June 13 (UPI) — The California National Guard will remain on the streets of downtown Los Angeles on Friday after an appeals court put an order from a federal judge to remove the soldiers on hold only hours after it was decreed.
The fifth night of a curfew in one square mile of downtown Los Angeles began Friday night. Mayor Karen Bass first imposed the curfew for most people beginning Tuesday night after protests against immigration enforcement operations became violent, including property damage.
President Donald Trump federalized thousands of National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Newsom filed suit against the order, saying it was illegal.
“The court has received the government’s emergency motion for stay pending appeal,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote late Thursday after the Trump administration requested a delay.
“The request for an administrative stay is granted,” the circuit judges continued in a single-page, six-sentence order that stops a temporary restraining order that had President Donald Trump relinquishing control of the state’s National Guard away from California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Trump posted to his Truth Social account Friday: “The appeals court ruled last night that I can use the National Guard to keep our cities, in this case Los Angeles, safe. If I didn’t send the military into Los Angeles, that city would be burning to the ground right now. We saved L.A. Thank you for the decision!!!”
Trump had been stopped, albeit briefly, from the deployment of those troops in the state’s largest city other than protecting federal buildings.
Newsom had filed suit against Trump, who federalized 4,000 members of the Guard and sent them to Los Angeles to stand against demonstrators protesting raids by Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents that began last week.
Newsom, the rightful commander-in-chief of the California National Guard when it is under state control, was not informed or involved with Trump’s action, and filed that suit to strike it down.
U,S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled on the initial filing Thursday, and issued a temporary restraining order that stated Trump’s deployment of the Guard to police the city’s streets likely violated the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which bars federal overreach.
“It is well-established that the police power is one of the quintessential powers reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment,” Breyer wrote in his ruling.
Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, further added that the “citizens of Los Angeles face a greater harm from the continued unlawful militarization of their city, which not only inflames tensions with protesters, threatening increased hostilities and loss of life, but deprives the state for two months of its own use of thousands of National Guard members to fight fires, combat the fentanyl trade and perform other critical functions.”
The Trump administration appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which put a hold on Breyer’s order until at least Tuesday at noon, and allows the White House to keep the Guard on active patrol in Los Angeles.
Newsom has not publicly commented as of yet on the Ninth Circuit’s stay of Breyer’s order, but California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office issued a statement that called the administrative stay “unnecessary and unwarranted in light of the district court’s extensive reasoning.”
After the district judge’s decision, Newsom posted on X: “The court has ruled. @RealDonaldTrump you must relinquish your authority of the National Guard back to me and back to California.”