Trump dispatches soldiers to Los Angeles in test of executive power

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The Trump administration will send 700 Marines to Los Angeles amid protests against raids on alleged illegal immigrants, as the president tests the boundaries of his executive power.

The move came just hours after California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom sued Donald Trump for an earlier decision to deploy National Guard troops to stamp out protests that began at the weekend.

Over the weekend, Trump moved to “federalise” the California National Guard by transferring control of the military troops from state to national control. Hundreds of guardsmen arrived on Sunday in downtown Los Angeles, where they used tear gas and rubber bullets against crowds who had gathered to protest against dozens of arrests in the city last week by armed federal immigration agents.

Newsom and state attorney-general Rob Bonta yesterday accused Trump of “creating fear and terror”. They wrote in a statement: “This is a manufactured crisis to allow him to take over a state militia, damaging the very foundation of our republic.”

Trump insisted that Los Angeles would have been “completely obliterated” without the National Guard. He also endorsed the idea of Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arresting Newsom, saying: “I would do it if I were Tom.”

Stephen Miller, the architect of the White House’s aggressive immigration policies, said that a “fight to save civilisation” was taking place on the streets of California’s most populous city, where demonstrators gathered again yesterday to protest against the immigration raids and the detention of union leader David Huerta.

Meanwhile, military veterans have objected to Trump deploying soldiers to the Los Angeles protests.

Retired major general Paul Eaton, who led the operation to train Iraqi troops during the US invasion of Iraq, told the FT that Trump’s order was a “display of presidential hubris” and a “misuse of executive power”. 

The deployment of the National Guard in majority liberal Los Angeles was “clearly done as an authoritarian show of strength”, said Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard University.

“There is no policy reason [why the administration] should be targeting places in Los Angeles as opposed to places in red states,” he said.

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Trump’s explicit call for “non-traditional” contractors to help build a “Golden Dome” missile shield for the US has emboldened Silicon Valley’s attempts to shake up the decades-old military industrial complex.

Investors have poured more than $150bn into defence start-ups since 2021, according to PitchBook, but US defence budgets are still overwhelmingly spent on legacy companies such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

In the rush to develop Trump’s Golden Dome, however, technology companies, including Microsoft and Peter Thiel’s data intelligence company Palantir, have seen an opportunity to claim a greater share of the Pentagon’s funds.

“The reality is that we need both [legacy contractors and technology groups]” to create the complex layers of technology and weapons systems required for the project, said Kari Bingen, who served as deputy under-secretary of defence for intelligence and security during Trump’s first term.

The plan, inspired by Israel’s “Iron Dome”, aims to use sensors, space-based interceptors, and generative AI to defend the US against new generations of ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Critics argue that — on top of being unnecessary, unproven, and expensive — it could trigger a dangerous global arms race.

Trump’s Pentagon views defence tech start-ups as “vital to shaping the future of missile defence”, in part due to their rapid development of artificial intelligence and the relative speed and low cost of commercial technology innovation.

Legacy defence players, meanwhile, emphasise their existing capabilities and delivery records. Northrop’s space division head Robert Fleming, for example, emphasised the importance of differentiating between “capabilities” and “aspirations”.

“We’d like to move as fast as anybody, but at the end of the day, we need to make sure that this stuff works,” said John Clark, head of technology and strategic innovation at Lockheed Martin.

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