Federal takeovers may have just become a lot harder for Trump to pull off.
Score one for the Constitution.
A federal judge has put a temporary halt to President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, finding the president violated a bedrock American law known as the Posse Comitatus Act.
Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer issued the preliminary injunction Tuesday after a three-day bench trial.
An appeal from the Justice Department is forthcoming.
The ruling was clear right from the start. “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 before detailing the actions of the Trump administration in sending troops to LA to ostensibly quash a rebellion, in the form of protests over immigration raids.
“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” Breyer acknowledged. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
“In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act,” he wrote, adding that the law was violated “willfully” and that the Defense Department “knowingly contradicted their own training materials which listed 12 functions that the Posse Comitatus Act bars the military from performing.”
Per the judge’s order, the Trump administration will be blocked from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws,” unless it can show “a valid constitutional or statutory exception” to the act.
At the height of Trump’s response, there were over 4,000 National Guard and 700 Marines deployed to LA, prompting Newsom to sue the administration. Currently, there are about 300 troops left in Los Angeles.
Breyer’s order on Tuesday only applies to California. But any attempt by the president to deploy troops elsewhere to assist with civilian law enforcement, as Trump has suggested he will do in Chicago, could now face major legal headwinds.
To send in Marines and grab hold of California’s National Guard, Trump issued a broad memo in June that invoked an obscure statute known as Section 12406 that he claimed essentially allowed him to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act if there is an ongoing rebellion against the U.
