The mayor of Los Angeles announced a curfew for the downtown area that has been the centre of four days of protests marked by conflicts with police and vandalism.
Karen Bass, LA’s mayor, said she had declared a local emergency and issued a curfew “to stop the vandalism, to stop the looting”.
Her order comes after her administration and California’s governor Gavin Newsom pushed back against US President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard and marines to the city.
In a speech on Tuesday, Newsom condemned what he called Trump’s “unlawful militarisation of Los Angeles”.
“What we’re witnessing is not law enforcement, it’s authoritarianism,” Newsom said.
Trump earlier on Tuesday said his administration would “liberate” Los Angeles, as he defended the deployment of 700 marines to tackle protests against his immigration crackdown in California’s largest city. Critics have denounced the deployment as an over-reach of executive power.
Speaking to soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Trump described the unrest as a “full-blown assault on peace, on public order and on national sovereignty, carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags”.
He said 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 over his decision to deploy marines, as well as 4,200 National Guard troops, to LA over the objections of 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.
Los Angeles has been tense since thousands of people took to the streets to protest against an immigration crackdown by agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week that has led to dozens of detentions.
Trump said 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 on Tuesday 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.
Betty McCollum, a Democratic committee member, told Hegseth she saw “no need for the marines to be deployed”.
McCollum said the unrest “looks nothing like the George Floyd protests [in 2020] or the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992”.
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.
