The National Guard, police and protesters stand off outside of a downtown jail in Los Angeles following two days of clashes with police during a series of immigration raids on June 08, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
A federal judge on Tuesday barred President Donald Trump from deploying National Guard troops in California to execute law-enforcement actions there, including making arrests, searching locations, and crowd control.
The ruling came in connection with a lawsuit filed in early June by the state of California challenging Trump’s and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s deployment of the Guard to deal with protests in Los Angeles over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies.
Judge Charles Breyer said that Trump’s deployment of the troops violated the federal Posse Comitatus Act, which bars U.S. Military forces from enforcing the law domestically.
Breyer’s ruling in U.S. District Court in San Francisco is limited to California, and the judge stayed the decision until Sept. 12 to give the Trump administration time to appeal it.
But it comes as Trump has considered deploying National Guard troops to other U.S. cities to deal with crime, including Oakland and San Francisco.
Breyer warned that it would create “a national police force with the President as its chief.”
“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.
“Nearly 140 years later, Defendants — President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense — deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced,” the judge wrote.
“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” Breyer wrote.
“Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
Breyer said that evidence introduced during a trial for the lawsuit shows that the defendants had “systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”
CNBC has requested comment on the ruling from the Justice Department, which represented the Trump administration in the lawsuit.
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