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    Pete Hegseth suggests he would disobey court ruling against deploying military in LA

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    The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, suggested on Wednesday that he would not obey a federal court ruling against the deployments of national guard troops and US marines to Los Angeles, the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore judges it disagrees with.The comments before the Senate armed services committee come as Donald Trump faces dozen of lawsuits over his policies, which his administration has responded to by avoiding compliance with orders it dislikes. In response, Democrats have claimed that Trump is sending the country into a constitutional crisis.California has sued over Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles, and, last week, a federal judge ruled that control of soldiers should return to California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. An appeals court stayed that ruling and, in arguments on Tuesday, sounded ready to keep the soldiers under Donald Trump’s authority.“I don’t believe district courts should be determining national security policy. When it goes to the supreme court, we’ll see,” Hegseth told the Democratic senator Mazie Hirono. Facing similar questions from another Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, he said: “If the supreme court rules on a topic, we will abide by that.”Hegseth was confirmed to lead the Pentagon after three Republican senators and all Democrats voted against his appointment, creating a tie vote on a cabinet nomination for only the second time in history. The tie was broken by the vice-president, JD Vance.There were few hints of dissatisfaction among GOP senators at the hearing, which was intended to focus on the Pentagon’s budgetary needs for the forthcoming fiscal year, but Democrats used it to press for more details on the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, as well as the turmoil that has plagued Hegseth’s top aides and the potential for the United States to join Israel’s attack on Iran.The Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin asked whether troops deployed to southern California were allowed to arrest protesters or shoot them in the legs, as Trump is said to have attempted to order during his first term.“If necessary, in their own self-defense, they could temporarily detain and hand over to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. But there’s no arresting going on,” Hegseth said. On Friday, marines temporarily took into custody a US citizen at a federal building in Los Angeles.The secretary laughed when asked whether troops could shoot protesters, before telling Slotkin: “Senator, I’d be careful what you read in books and believing in, except for the Bible.”An exasperated Slotkin replied: “Oh my God.”Trump has publicly mulled the possibility that the United States might strike Iran. Slotkin asked if the Pentagon had plans for what the US military would do after toppling its government.“We have plans for everything,” Hegseth said, prompting the committee’s Republican chair, Roger Wicker, to note that the secretary was scheduled to answer further questions in a behind-closed-doors session later that afternoon.In addition to an aggressive purge of diversity and equity policies from the military, Hegseth has also ordered that military bases that were renamed under Joe Biden because they honored figures in the Confederacy to revert to their previous names – but officially honoring various US soldiers with the same name.The Virginia senator Tim Kaine said that in his state, several bases had been renamed under Biden in honor of accomplished veterans, and their families were never officially told that the names would be changed back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You didn’t call any of the families, and I’ve spoken with the families, and the families were called by the press. That’s how they learned about this. They learned about it from the press,” Kaine said,He asked Hegseth to pause the renaming of these bases, which the secretary declined to do, instead saying: “We’ll find ways to recognize them.”Democrats also criticized Hegseth for turmoil in the ranks of his top aides, as well as his decision to name as the Pentagon’s press secretary Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared on social media an antisemitic conspiracy theory.The Pentagon head had a sharp exchange with the Democratic senator Jacky Rosen, who asked whether he would fire Wilson. “I’ve worked directly with her. She does a fantastic job, and … any suggestion that I or her or others are party to antisemitism is a mischaracterization.”“You are not a serious person,” the Nevada lawmaker replied. “You are not serious about rooting out, fighting antisemitism within the ranks of our DOD. It’s despicable. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”Rosen then asked if the far-right activist Laura Loomer was involved in the firing of a top national security staffer. Hegseth demurred, saying the decision was his to make, but the senator continued to press, even as the committee chair brought down his gavel to signal that she had run out of time for questions.“I believe your time is up, senator,” Hegseth said. A furious Rosen responded: “It is not up to you to tell me when my time is up. And I am going to say, Mr Secretary, you’re either feckless or complicit. You’re not in control of your department.” More

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      ‘Abducted by Ice’: the haunting missing-person posters plastered across LA

