks and cinder blocks at law enforcement officers and setting vehicles ablaze, as well as attempting to infiltrate and occupy federal buildings.

“Under the Trump administration, this anarchy will not stand,” he said.

Earlier in the day, he told reporters that if required he would “certainly invoke” the Insurrection Act of 1807, a law that would empower him to deploy the US military and units of the National Guard domestically to suppress civil disorder, insurrection or armed rebellion.

Meanwhile, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth faced hostile questioning from Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill over the troop deployment.

Hegseth was testifying before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense over the Pentagon’s budget request for 2026.

“In Los Angeles we believe that ICE . . . has the right to safely conduct operations in any state and any jurisdiction in the country,” he said.

But he was attacked by Betty McCollum, a Democratic committee member, who told Hegseth she saw “no need for the Marines to be deployed”.

“History had proven that law enforcement and the National Guard are more than capable of handling situations more volatile than what happened this weekend” in Los Angeles, she said.

McCollum said the unrest “looks nothing like the George Floyd protests [in 2020] or the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992”.

“This is a deeply unfair position to put our Marines in,” she said. “Their service should be honoured. It should not be exploited.”

Pete Aguilar, a Democratic Representative from California, asked Hegseth what the justification was for using the military for civilian law enforcement purposes.

He noted that the administration had invoked a statute, 10 USC 12406, which only allows the president to call National Guard members and units into federal service under certain circumstances — such as during an invasion by a foreign nation, a rebellion against the authority of the government, or when the president is unable to execute US laws with regular forces.

Hegseth said US authorities were facing “all three” scenarios in Los Angeles. “If you’ve got millions of illegals and you don’t know where they’re coming from, they’re waving flags from foreign countries and assaulting police officers, it’s a problem,” he said.

Asked by Aguilar how long the Marine deployment would last, the defence secretary said 60 days — “because we want to ensure that those rioters, looters and thugs on the other side, assaulting our police officers, know that we’re not going anywhere”.