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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.
DOZENS OF ANTI-ICE RIOTERS ARRESTED IN LA AS TRUMP SENDS IN NATIONAL GUARD TO QUELL VIOLENCE
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.
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.
Meanwhile Trump defended the decision on Monday, and added that if protesters spit in the face of guardsmen in Los Angeles, they’ll “be hit harder than they have ever been hit before.”
“IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT,” Trump wrote. “Such disrespect will not be tolerated!”
Federal law typically bars the U.S. military from carrying out domestic law enforcement purposes, unless the president invokes the Insurrection Act.
Newsom claimed Trump is trying to “manufacture a crisis” and that the president is “hoping for chaos so he can justify more crackdowns, more fear, more control.”
The protests began in reaction to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the City of Angels as the Trump administration moves to make good on its promise of mass deportations. Over the weekend, protests devolved into violence that left vehicles charred to a crisp and windows smashed at the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters.
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