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      “Missing son.” “Missing father.” “Missing grandmother.”The words are written in bright red letters at the top of posters hanging on lampposts and storefronts around Los Angeles. At first glance, they appear to be from worried relatives seeking help from neighbors.But a closer look reveals that the missing people are immigrants to the US who have been disappeared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Some of the faces are familiar to anyone who has been following the news – that missing father, for instance, is Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador in March without a hearing, in what the Trump administration admitted was an error. “Abducted by Ice,” the poster reads, under a picture of Ábrego García with his small son. “Did not receive constitutional protections. Currently being held in detention.”The missing grandmother is Gladis Yolanda Chávez Pineda, a Chicago woman who was taken by Ice when she showed up for a check-in with immigration officials this month. She had arrived in the US seeking a better life for her daughter and was in the midst of applying for asylum. “Lived in the US for 10 years,” the poster states. “No criminal history.”View image in fullscreenThe missing son is Andry Hernández Romero, a makeup artist who fled persecution in Venezuela. On arrival in the US, he was detained, with US authorities claiming his tattoos indicated gang membership. His family and friends say that’s ridiculous. He was among hundreds of people deported to the El Salvador mega-prison known as Cecot in March. “Currently being held in a concentration camp,” the poster says.The posters are just a few examples of a campaign of quiet resistance on the streets of Los Angeles. On Monday, a walk down Sunset Boulevard in the historic Silver Lake neighborhood meant encountering an array of flyers, artwork and spray-painted messages of support for disappeared immigrants and fury at the administration.The “missing” posters, which have also appeared in other neighborhoods, were particularly effective. Duct-taped to telephone polls amid ads for comedy shows, guitar lessons and yard sales, they reminded passersby of the individual lives derailed by Trump’s immigration crackdown – instead of names in the news, these were families and friends who might have lived just down the road.View image in fullscreenHumanizing people’s stories was precisely the goal, said the creators behind the posters.“I just wanted to reframe this idea of immigrants as criminals, and put into perspective that these are people – this is someone’s grandmother, this is someone’s father, this is someone’s son,” said Ben*, the posters’ 28-year-old designer. He worked with his friend Sebastian*, 31, to distribute them around town.What began as a friends-and-family effort expanded after Ben shared the PDF: “I shared it with a few friends, then they shared it, and so it kind of just blew up.”For Sebastian, the issue was personal. “I moved here from Colombia 14 years ago, and ever since the first Trump administration, I’ve seen my community being attacked,” he said. “So as soon as I saw these posters that my friend was doing, that I felt something in me that needed to go out and help.”While they worked, “people started taking photos, and I had a moment with this one elderly woman where she was looking at it, and she really just started tearing up,” Ben said. “At that moment, I was like, ‘OK, this is actually connecting to people.’”The images have appeared in recent days as the city has become a focal point for protests against Trump’s immigration policies, which began on 6 June amid raids targeting immigrants at several locations in the city.As the protests emerged in parts of LA, Donald Trump called in the national guard without the governor’s consent – an action no president has taken since 1965. Shortly afterward, he summoned hundreds of marines. Much news coverage painted the city as a kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, with protesters facing off against troops and cars on fire, fueling Trump’s narrative of a lawless city hopelessly embroiled in chaos.In fact, much of the unrest was confined to a small area of downtown LA. Across most of the vast city and county, life continued as normal, the sun shining over familiar traffic jams, studio lots and suburban sprawl. Still, the protests – and the federal government’s wildly disproportionate clampdown – served as a spark that has helped to fuel a national outcry, as well as this subtler demonstration of local solidarity.Alongside the “Missing” posters were a series of alternative descriptions of Ice – rather than Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, stenciled messages on the pavement and shop windows condemned “Illegal Country-wide Embarrassment”, “Institution of Child Endangerment” and the perhaps less clear “Insecure Confused Ejaculation”.View image in fullscreenOther flyers advertised Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, while still others noted that “Undocumented hands feed you”, with an illustration of a person working in a field. Those latter posters were created by Sydney*, 29, who works in the music industry in Los Angeles. Her 9-to-5 job makes it impossible to attend protests, she said, so creating this image was an alternative way to participate in resistance. “You read something tragic every morning lately about the Ice raids,” she said.She was particularly moved by the plight of agricultural workers, toiling for low wages under the threat of immigration crackdowns. “I just felt very compelled to speak up for them in places that people probably don’t think about them, like Silver Lake and the city,” she said. “I am Latina. I have many family members that came here and are immigrants, and so it just touches home for me.”Inspired by a slogan she saw in protest photos and Mexican decor flags, Sydney created the stylized image as a social media post. “I just wanted to tie something beautiful with something very political and loud,” she said. A friend saw the post, asked if she could print it out, and plastered it around town.That DIY approach adds to the posters’ power: there is a sense of neighbors helping neighbors. As the administration conjures a tale of a city in crisis, the images – unpretentious and haunting – serve as a reminder of what the protests are actually about.* The Guardian is withholding full names for privacy reasons More

