The Trump administration redoubled its rhetoric Monday on the decision to deploy National Guard soldiers on the streets of Los Angeles to quell immigration protests. City and state officials insisted that calm prevailed across most of the nation’s second-largest city, even after several days of demonstrations, and said that calling in the troops had needlessly escalated tensions.

California officials intend to sue President Trump for bypassing Gov. Gavin Newsom and taking control of the state’s National Guard, sending 2,000 soldiers into the city on Sunday. The legal challenge was expected to be filed as protests were held in more cities over federal immigration enforcement and the arrest of a union leader, who will appear in court on Monday afternoon.

About 150 people have been arrested in Los Angeles since Friday, when intense protests followed an immigration enforcement raid. About 60 other demonstrators were arrested on Sunday in San Francisco, where a solidarity protest turned violent. The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, told CNN on Monday morning that while she condemned the violence, it had been limited. “This is not citywide civil unrest taking place in Los Angeles,” she said.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that the protesters in Los Angeles were “insurrectionists,” adopting a rationale that could allow him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and use the active-duty U.S. military to deal with violent protests. But so far, the vast majority of protests have remained peaceful, and videos taken Sunday show that National Guard troops largely avoided clashing with demonstrators.

News highlights

• Nationwide demonstrations: Protests were planned in more than a dozen cities nationwide, including Sacramento, where the Service Employees International Union of California will demonstrate outside the state capitol, its leaders said. A prominent labor official was arrested in demonstrations on Friday. Through early afternoon, union-led protests in New York, Chicago and elsewhere had been small and peaceful.
• Marching in solidarity: Some of the people demonstrating in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday said they were first- or second-generation immigrants showing solidarity with their neighbors or family members. During a news conference on Monday morning, several family members of the detained held photos of their loved ones and said that they have not been able to communicate with them.
• Mexican flags: Latin American flags emerged as emblems in the weekend protests. Trump officials have cast flag wavers as insurrectionists and seemed to assume that they are not U.S. citizens. But for many protesters who are American citizens, the flag signifies pride in their roots.
• Journalists injured: Several journalists have been injured while covering the protests in Los Angeles, including a television reporter who was struck when a law enforcement officer fired a nonlethal projectile while she was on the air. Video showed the moment that the reporter, Lauren Tomasi of 9News Australia, was hit.

President Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that the protesters in Los Angeles “are insurrectionists,” a term that several of his aides have been using as well, in what may become a rationale for him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act.

Invoking the act would give Trump broad authority to use the United States military to deal with violent protests in California and possibly elsewhere.

“The people who are causing the problems are bad people, they are insurrectionists,” Trump told a small group of reporters after he landed on the White House lawn Monday. He  arrived by helicopter from Camp David, where he had attended a meeting Sunday night.

California officials have pushed back against the administration’s language about the scale of the protests, which they say have been limited to a relatively small area, as well as the White House’s characterization of the situation. In an interview on CNN Monday, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles said Trump’s decision over the weekend to order 2,000 National Guard troops into the city felt like a “deliberate” attempt to sow chaos, and she pleaded with the Trump administration to “please dial this back.”

When Trump was asked about Newsom, who said on Monday that the state would sue over the order federalizing the National Guard, Trump called Newsom “a nice guy” but added that he considered the governor “grossly incompetent.”

When a reporter noted to Trump that Newsom had dared Trump’s border czar, Thomas D. Homan, to have him arrested, the president replied: “I’d do it if I were Tom. I think it’s great.”

But Trump then added that “Gavin likes the publicity,” which left unclear whether Trump truly endorsed the idea or thought it would give the governor an advantage in his contentious interactions with the White House.

Family members of workers detained by ICE officials on Friday are speaking in front of the Los Angeles warehouse where the raid took place. “My family and I haven’t had communication with my dad,” Yurien Contreras, a high school student, said through tears. She said she has been telling her 4-year-old brother that their father is still at work.

Police officers and deputies from several agencies maintained a large presence across downtown Los Angeles on Monday morning, but no protesters have been seen in the area. A cleanup effort has begun to clear debris from streets, sweep glass from broken windows and paint over messages that had been spray-painted on buildings.

Bass said on Monday that the Trump administration and its immigration raids were to blame for inflaming tensions in the city.

In a televised interview, Bass sought to downplay the protests of the last few days. “This is not citywide civil unrest,” she said on CNN. “A few streets downtown, it looks horrible.”

She noted that most Angelenos have been living life as normal, away from the clashes focused in a relatively small area outside a federal office building and detention center downtown. She promised that protesters who destroyed cars and threw things at police officers would be prosecuted, and said that the police were combing through video images of the clashes to identify people who had committed crimes.

