Roughly 700 Marines are deploying to the Los Angeles area to protect federal buildings and personnel in the wake of protests over immigration that have already led President Trump to federalize National Guard troops, the U.S. military said Monday.
The troops, which are assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division out of Twentynine Palms, Calif., won’t engage with protesters, U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in North America, said in a statement.
A senior administration official told reporters on Monday evening that the move came in light of increased threats against federal officers and federal buildings.
The unusual decision marks the first time in more than three decades that Marines have been sent into a U.S. city to address civil unrest.
It came over the objections of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom , who has called the federal intervention an intrusion on state sovereignty and sued in response. “They shouldn’t be deployed on American soil facing their own countrymen to fulfill the deranged fantasy of a dictatorial President,” Newsom wrote in a message on X. Later Monday night, he said he would file a lawsuit to prevent the Marines from being deployed.
The troops, which could arrive in the Los Angeles area as soon as tonight, will be under the U.S. Northern Command.
The Marines are among the troops Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said over the weekend were prepared to deploy .
Federal agents arrested several immigrants during a targeted operation on Friday, igniting protests that quickly spread across the city into neighboring Paramount, where agents conducted more arrests. Despite Newsom’s public insistence that the situation was stabilizing, Trump ordered National Guardsmen to Los Angeles on Saturday night, ignoring the governor’s warnings that an uninvited federal deployment was “purposefully inflammatory” and risked escalating tensions.
It is unclear how long the Marines will deploy, what kind of weapons they are authorized to carry or their specific orders.
A statement by the U.S. Northern Command said that 2,100 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines will protect federal personnel and property under the command of Task Force 51, the headquarters that has been assigned the mission. The forces have been trained in de-escalation, crowd control, and standing rules for the use of force, the command said.
Even as the Marines deployed, there were signs that the U.S. military force in Los Angeles might soon expand further. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a social-media post Monday night that an additional 2,000 National Guard troops were being mobilized. If all of the troops were quickly deployed, the force in Los Angeles would approach 5,000 troops.
Newsom said in a social-media post that he had also been informed more National Guard troops were being mobilized, but added that the Guard deployment appeared to be going slowly. Only 300 of the first complement of National Guard members had been deployed, he wrote, while the rest were sitting in federal buildings awaiting orders.
“This isn’t about public safety. It’s about stroking a dangerous President’s ego,” Newsom said on X.
Northern Command said late Monday night that the National Guard force has now grown to 1,700 in the Greater Los Angeles area.
Meanwhile, Newsom said that more than 800 additional state and local law-enforcement officers from nearby counties will be sent to Los Angeles to help quell the protests and “clean up President Trump’s mess.”
A presidential order issued Saturday by Trump directed the Pentagon to use the National Guard and “other members of the Regular Armed Forces as necessary” to protect federal “functions and property.”
The last time Marines deployed to quell civil unrest was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which erupted after four police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.
President George H.W. Bush acted after he received a request from California Gov. Pete Wilson to help contain the violence that erupted after the acquittal of the police officers.
Bush invoked the Insurrection Act, federalizing the California National Guard. He then deployed roughly 2,000 Army soldiers from nearby Fort Ord and 1,500 Marines from Camp Pendleton.
In this instance, Trump didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that allows the president to deploy the U.S. military domestically in some instances, such as putting down civil disorder or a rebellion, but instead appeared to authorize the deployment under the weekend executive order.
National Guard troops are part-time soldiers assigned to a state and are usually under the governor’s authority. Active-duty troops answer solely to the commander in chief and their focus is on defending the U.S.
Trump, who won his re-election campaign on a pledge to crack down on illegal immigration, has embraced fights with Democrats who have said his tactics go beyond his constitutional limits.
Though U.S. officials have said the role of the National Guard and Marine forces in Los Angeles will be limited, the broad nature of the order has spurred concerns that it could also be laying the foundations for future military actions against protesters elsewhere in the country. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bars the armed forces from law enforcement except under certain circumstances.
The Los Angeles deployment also comes on the heels of other steps in which Trump has used his executive authority to push the boundaries of using troops on U.S. soil. Those include authorizing active‑duty troops to detain migrants in newly created military zones along the southern border, using U.S. bases as detention areas and flying detainees out of the country on U.S. Air Force planes.
“This is Trump’s dream,” Rep. Seth Moulton , a Massachusetts Democrat who as a Marine officer served multiple tours during the war in Iraq, said Monday. “This is exactly what he has wanted to do: turn the military against the American people. Donald Trump has never respected what Marines do overseas, but has always wanted to use them to force his political agenda at home.”
It is rare for a president to send National Guard troops or active-duty military to a state without an explicit request from a governor or invoking the Insurrection Act.
President Lyndon Johnson federalized the National Guard and sent them to Alabama to protect protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 without a request from the state’s governor. Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act.
Active-duty troops were used by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 without permission of the state’s governor. They were used to uphold a Supreme Court ruling that segregated schools were inherently unequal, which enabled Black children to enroll at a previously segregated school in Little Rock, Ark. Eisenhower also relied on the Insurrection Act.
Write to Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com , Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com