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      Appeals court likely to keep Trump in control of national guard deployed in LA

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      A federal appeals court on Tuesday seemed ready to keep Donald Trump in control of California national guard troops after they were deployed following protests in Los Angeles over immigration raids.Last week, a district court ordered the US president to return control of the guard to Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who had opposed their deployment. US district judge Charles Breyer said Trump had deployed the Guard illegally and exceeded his authority. But the administration quickly appealed and a three-judge appellate panel temporarily paused that order.Tuesday’s hearing was about whether the order could take effect while the case makes its way through the courts, including possibly the supreme court.It’s the first time a US president has activated a state national guard without the governor’s permission since 1965, and the outcome of the case could have sweeping implications for Trump’s power to send soldiers into other US cities. Trump announced on 7 June that he was deploying the guard to Los Angeles to protect federal property following a protest at a downtown detention center after federal immigration agents arrested dozens of immigrants without legal status across the city. Newsom said Trump was only inflaming the situation and that troops were not necessary.In a San Francisco courtroom, all three judges, two appointed by Trump in his first term and one by Joe Biden, suggested that presidents have wide latitude under the federal law at issue and that courts should be reluctant to step in.“If we were writing on a blank slate, I would tend to agree with you,” Judge Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee, told California’s lawyer, Samuel Harbourt, before pointing to a 200-year-old supreme court decision that she said seemed to give presidents the broad discretion Harbourt was arguing against.Even so, the judges did not appear to embrace arguments made by a justice department lawyer that courts could not even review Trump’s decision.It wasn’t clear how quickly the panel would rule.Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, opened the hearing by asking whether the courts have a role in reviewing the president’s decision to call up the national guard. Brett Shumate, an attorney for the federal government, said they did not.“The statute says the president may call on federal service members and units of the Guard of any state in such numbers that he considers necessary,” Shumate said, adding that the statute “couldn’t be any more clear”.Shumate made several references to “mob violence” in describing ongoing protests in Los Angeles. But mayor Karen Bass lifted a curfew for downtown Los Angeles Tuesday, saying acts of vandalism and violence that prompted her curfew a week ago had subsided.“It is essential that this injunction be stayed, otherwise, lives and property will be at risk,” Shumate said.Harbourt argued that the federal government didn’t inform Newsom of the decision to deploy the guard. He said the Trump administration hasn’t shown that they considered “more modest measures to the extreme response of calling in the national guard and militarizing the situation”.Harbourt told the panel that not upholding Breyer’s ruling would “defy our constitutional traditions of preserving state sovereignty, of providing judicial review for the legality of executive action, of safeguarding our cherished rights to political protest”.Breyer’s order applied only to the national guard troops and not the marines, who were also deployed to LA but were not yet on the streets when he ruled.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNewsom’s lawsuit accused Trump of inflaming tensions, breaching state sovereignty and wasting resources just when guard members need to be preparing for wildfire season. He also called the federal takeover of the state’s national guard “illegal and immoral”.Newsom said in advance of the hearing that he was confident in the rule of law.“I’m confident that common sense will prevail here: the US military belongs on the battlefield, not on American streets,” Newsom said in a statement.Breyer ruled the Trump violated the use of title 10, which allows the president to call the national guard into federal service when the country “is invaded”, when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government,” or when the president is unable “to execute the laws of the United States”.Breyer, an appointee of former president Bill Clinton, said the definition of a rebellion was not met.“The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of ‘rebellion,’” he wrote. “Individuals’ right to protest the government is one of the fundamental rights protected by the First Amendment, and just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone.”The national guard hasn’t been activated without a governor’s permission since 1965, when President Lyndon B Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. More