Bass said that it was President Trump and his federal immigration authorities who had provoked the unrest by sending federal agents in tactical gear to workplaces in the city to detain and deport immigrants.

“Why were there raids?” she asked. “We had been told that he was going to go after violent criminals. It wasn’t a drug den; it was a Home Depot.”

Bass was referring to one of several immigration raids conducted on Friday that prompted days of protest, including at a Home Depot in the nearby city of Paramount, Calif., where day laborers regularly gather in search of work.

She said it appeared that the Trump administration was deliberately trying to sow chaos in the city, and then generating more backlash by sending in National Guard troops.

“What was the reason that the president had to take the power from the governor and federalize the National Guard?” she asked. “The night before this action was taken, there was a protest that got a little unruly, late at night. It was 100 people. Twenty-seven people were arrested. There wasn’t a reason for this.”

Homan continued to attack Newsom of California on Monday in an interview with Fox News. But Homan also appeared to soften threats he made over the weekend to arrest officials like Newsom and Bass, saying there had not been any discussion of arresting Newsom but that “no one’s above the law.”

Senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York have sent a letter to federal leaders, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, demanding answers about the arrest of David Huerta, a prominent union leader who was detained by federal agents on Friday while protesting an immigration raid at a work site in downtown Los Angeles.

Huerta is scheduled to be arraigned later today. The senators’ letter called it “deeply troubling” that Huerta, a U.S. citizen, remained in detention.

The state of California will file suit against the Trump administration over its move to take control of the state’s National Guard and deploy its troops to Los Angeles to protect immigration enforcement agents, said in a social media post Monday.

The governor has argued that local law enforcement agencies were effectively managing the response to protests over recent immigration raids, and that there was no need for President Trump to call up the National Guard.

Before the lawsuit was filed, Newsom’s office appeared to foreshadow the litigation in a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday.

“In dynamic and fluid situations such as the one in Los Angeles, state and local authorities are the most appropriate ones to evaluate the need for resources to safeguard life and property,” Newsom’s legal affairs secretary, David Sapp, wrote in the letter. “Indeed the decision to deploy the National Guard, without appropriate training or orders, risks seriously escalating the situation.”

Trump said on Saturday that he was imposing federal control over at least 2,000 National Guard troops for at least 60 days in order to quell the protests, and directed Hegseth to determine which ones to use. The order did not specify that the troops needed to come from California, but so far the California National Guard has been used, according to the U.S. Northern Command.

Trump’s order suggested that protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and detention facilities were interfering with federal functions, and that they constituted a rebellion against the federal government’s authority and its ability to enforce federal law. That is the standard for invoking the Insurrection Act to use the military for domestic policing.

But the order did not invoke the Insurrection Act. Instead, it cited only a statute that allowed the president, under certain circumstances, to federalize a state’s National Guard. It also appeared to gesture toward a claim of inherent presidential power to use troops to protect federal functions.

The order raises many legal complexities, including whether a rebellion against federal authority is indeed taking place, and whether a court could reject a president’s claim that the situation rises to the level that would make it lawful to send in troops.

But there is also a basic procedural issue: whether it was lawful for Hegseth to cut Newsom out of the administration’s decision-making process.

Trump’s order instructed Hegseth to consult with state governors about calling up National Guard units, and the call-up statute Trump cited said that orders for National Guard call-ups “shall be issued through the governors of the states.” But Sapp’s letter complained that Hegseth had sent a directive to the general in charge of California’s National Guard informing him that the federal government was taking control of 2,000 of its troops without consulting Newsom or relaying the order through the governor.

In the letter to Hegseth on Sunday, Sapp focused on that procedural problem and added that local law enforcement authorities in Los Angeles had the matter in hand. He also invoked the principle of states’ rights.

“There is currently no need for the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles, and to do so in this unlawful manner and for such a lengthy period is a serious breach of state sovereignty that seems intentionally designed to inflame the situation, while simultaneously depriving the state from deploying these personnel and resources where they are truly required,” Sapp’s letter said.

Trump’s move was the first time in about 60 years that a president had sent troops under federal control into a state to quell unrest without a request from the state’s governor. That last happened during the civil rights movement, when state governors were resisting court orders to desegregate public schools.

The last time a president used military force to carry out police functions on domestic soil was in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush sent troops into Los Angeles to calm widespread rioting that followed a jury’s acquittal of police officers who had been videotaped beating a Black man, Rodney King. But in that case, both the California governor and the mayor of Los Angeles had requested the federal assistance.

David E. Sanger is a reporter with The New York Times. Emily Baumgaertner, Jesus Jimenez, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Anushka Patil, Laurel Rosenhall and Charlie Savage contributed to this report. Copyright 2025, The New York Times