By Brad Brooks, Jorge Garcia, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Hundreds of U.S. Marines arrived in Los Angeles overnight and more were expected on Tuesday under orders from President Donald Trump, who has also activated 4,000 National Guard troops to quell protests despite objections from California Governor Gavin Newsom and other local leaders.
The city has seen days of public outrage since the Trump administration launched a series of immigration raids on Friday, though local officials said the demonstrations on Monday were largely peaceful.
About half of the roughly 700 Marines that Trump ordered to Los Angeles arrived on Monday night, and the remaining troops will enter the city on Tuesday, a U.S. official told Reuters. The U.S. military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told KABC that more than 100 people had been arrested on Monday but that the majority of protesters were nonviolent. Over the weekend, protesters threw rocks and other objects at officers and vehicles and set several cars ablaze. Police responded by firing projectiles like pepper balls as well as flash bang grenades and tear gas.
Trump has justified his decision to deploy active military troops to Los Angeles by describing the protests as a violent occupation of the city, a characterization that Newsom and Bass have said is grossly exaggerated.
Newsom said that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops has only inflamed the situation and made it more difficult for local law enforcement to respond to the demonstrations.
In a statement on Monday, Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said the department had not been notified that any Marines were traveling to the city and that their possible arrival “presents a significant logistical and operational challenge” for police.
Trump’s decision to mobilize 700 Marines based in Southern California escalated his confrontation with Newsom, who filed a lawsuit on Monday asserting that Trump’s deployment of Guard troops without the governor’s consent was illegal. The Guard deployment was the first time in decades that a president activated the Guard absent a request from a sitting governor.
While the Marines are only tasked with guarding federal property temporarily until the full contingent of 4,000 Guard troops arrives, the use of active military to respond to civil disturbances is extremely rare.
“This isn’t about public safety,” Newsom wrote on X on Monday. “It’s about stroking a dangerous President’s ego.”
The top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed, said he was “gravely troubled” by Trump’s deployment of active-duty Marines.
“Since our nation’s founding, the American people have been perfectly clear: we do not want the military conducting law enforcement on U.S. soil,” he said.
In a post on Tuesday morning on Truth Social, Trump claimed Los Angeles would be “burning to the ground right now” if he had not deployed troops to the city.
DEMONSTRATIONS AND ARRESTS
The raids are part of Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, which Democrats and immigrant advocates have said are indiscriminately breaking up families.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pledged on Monday to carry out more operations to round up suspected immigration violators. Trump officials have branded the protests as lawless and blamed state and local Democrats for protecting undocumented immigrants with sanctuary cities.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered on Monday outside a federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles where immigrants have been held, chanting “free them all” and waving Mexican and Central American flags.
National Guard forces formed a human barricade to keep people out of the building, and late on Monday, police began dispersing the crowd using gas canisters and arrested some protesters.
At dusk, officers had running confrontations with protesters who had scattered into the Little Tokyo section of the city. As people watched from apartment patios above street level and as tourists huddled inside hotels, a large contingent of LAPD and officers and sheriff’s deputies fired several flash bangs that boomed through side streets along with tear gas.
Protests spread to neighboring Orange County on Monday night after immigration raids there, with demonstrators gathering at the Santa Ana Federal building, according to local officials and news reports.
Protests also sprang up in at least nine other U.S. cities on Monday, including New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, according to local news reports.
In Austin, Texas, police fired non-lethal munitions and detained several people as they clashed with a crowd of several hundred protesters.
(Reporting by Jorge Garcia, Brad Brooks, Jane Ross and Arafat Barbakh in Los Angeles and Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart in Washington; Additional reporting by Sandy Hooper, Joel Angel Juarez, Kanishka Singh, Ismail Shakil, Doina Chiacu, Steve Holland, Nandita Bose, Lizbeth Díaz, Noé Torres, Alexia Garamfalvi and Dietrich Knauth; Writing by Dan Trotta, Andy Sullivan and Joseph Ax; Editing by Ross Colvin and Alistair Bell)
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