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      ‘It’s time to wake up’: Padilla recounts being handcuffed at Noem briefing in emotional speech

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      Alex Padilla took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to deliver a deeply personal speech, formally entering into the congressional record his account of being restrained and forcibly removed as he attempted to ask a question at a press conference held by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, in Los Angeles last week.In emotional remarks, Padilla described the encounter that he hoped would serve as a “wake up call” for Americans – a warning, he said, of how quickly democratic norms can slip away when dissent is silenced and power is unchecked.“If that is what the administration is willing to do to a United States senator for having the authority to simply ask a question,” Padilla said, “imagine what they’ll do to any American who dares to speak up”.In his floor speech, Padilla said he was in Los Angeles to conduct congressional oversight of the administration’s escalating immigration operations in the city. He was at the federal building that morning for a scheduled briefing with US northern command’s General Gregory Guillot about the president’s order to deploy US marines to the city as part of its response to protests against immigration raids that left Latino communities shaken and afraid.When he arrived, Padilla said that he was met at the building’s entrance by a national guardsman and an FBI agent. He was then escorted through a security screening and into the conference room where the briefing would take place.When he learned Noem was holding a press conference “literally down the hall” – and that it was the reason his own briefing was delayed – Padilla said he asked to attend. He and his colleagues had many outstanding information requests about the department’s immigration enforcement tactics, and he said he hoped he might learn something from the secretary.“I didn’t just stand up and go – I asked,” he said.According to Padilla, the guardsman and FBI agent then “escorted” him into the room where Noem was giving remarks to reporters. “They opened the door for me. They accompanied me into the press briefing room, and they stood next to me as I stood there for a while listening,” he said.When Noem declared that the federal law enforcement and military personnel would “liberate” Los Angeles from its Democratic governor and mayor – what Padilla called an “un-American mission statement” – he said he could no longer remain silent.“I was compelled, both as a senator and as an American, to speak up,” the senator said. “But before I could even get out my question, I was physically and aggressively forced out of the room, even as I repeatedly announced I was a United States senator, and I had a question for the secretary, and even as the national guardsmen and the FBI agent who served as my escorts brought me into that press briefing room, stood by silently, knowing full well who I was.”He was dragged into a hallway and forced onto the ground, Padilla recalled, his voice catching as he described being forced onto his knees and then his chest pressed into the ground. “I was handcuffed and marched down a hallway repeatedly asking, ‘Why am I being detained?’ Not once did they tell me why?” he said. “I pray you never have a moment like this.”As this was happening, Padilla said his thoughts turned to his family: “What will my wife think? What will our boys think?” And then to his constituents – those in a city already on edge, militarized against the wishes of the governor and local enforcement – how would they react when they saw the images of their US senator – the first Latino elected to the chamber from California – in handcuffs.When asked about Padilla’s removal during the press conference, Noem said she didn’t recognize the two-term senator and said he hadn’t requested a meeting. Noem and Padilla met for for 15 minutes following the incident, according to DHS.The FBI has said its agents believed Padilla was an attacker and responded appropriately. They blamed the senator for not wearing a pin identifying him as a member of Congress. The Guardian’s requests for comment from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the National Guard and the Secret Service were not immediately returned.In a statement on Tuesday, the White House dismissed Padilla’s floor speech as a “temper tantrum”.“Alex ‘Pay Attention to Me’ Padilla is bouncing from one desperate ploy for attention to the next,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, adding: “Whether or not Democrats like it, the American people support President Trump’s agenda to deport illegal aliens.”But Padilla, who noted he has never had a reputation as a “flame-thrower”, challenged his colleagues in both parties to consider what the episode revealed about the state of American democracy.“If you watched what unfolded last week and thought what happened is just about one politician and one press conference you’re missing the point,” he said. Democrats and some Republicans condemned the incident. But administration officials – and many Republicans – blamed Padilla, with the House speaker Mike Johnson suggesting he should be censured for his actions.Padilla accused Trump of being a “tyrant” who had ordered National Guard troops and US marines into Los Angeles to “justify his undemocratic crackdowns and his authoritarian power grabs”. He said Trump was surrounded by “yes men” and a pliant Congress who refused to reign in the president tries everything to “test the boundaries of his power”.“If Donald Trump can bypass the governor and activate the National Guard to put down protests on immigrant rights, he can do it to suppress your rights too,” he continued. “If he can deploy the Marines to Los Angeles without justification, he can deploy them to your state too. And if you can ignore due process, strip away first amendment rights and disappear people to foreign prisons without their day in court, he can do it to you too.”Padilla, the “proud” son of Mexican immigrants, warned that what is happening in his state could spread nationwide.“I refuse to let immigrants be political pawns on his path towards fascism,” he said. He described the situation in California as a “test case” for what could happen to “any American anywhere in the country”.As Padilla spoke in Washington, images emerged from New York where Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller and a candidate for mayor, had been arrested by masked federal agents as he visited an immigration court.“It’s time to wake up,” Padilla said, urging Americans to continue to peacefully protest the administration. “If this administration is this afraid of just one senator with a question … imagine what the voices of tens of billions of Americans peacefully protesting can do.”The Democrats in the chamber erupted in applause. More

