A battalion of 500 U.S. Marines are mobilizing to Los Angeles to respond to anti-immigration enforcement riots, Fox News has learned.
The Marines will be tasked with protecting federal property and federal personnel, according to a senior defense official, and the deployment is open-ended.
The Marines will not be carrying out a law enforcement role, but it’s unclear what their use of force rules are if protesters throw things or spit at them.
The new deployment comes after President Donald Trump sent some 2,000 National Guardsmen to the riot-racked city over the weekend.
The Marines are from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines at Twentynine Palms, California.
Moments before the deployment, Trump expressed optimism that the situation in Los Angeles is improving.
“I mean, I think we have it very well under control,” he told reporters. “I think it would have been a very bad situation. It was heading in the wrong direction. It’s now heading in the right direction.”
The Marine mobilization is sure to draw outcry from liberal critics: California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed suit against the Trump administration on Monday for deploying the Guard.
The governor’s office both downplayed the troop movement and called it “completely uncalled for.”
“From our understanding, this is moving Marines from one base to another base. At this time, the information we have is that Marines are not being deployed (there is a difference between that and being mobilized). The level of escalation is completely unwarranted, uncalled for, and unprecedented — mobilizing the best in class branch of the U.S. military against its own citizens,” Newsom’s press office wrote on X.
Newsom and the California attorney general claimed Trump and Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth “trampled over” California’s sovereignty by calling up the state’s National Guard without Newsom’s approval.
