President Donald Trump ordered active-duty U.S. Marines and 2,000 more National Guard troops into Los Angeles on Monday, June 9th, to restore law and order in a city hit by increasingly violent protests against the federal government’s lawful cracking down on illegal immigration.
Trump’s extraordinary mobilization of 700 full-time professional military personnel—and thousands of National Guard troops—came on the fourth day of street protests descending into vandalism, triggered by dozens of immigration arrests in a city with huge foreign-born and Latino populations.
The deployment was ordered after demonstrators took over streets in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, torching cars and looting stores in scenes that saw law enforcement responding with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Dozens of illegal migrants and gang members were arrested over the weekend, while California Democrat governor Gavin Newsom, who was unable to keep the protests under control, demanded that the president pull out the federal troops from the state.
Trump, speaking in Washington, D.C., described the mostly violent protesters “professional agitators and insurrectionists.” In fact, as a New York Post editorial pointed out, the riots saw “Mexican flag-waving punks” “wearing skull masks and setting fire to cars.”
The liberal media, as it did before, attempted to downplay the severity of the situation but, as the NYP noted, had a hard time trying to “paint President Trump as a fascist when protesters from another country” were “inciting violence and looting.”