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      Will the public side with the protesters in LA? Here are some lessons from history | Musa al-Gharbi

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      On 6 June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) conducted aggressive raids in Los Angeles, sweeping up gainfully employed workers with no criminal record. This led to demonstrations outside the Los Angeles federal building. During these protests, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, was arrested alongside more than 100 others – leading to even larger demonstrations the next day.Donald Trump responded on 7 June by sending federal troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests without consulting Gavin Newsom, and, in fact, in defiance of the California governor’s wishes. This dramatic federal response, paired with increasingly aggressive tactics by local police, led to the protests growing larger and escalating in their intensity. They’ve begun spreading to other major cities, too.Cue the culture war.On the right, the response was predictable: the federal clampdown was largely praised. Hyperbolic narratives about the protests and the protesters were uncritically amplified and affirmed. On the left, the response was no less predictable. There is a constellation of academic and media personalities who breathlessly root for all protests to escalate into violent revolution while another faction claims to support all the causes in principle but somehow never encounters an actual protest movement that they outright support.For my part, as I watched Waymo cars burning as Mexican flags fluttered behind them, I couldn’t help but be reminded of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the documentary Sociology Is a Martial Art, he emphasized: “I don’t think it’s a problem that young people are burning cars. I want them to be able to burn cars for a purpose.”It is, indeed, possible for burning cars to serve a purpose. However, it matters immensely who is perceived to have lit the fuse.It’s uncomfortable to talk about, but all major successful social movements realized their goals with and through direct conflict. There’s never been a case where people just held hands and sang Kumbaya, provoking those in power to nod and declare, “I never thought of it that way,” and then voluntarily make difficult concessions without any threats or coercion needed. Attempts at persuasion are typically necessary for a movement’s success, but they’re rarely sufficient. Actual or anticipated violence, destruction and chaos also have their role to play.Civil rights leaders in the 1950s, for instance, went out of their way to provoke high-profile, violent and disproportionate responses from those who supported segregation. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr had an intuitive understanding of what empirical social science now affirms: what matters isn’t the presence or absence of violence but, rather, who gets blamed for any escalations that occur.The current anti-Ice protests have included clashes with police and occasional property damage. Melees, looting and destruction are perennially unpopular. Then again, so were civil rights-era bus boycotts, diner sit-ins and marches. In truth, the public rarely supports any form of social protest.Something similar holds for elite opinion-makers. In the civil rights era, as now, many who claimed to support social justice causes also described virtually any disruptive action taken in the service of those causes as counterproductive, whether it was violent or not. As I describe in my book, civil rights leaders across the board described these “supporters” as the primary stumbling block for achieving equality.The simple truth is that most stakeholders in society – elites and normies alike, and across ideological lines – would prefer to stick with a suboptimal status quo than to embrace disruption in the service of an uncertain future state. Due to this widespread impulse, most successful social movements are deeply unpopular until after their victory is apparent. Insofar as they notch successes, it is often in defiance of public opinion.For instance, protests on US campuses against Israel’s campaign of destruction in Gaza were deeply unpopular. However, for all their flaws and limitations, the demonstrations, and the broader cultural discussion around the protests, did get more people paying attention to what was happening in the Middle East. And as more people looked into Israel’s disastrous campaign in Gaza, American support plummeted. Among Democrats, independents and Republicans alike, sympathy for Israelis over Palestinians is significantly lower today than before 7 October 2023. These patterns are not just evident in the US but also across western Europe and beyond.The Palestinian author Omar el-Akkad notes that when atrocities become widely recognized, everyone belatedly claims to have always been against them – even if they actively facilitated or denied the crimes while they were being carried out. Successful social movements function the opposite way: once they succeed, everyone paints themselves as having always been for them, even if the movements in question were deeply unpopular at the time.Martin Luther King Jr, for instance, was widely vilified towards the end of his life. Today, he has a federal holiday named after him. The lesson? Contemporaneous public polls about demonstrations tell us very little about the impact they’ll ultimately have.So, how can we predict the likely impact of social movements?The best picture we have from empirical social science research is that conflict can help shift public opinion in favor of political causes, but it can also lead to blowback against those causes. The rule seems to be that whoever is perceived to have initiated violence loses: if the protesters are seen as sparking violence, citizens sour on the cause and support state crackdowns. If the government is seen as having provoked chaos through inept or overly aggressive action, the public grows more sympathetic to the protesters’ cause (even if they continue to hold negative opinions about the protesters and the protests themselves).The 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles are an instructive example. They arose after King was unjustly beaten by law enforcement and the state failed to hold the perpetrators to account. In public opinion, the government was held liable for these legitimate grievances and outrage. As a result, the subsequent unrest seemed to generate further sympathy for police reform (even though most Americans frowned on the unrest itself).skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStonewall was a literal riot. However, it was also widely understood that the conflict was, itself, a response to law enforcement raids on gay bars. Gay and trans people were being aggressively surveilled and harassed by the state, and began pushing back more forcefully for respect, privacy and autonomy. The government was the perceived aggressor, and this worked to the benefit of the cause. Hence, today, the Stonewall uprising is celebrated as a pivotal moment in civil rights history despite being characterized in a uniformly negative fashion at the time.This is not the way social movements always play out. If the protests come to be seen as being motivated primarily by animus, resentment or revenge (rather than positive or noble ideals), the public tends to grow more supportive of a crackdown against the movement. Likewise, if demonstrators seem pre-committed to violence, destruction and chaos, people who might otherwise be sympathetic to the cause tend to rapidly disassociate with the protesters and their stated objectives.The 6 January 2021 raid on the Capitol building, for instance, led to lower levels of affiliation with the GOP. Politicians who subsequently justified the insurrection performed especially poorly in the 2022 midterms (with negative spillover effects to Republican peers).The protests that followed George Floyd’s murder were a mixed bag: in areas where demonstrations did not spiral into chaos or violence, the protests increased support for many police reforms and, incidentally, the Democratic party. In contexts where violence, looting, crime increases and extremist claims were more prevalent – where protesters seemed more focused on condemning, punishing or razing society rather than fixing it – trends moved in the opposite direction.Yet, although the Floyd-era protests themselves had an ambivalent effect on public support for criminal justice reform, the outcome of Trump’s clampdown on the demonstrations was unambiguous: it led to a rapid erosion in GOP support among white Americans – likely costing Trump the 2020 election. Why? Because the president came off as an aggressor.Trump did not push for a crackdown reluctantly, after all other options were exhausted. He appeared to be hungry for conflict and eager to see the situation escalate. He seemed to relish norm violations and inflicting harm on his opponents. These perceptions were politically disastrous for him in 2020. They appear to be just as disastrous today.Right now, the public is split on whether the ongoing demonstrations in support of immigrants’ rights are peaceful. Yet, broadly, Americans disapprove of these protests, just as they disapprove of most others. Critically, however, most also disapprove of Trump’s decisions to deploy the national guard and the marines to Los Angeles. The federal agency at the heart of these protests, Ice, is not popular either. Americans broadly reject the agency’s tactics of conducting arrests in plain clothes, stuffing people in unmarked vehicles and wearing masks to shield their identities. The public also disagrees with deporting undocumented immigrants who were brought over as children, alongside policies that separate families, or actions that deny due process.Employers, meanwhile, have lobbied the White House to revise its policies, which seem to primarily target longstanding and gainfully employed workers rather than criminals or people free-riding on government benefits – to the detriment of core US industries.Even before the protests began, there were signs that Americans were souring on Trump’s draconian approach to immigration, and public support has declined rapidly since the protests started on 6 June.Whether the demonstrations ultimately lead to still more erosion of public support for Trump or continued declines in public support for immigration will likely depend less on whether the demonstrations continue to escalate than on whom the public ultimately blames for any escalation that occurs.At present, it’s not looking good for the White House.

      Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, is out now with Princeton University Press. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘This moment was thrust upon him’: Gavin Newsom steps up to parry Trump’s ‘wrecking ball’ attacks on American democracy

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      When Donald Trump landed in Los Angeles to tour the ruins left by January’s devastating wildfires, just days after being sworn in for a second term, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, was waiting on the tarmac to greet him. The surprisingly warm exchange between two longtime political rivals seemed to reflect a new reality: with a vengeful Trump back in the White House, fire-ravaged California – and its Democratic governor – had a great deal at stake.In the weeks that followed, Newsom met with Trump at the White House to lobby for federal disaster relief, then approved funding to strengthen the state’s legal defenses against challenges from the Trump administration. He invited Maga-world fixtures on to his podcast, including Steve Bannon, and infuriated progressives, and even some allies, when he said that it was “deeply unfair” for transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports – a wedge issue central to Trump’s conservative agenda. All the while, his state was suing the Trump administration – over executive actions on immigration, federal funding and tariffs – at a rate of more than one lawsuit a week.Their fragile detente, already showing cracks, shattered spectacularly last week, when the president mobilized thousands of national guard troops and 700 marines – over the governor’s objections – to quell protests in Los Angeles sparked by immigration raids across the region.Newsom accused Trump of deliberately injecting chaos into a situation that local authorities had under control. Trump’s actions, he declared, were “madness” and marked an “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”. Trump, in turn, called Newsom, whom he refers to as “Newscum”, grossly incompetent and suggested the governor should be arrested. “Gavin likes the publicity,” the president mused, though he later played down the threat.With guards troops deployed in the streets of Los Angeles, the 57-year-old governor of the country’s most populous state delivered a formal, state-of-the-union-style address warning that the president was taking a “wrecking ball” to American democracy.“Look, this isn’t just about protests in LA,” Newsom said on Tuesday. “This is about all of us. This is about you.”“California may be first – but it clearly won’t end here. Other states are next,” he said. “Democracy is next.”For months, Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and a growing number of alarmed Americans had been clamoring for leaders who grasp what they say is the urgency of Trump’s assault on democratic norms and American institutions. When Trump activated California’s national guard troops, Newsom stepped into the ring – and hasn’t stopped swinging since.“This moment was thrust upon him,” said Mike Madrid, a sharp critic of Trump and former political director of the California Republican party, “and whether it was a battlefield conversion or a genuine moment, Gavin Newsom realized that the only way out of this was to fight.”View image in fullscreenIn the week since the national guard’s deployment to Los Angeles, Newsom has mounted an all-out offensive – battling Trump in the courts and in the court of public opinion. He has made himself ubiquitous: sitting for interviews with podcasters and YouTubers, national media and local media. On social media, he and his team are running a rapid response blitz – a stream of taunts, Star Wars memes and factchecks.Newsom sued to block the guard’s deployment without his consent. California later filed an emergency order asking a judge to bar the guard from assisting with immigration enforcement. On Thursday, a federal judge sided with the state, finding that Trump’s deployment of the guard was unlawful – though the victory was short-lived. Two hours later, the ninth US circuit court of appeals temporarily blocked the order.“He is not a king and he should stop acting like one,” Newsom said on Thursday, at a press conference before the ruling was paused.The White House has responded in kind, with Trump hurling insults back at Newsom. When asked what crime Newsom might be charged with, Trump sniped: “His primary crime is running for governor, because he’s done such a bad job.”Trump, thanking the appeals court on Friday, said: “If I didn’t send the military into Los Angeles, that city would be burning to the ground right now” – a claim Newsom, city officials and local law enforcement strongly dispute.Tensions escalated further on Thursday, when a senator from California, Alex Padilla, was forcibly removed and handcuffed after trying to ask a question at a press conference held by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, amid the ongoing protests in Los Angeles. Newsom called the episode “outrageous, dictatorial, and shameful”.“This is a moment that tests the mettle of leaders,” said Brian Brokaw, a longtime political adviser to Newsom. He noted that Newsom’s tenure was defined by crisis from the very start.The day after he was elected in 2018, a gunman killed 12 people at a country music bar in Thousand Oaks and as the Camp fire – the deadliest wildfire in state history – raged toward the town of Paradise. Since then, Newsom has faced a near-constant onslaught: more fires, more mass shootings, floods, mudslides, drought, a global pandemic, mass protests after the murder of George Floyd, and the wildfires that swept Los Angeles earlier this year.“Newsom has pretty good instincts,” Brokaw said. “He knows what a moment like this requires – and that’s what you’re seeing from him now.”The rapidly intensifying standoff between Trump and Newsom has rallied Democrats. Twenty-two Democratic governors signed a joint statement in support of California, calling Trump’s troop deployment “ineffective and dangerous”. The signatories spanned the ideological spectrum of the party and included several governors who are potential 2028 presidential contenders, such as JB Pritzker of Illinois, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Andy Beshear of Kentucky.“He has shown he’s not going to be intimidated, and we’re all for that,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said earlier this week.Even some of his critics have been impressed. Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, one of the groups behind Saturday’s “day of defiance” protests against Trump, said Newsom’s pugilistic response to the president’s “bullying” has been “spot on”.