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When is it OK for a president to use military forces on civilians in a state over the objections of their governor?
When that governor is Gavin Newsom, California Republican leaders say.
In a rare move, President Donald Trump overrode Newsom and local leaders in sending 4,000 National Guard members and 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles in response to protests against the president’s immigration enforcement.
California is challenging Trump’s order in federal court. While the president argues that he has the sole authority to deploy the military, legal scholars and judges have warned that the move risks intruding upon state sovereignty and tilting the constitutional balance of power between the federal and state governments.
But most California Republican lawmakers, who have vehemently opposed “government overreach,” would not say where they stand on Trump’s military intervention in Los Angeles.
CalMatters asked all 29 Republican lawmakers in the state Legislature whether they support Trump’s troop deployment. Only six answered, and all sided with Trump.
The Democrats had it coming, those lawmakers argued, because their lenient immigration and crime policies — including a 2017 state “sanctuary” law that limits local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agents — forced Trump’s hand.
“It is the root cause of the rioting and violence that we are witnessing this year,” state Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil of Modesto said of the sanctuary law in a video last week.
State Republicans also seized on sporadic violent clashes, captured in viral videos on social media, as proof of Newsom and other Democrats’ failure to rein in violence. The GOP lawmakers argued that’s why Trump had to step in, even though local police had said they did not need help from federal troops.
“What do you do when you have a governor who’s not leading (and) is not doing anything about unrest and violence in his own state?” said Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher of Chico.
But would the Republican lawmakers say the same if a Democratic president descended the military upon a red state over the head of its governor? Some said yes as others bit their tongues, arguing it should be judged on a case-by-case basis and refusing to entertain hypotheticals.
“It depends on the situation,” Gallagher told CalMatters. “What are the times when you can and when you can’t? That’s what the court’s going to decide.”
It’s no surprise that state Republicans are using the opportunity to slam Democrats on immigration and crime: Those strategies have worked for the minority party in the past. It’s also a chance for them to demonstrate their loyalty to Trump, who wields a definitive influence over the party.
But it is particularly worrisome when Republicans are aligned with Trump in a move to override state authority, which tears at the fabric of the U.S. Constitution, said Eric Schickler, political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“If you think about what the framers were worried about when they created the Constitution, it’s exactly this kind of dynamic,” he said. “It’s not an exaggeration to say the nature of the U.S. political system has changed. And it’s changed not just because of Trump’s force of will as an individual, but it’s changed because members of his party, when he’s asserted authority, have sided with him consistently.”
That alignment could cost Republicans in 2026, said Mike Madrid, a longtime GOP strategist and a vocal critic of Trump. Polling in recent weeks has shown that Trump’s immigration policies and military deployment in Los Angeles are growingly unpopular among Americans.
“I don’t think people are seeing this as an immigration issue anymore. They are seeing it the way the governor has framed this, which is a constitutional issue, a federal overreach issue, a due process issue,” Madrid said. “That puts Republicans on very troubling ground.”
California GOP lawmakers: Trump ‘stepped up’
While Trump’s executive order told the troops to guard federal personnel and properties, he and his administration have also repeatedly suggested that the troops are there to crack down. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week even said the military was there to “liberate the city from the socialists.”
The military presence has stoked fear among legal experts and some law enforcement officials, who argue there is no legal standing for Trump’s use of authority. Unleashing military forces on domestic protesters can also have a chilling effect, risk escalating the situation further and create confusion among civilians, they said.
CalMatters also reached out to U.S. Reps. David Valadao, Young Kim and Ken Calvert, three Republicans who will likely face fierce challenges from Democrats in 2026. None of them responded.
While acknowledging California’s sovereignty, some state Republican lawmakers told CalMatters Trump needed to intervene due to what they perceived as a lack of leadership from Newsom. They cited videos of brick-throwing, Molotov-cocktail-tossing protesters and made unsubstantiated claims that paid agitators stoked violence among protesters — a claim Trump has made.
Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, a Coachella Republican and the only incumbent lawmaker who is a retired Marine, initially would not say if the scale of the Los Angeles protests warranted federal intervention, stating he did not have the “confidential intelligence” to weigh in. He also did not commit to supporting the same actions if they came from another president, arguing each situation is different.
But when a CalMatters reporter pushed for comments, Gonzalez pointed to videos of violence as justification for Trump’s deployment.
“When you have leaders that don’t step up, someone needs to step up, and that’s what took place,” he said.
State Sen. Steven Choi of Irvine told CalMatters that while he supports states’ rights, when immigration agents face violence or interference, “it is appropriate for federal authorities to protect both those agents and federal properties.”
Sen. Tony Strickland, a former mayor of Huntington Beach, said there is precedent for federalizing the California National Guard to quell domestic riots, referencing the 1992 turmoil in Los Angeles over the acquittal of police officers who killed Black activist Rodney King.
But in that example, then-President George H.W. Bush deployed troops at the request of then-Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and then-Democratic Mayor Tom Bradley. The riots were also far more violent, resulting in 63 deaths.
Strickland argued that deaths have been avoided in Los Angeles only because Trump sent in the military, echoing the president’s assertion that the city otherwise would have burned to the ground.
“Do you wait till 63 people die before you call them in?” Strickland said.
Blaming California’s sanctuary law
The Republicans argued that Trump’s use of military force was necessary because of California’s 2017 sanctuary state law, which has been upheld in federal court.
Their logic goes like this: Had California police been more cooperative with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, federal agents wouldn’t have had to arrest immigrants in the streets, Californians wouldn’t have been so riled and Trump wouldn’t have had to deploy troops to protect those agents.
Under current law, local law enforcement can choose to alert federal immigration authorities about an upcoming release of an inmate if they are convicted of violent felonies. Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones, of San Diego, failed this year to push through a measure that would have made the cooperation mandatory.
It is California’s lack of cooperation that forced federal immigration agents to hunt down “violent criminals” in public, Jones argued. He dismissed arrests, such as that of a 4-year-old girl on life-saving medication in Bakersfield, as “collateral.”
“When the federal agents are having to go into neighborhoods and find these violent felons to capture and report and prosecute … there are going to be collateral arrests in that, and that’s the state that Gov. Newsom and the Democratic leadership have created,” Jones told CalMatters.
Assemblymember Tom Lackey, a Palmdale Republican who served in the California Highway Patrol for 28 years, said the sanctuary law “created all of this fear and chaos.”
“What we are seeing now is a situation where the supermajority has limited tools to manage immigration; creating a communication breakdown between local and federal law enforcement, and a vacuum that invites a heavier hand from Washington,” he said in a statement.
But Madrid said blaming the tension all on the state’s sanctuary law is an “extraordinarily weak” argument.
“If that were the case, this would have been a situation long before,” he said. “It is consciously deceptive in telling a very, very small part of the problem.”
While Madrid called the state’s sanctuary law a “patchwork” policy, he argued immigration is an issue entirely “on the doorstep of the federal government.” The Trump administration has missed opportunities to rein in the border, Madrid argued, noting Trump last year helped kill a bipartisan legislative deal over border security.
“What California has decided to do is to say: ‘Fine, if you are not going to control border security and … leave us as the largest border state in the country to deal with it, we are going to accommodate it. We are going to ingratiate people into the fabric of our culture, our politics and our economy,’” he said.
Could support for troops cost Republicans?
Aligning with Trump has its perks. The president — the face of a growingly populist party — can galvanize Republican voters and help legislators cement their conservative base. Even as the president’s approval rating slips among Americans, Republican voters continue to show strong support for him.
But Republicans could lose ground, especially among Latino voters, over Trump’s fierce crackdown on immigration and the protests, Madrid predicted.
While Latinos flocked toward Trump in 2024 despite the president’s promise of mass deportation, that threat is no longer “abstract” but “existential,” Madrid said. Moreover, more Americans are alarmed by Trump’s use of the military on its own people, he said.
“He so overplayed his hand on immigration crackdowns that it’s now about overreach and not about border security,” Madrid said.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: California Republicans quiet on Trump military deployment in Los Angeles