“I think he’s been one of the leading members of the ‘roll over and play dead’ faction, one of these dead-dog Democrats,” Levin said. “But maybe – maybe – he is shifting sides, and I think it is very important that we welcome people and leaders when they do that.”The White House believes its maximalist response to unrest in California plays to its political advantage. Trump, who campaigned on a promise of mass deportations, has framed California’s resistance as an obstruction to what he says is a popular mandate. Images of protesters waving Mexican flags near burning robotaxis feed the rightwing narrative of disorder in Democratic-run cities such as Los Angeles.“To be very cynical about this, you can argue that this benefits both principals,” said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University. “Donald Trump gets to swing at his favorite piñata, California, but Gavin Newsom doesn’t mind taking the whacks because it plays pretty well with the Democratic base.”According to a YouGov flash poll, 45% of Americans disapprove of the Los Angeles protests, while 36% approve. Similar shares disapprove of Trump’s deployment of the marines – 47% to 34% – and the national guard – 45% to 38%.View image in fullscreenSince Trump’s 2024 victory, many Democrats have taken pains to show support for law enforcement and border security.Some say Newsom’s approach offers a clear path forward. He has been unequivocal in condemning sporadic violence, vowing “zero tolerance” for bad actors. At the same time, he has offered a full-throated defense of the city’s immigrant communities, accusing Trump of tearing apart families and “disappearing” neighbors.“What’s happening right now is very different than anything we’ve seen before,” Newsom said in his Tuesday address, accusing federal agents of indiscriminately targeting Latino neighborhoods. “Trump is pulling a military dragnet across LA, well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals.”Conservatives say Newsom’s posture is precisely what helped Trump make inroads in some of the bluest corners of the country last year. Steve Hilton, a former top adviser to former UK prime minister David Cameron now running for governor of California, accused Newsom of trying to “gaslight us”.“Do your job,” he said on Fox News, “instead of pretending this is fine.”Newsom rose to prominence as the mayor of San Francisco, defying state law to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He served as the state’s lieutenant governor for eight years before being elected governor in the middle of Trump’s first term, riding a wave of progressive anger. He survived a 2021 recall attempt, fueled in part by backlash to his handling of the pandemic, and was easily re-elected in 2022. He campaigned aggressively for Biden in 2024, even as some in the party hoped he’d run himself. When Biden dropped out, Newsom quickly endorsed his fellow Californian, “fearless” Kamala Harris.Democrats’ staggering losses in November left the party leaderless and without power in Washington. As Democrats grasped for answers – how to oppose an emboldened president whom voters chose over them – Newsom launched a podcast. Some speculated Newsom’s moves – interviewing far-right figures on his podcast, cracking down on homeless encampments and moving to scale back health coverage for immigrants without legal status – were part of a calculated pivot toward the political center, in preparation for a 2028 presidential run.Asked recently at a press conference if he was trying to shed his liberal persona, Newsom said he had always been a “hard-headed pragmatist”. “I’m not an ideologue,” he added.California – the biggest blue state in the country – has long served as Trump’s favorite foil. From homelessness and crime to immigration and climate policy, Trump has painted the state as a cautionary tale – a failed experiment in liberal governance now a “symbol of our nation’s decline”.This week, amid his clash with Newsom, Trump signed into law a measure blocking California’s vehicle emissions rules and his administration announced plans to abolish two of the state’s newest national monuments.“If it’s a day ending in Y, it’s another day of Trump’s war on California,” the governor’s office tweeted.Steve Maviglio, a Democratic political consultant, said Newsom’s “guerrilla warfare” tactics may raise the governor’s national profile – but at a cost.“We know that the president doesn’t respond well to being attacked,” Maviglio said, adding: “It’s likely going to result in a lot less federal dollars coming our way – which is about the last thing we need right now with a multibillion-dollar budget deficit.”Yet Newsom’s attempt at conciliation yielded little protection. Earlier this month, the Trump administration warned it may pull billions in funding from California’s long-delayed high-speed rail project. Trump has threatened to “maybe permanently” strip federal funding if the state continues to allow transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. And California is still waiting for the disaster aid Newsom sought after the fires.Newsom has argued in recent interviews that Trump can’t be placated. The governor suggested the state had leverage: it could withhold the billions in taxes its residents pay the federal government. (He has since tempered the idea, but said he urged his team to get “creative” on how the state might push back on Trump’s threats.)Newsom also suggested that growing public opposition to the immigration crackdown was working, after Trump conceded that his immigration tactics were hurting agriculture and hospitality. “Turns out, chasing hardworking people through ranches and snatching women and children off the streets is not good policy,” Newsom shot back.Though protests have calmed, the situation remains volatile. With the appeals court decision, Trump remains in command of the national guard through at least next week. On Friday, US marines temporarily detained a man outside the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles – the first known detention of a civilian by active-duty troops deployed there by Trump.Speaking in Los Angeles, Noem pledged to “liberate” Los Angeles and vowed that the Trump administration would continue its immigration operations across the region.Ahead of planned protests on Saturday, Newsom ordered the state to “pre-deploy” additional resources to support law enforcement throughout the state. Organized as a show of defiance against Trump’s military parade staged in the streets of Washington DC on Saturday to celebrate the US army’s 250th anniversary and the president’s 79th birthday, the events have multiplied since Trump deployed guard troops to Los Angeles.For Newsom, the stakes are bigger than California. He has framed this moment as a test of democratic resilience in the face of creeping authoritarianism. And for those who have long sounded the alarm, the governor is meeting it.“He’s become what Democrats nationally have been waiting for since the election,” Madrid said. “He’s the tip of the spear – the more strenuously he fights, the more aggressive he is, the more he uses Trump’s tactics against him, the more he’s going to be rewarded.”David Smith in Washington and Rachel Leingang contributed reporting More

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      What the foreign flags at the LA protests really mean

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      At the White House on Wednesday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters Donald Trump’s decision to dispatch the military to Los Angeles had been triggered by something he’d seen: “images of foreign flags being waved” during protests over federal immigration raids.Leavitt did not specify which images the president had been so disturbed by, but the fact that some protesters denouncing his immigration crackdown have waved Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadorian flags, or hybrid flags that combine those banners with the American flag, has been taken as an affront by supporters of his mass deportation campaign.The architect of that policy, Stephen Miller, has complained bitterly about flag-waving protesters on the streets of his Los Angeles hometown, and shared video of demonstrators on social media with the comment: “Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory.”Trump himself even claimed, during his deeply partisan speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, that his deployment of active-duty marines to the city was justified because of the protesters he called “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.But observers with a more nuanced understanding of the Los Angeles communities being targeted in these raids, and of the nation’s history as a refuge for immigrants, suggest that the flags are not intended to signal allegiance to any foreign government but rather to signal solidarity with immigrants from those places and, for Americans with roots in those countries, to express pride in their heritage.Lalo Alcaraz, a Mexican American satirist and editorial cartoonist, who coined the term “self-deportation” in the 1990s as part of an elaborate prank in response to the anti-immigrant policies of then California governor Pete Wilson, said that the protesters carrying those flags in LA are not immigrants themselves, but “the younger generation that are American citizens and that have pride in their immigrant parents”. Their parents, he said, “are hard-working good people who come from other countries – Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador. This is why they proudly wave those flags.”“Of course they’re proud of their roots, and honestly, what has the American flag done for them but persecute their families?” Alcaraz added. “They are promised that there is a right way to immigrate, that there will be a pathway to citizenship, but this promise has been ignored because corporations make profits off the low wages and hard work of these immigrants, and want to keep them in limbo because it’s easier to control them.”That sentiment was echoed by a protester named Jesus, who told NPR during a protest this week that he waved the Mexican flag because “I’m proud of my Mexican heritage, you know? Even though it was several generations ago, my family members were immigrants.”As NPR’s Adrian Florido pointed out, the large number of flags from other parts of the Americas at these protests contrasted sharply with what was seen in the same place two decades ago.View image in fullscreenIn 2006, when huge marches brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of LA to protest against Republicans in Congress introducing a restrictive immigration bill that would close off paths to citizenship and build fences along the border, organizers urged the demonstrators to wave American flags.“Apparently taking stock of complaints about the number of Mexican flags in previous demonstrations, organizers made sure that the vast majority of marchers Monday carried American flags,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2006 on the massive May Day march that year. Images from that rally showed that Mexican flags were vastly outnumbered in a sea of American flags.Others have pointed out that, for Americans with European roots, waving the flags of their ancestors, from Ireland or Italy, for example, is considered uncontroversial.“The reason Mexicans and Mexican Americans wave the Mexican flag is the same reason the Irish wave the Irish flag,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote on Friday. “Not because they want to go back there, but because they are proud of their Heritage and want to stand up for people with their ancestry.”“When you persecute a minority, it makes them more aware of their identity and differences from the majority, slowing assimilation,” he added. “In other words, the Trump agenda is bad for the very thing Trumpists claim to want.”In that light, it is worth recalling that charges of dual loyalty were once hurled at Irish and Italian immigrants, too. Less than a century ago, in fact, American citizens from Irish and Italian families were viewed with hatred and suspicion by native-born, white Protestants.To take one example, when 1,000 robed members of the Ku Klux Klan rioted at the 1927 Memorial Day parade in Queens, and seven men were arrested, one of their chief targets was New York’s Irish American-led police force, which tried to prevent them from marching. One of those men was the current president’s father, Fred Trump. (A report from the time in a Brooklyn newspaper said that “a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so” against Trump was quickly dismissed.)The deep vein of hatred Italian immigrants faced was even a motivating factor in the the first Columbus Day proclamation, issued by Benjamin Harrison in 1892. The then US president hoped to gain support from new Italian American voters, but he was also trying to absolve the country of the stain from a deadly anti-Italian riot the year before in New Orleans, in which 11 Italian immigrants had been falsely accused of murder and were lynched by a mob.One of Trump’s first acts on returning to office this year was to issue a proclamation that Columbus Day would be celebrated during his administration without any acknowledgement of the Indigenous people who suffered so much in the centuries after his voyage to this hemisphere. More

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      Has Trump turned the US into a police state? – podcast

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      Trump keeps national guards in LA for now as appeals court puts brakes on ban

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      An appeals court has temporarily returned control of California’s national guard to Donald Trump, just hours after a federal judge ruled the president’s use of the guards to suppress protests in Los Angeles was illegal and banned it.The 9th US Circuit court of appeals order means Trump retains command of the guards for now and can continue to use them to respond to protests against his immigration crackdown. The court could later decide against his control.It’s a temporary victory for Trump in back-and-forth court decisions on who should control the security force, an issue that has pitted California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the president and angered Democrats, who see the deployment as an abuse of power.The three-judge panel that paused the ruling included two judges appointed by Trump in his first term. The other is a judge appointed by Joe Biden. The panel said it would hold a hearing on Tuesday to consider the merits of the order from District Judge Charles Breyer from earlier in the day.Breyer ruled the Guard deployment was illegal and both violated the 10th amendment and exceeded Trump’s statutory authority. The order applied only to the National Guard troops and not Marines who were also deployed to the LA protests. The judge said he would not rule on the Marines because they were not out on the streets yet.In issuing a temporary restraining order against Trump, Breyer found the president had failed to show there was a “rebellion” in Los Angeles that required him to federalize the guard and failed to comply with the procedural steps to notify the governor.“His actions were illegal – both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States constitution. He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor,” Breyer wrote.The request for the injunction is part of a lawsuit filed by the state of California challenging Trump’s move to call up more than 4,000 national guard troops and about 700 active-duty marines based in Twentynine Palms, California, over Newsom’s objections.Beryer’s decision came after a hearing in federal district court in San Francisco where the justice department argued Trump had the sole and unreviewable power to decide whether there was a “rebellion” that needed federal intervention.Breyer rejected both arguments in his sweeping 36-page opinion, effectively rebuking the justice department for trying to suggest the conditions to take control of the guard had been met as long as Trump had decided himself that was the case.“The president’s discretion in what to do next does not mean that the president can unilaterally and without judicial review declare that a vacancy exists in order to fill it. That is classic ipse dixit,” Breyer wrote, adding that the definition of rebellion had clearly not been met.The temporary restraining order did not touch on Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, moving to deploy the marines, in large part because the justice department told the judge they were only being used to protect federal buildings and personnel.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUsing the military for protective purposes, Breyer suggested at the hearing, would not be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th-century law prohibiting the use of troops to engage in law enforcement activities on domestic soil.Trump has been suggesting the idea of deploying troops against Americans since his first term, when some Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 turned violent. He opted against doing so at the time, but has since expressed regret to advisers that he did not punish them more aggressively.Notably, during a campaign rally in 2023, Trump vowed to respond more forcefully if elected to a second term. “You’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in,” he said of the president’s usual role in deciding whether to send in the military. “The next time, I’m not waiting.”The Associated Press contributed reporting. More