In June, President Trump deployed thousands of National Guard members and hundreds of active duty Marines to Los Angeles to respond to largely peaceful protests over the administration’s immigration sweeps. A judge recently ruled that the use of federal troops in LA was illegal since they performed law enforcement duties the military are constitutionally prohibited from doing.
Now, Trump has mobilized 200 National Guard troops to Portland, saying they’re necessary to protect federal officials and property. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield has sued to block the deployment.
Rebecca Ellis covers Los Angeles county government as a staff writer for the LA Times. She previously covered Portland city government for OPB. She joins us to talk about how Angelenos responded to the deployment in their city and what could be in store for Portland.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. President Trump’s announcement that he was deploying federal troops to Portland does not have a true historical precedent, but it does have a recent one. In June, President Trump deployed thousands of National Guard members and hundreds of active duty Marines to Los Angeles, to respond to largely peaceful protests over the administration’s immigration sweeps. A judge recently ruled that the use of those troops was illegal.
We wanted to get a sense for what that deployment actually meant for Los Angeles. Rebecca Ellis joins us to talk about this. She covers Los Angeles County government as a staff writer for the LA Times. She previously covered the city of Portland for OPB. Rebecca, welcome back.
Rebecca Ellis: Thanks for having me.
Miller: What was happening in LA before the deployment of federal troops?
Ellis: So this was right around when we were starting to see immigration raids, these raids that are now everywhere were just beginning and LA was the epicenter. The weekend before these troops were deployed, we saw the first raids. And activists came out, started protests. There were some pretty big ones downtown – all peaceful, but large protests. And that was what was happening when Trump sent in the troops.
Miller: How did these protests compare to what you covered in Portland in the summer and fall of 2020.
Ellis: It’s funny, I was hoping you’d ask that. They were so different. I did all the protests in Portland that went on for months and months, and these ones were during the daytime. They were much, much less rowdy. With one exception, they were smaller. They were just really calm, peaceful daytime protests. Portland’s were much more memorable in their chaoticness, I’d say.
Miller: Well, how did the Trump administration justify the deployment of federal troops?
Ellis: He said they were needed. He said the protests were out of hand, the city was out of control, a statement that was rebuffed pretty harshly by our mayor. He said the city was in chaos and the troops were needed to right the ship.
Miller: You mentioned a statement by the mayor. Broadly, how did officials in Los Angeles or California as a whole respond?
Ellis: Yeah, they were furious, particularly Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom. They were furious. They called it political theater. And you could see this, they were right, that when these troops got sent in, it really just inflamed the situation and brought more protesters to the scene downtown, much like in Portland in 2020 when you saw federal officers come and then the protests got even bigger. Sort of a similar dynamic there. They said, “get out, we don’t want you guys here,” essentially.
Miller: When you say inflamed, so more people but also more confrontational on the part of protesters?
Ellis: Yeah, exactly, right. Because now you actually have like a focal point of your protests, as opposed to before where you were protesting immigration, but ICE was nowhere around, so people just kind of gather in the city. Now, you actually had all these protesters who were literally facing off against these Marines and National Guard troops. It just gave the protest a subject, something to actually look at and protest. So yeah, it did get much more tense once the federal troops arrived.
Miller: How much coordination was there between local law enforcement and these federal troops, whether National Guards troops or Marines?
Ellis: That was something that I think was a big source of frustration to local law enforcement here, was there really was no communication, at least from what they said. Local law enforcement said they had no idea what the federal troops were doing, so had to figure it out on their own. It ended up being this weird dynamic where you would have these federal troops just guarding these federal buildings, and then local law enforcement would come in and basically just try to move protesters away to deflate the situation and just get them as far away from these guys as possible, just because they thought it was kind of a tinderbox of a situation. But there was no real coordination between state and federal.
Miller: Did it then require more work on the part of local law enforcement, sort of paradoxically, more people on the ground ostensibly to calm things down. In inflaming things, did it mean that LA police officers actually had to do more work?
Ellis: I think you could argue that because, again, the protests got bigger when federal troops arrived, because there was now even more to protest. You saw law enforcement trying really, really hard, once the protests are getting a little rowdy, once it was turning dark, to get protesters away from federal troops. So, yeah, I think it’s safe to say it added to the workload.
Miller: What exactly were federal troops doing while they were in Los Angeles?
Ellis: Not much. There were some federal buildings, one downtown and one more in the west of the city, that they were guarding. They were sort of standing just right outside the perimeter of the building just kind of watching the protests, and protesters would get really close and chant, and that was just sort of the dynamic for a week or two. We did reporting at the LA Times and we spoke with some of the people who were there, and they just said they were really bored, because again, their job suddenly was just standing outside this building.
Miller: The troops said that?
Ellis: Yeah, they said that they were bored. Yeah, we had a reporter who did a really good article on how much boredom creeps in when your job becomes standing in front of a building. And there are issues where there weren’t places for them to go, because there were thousands of troops deployed here and it wasn’t set up for it. The boredom was a prominent thing we heard.
Miller: A judge recently ruled that federal troops illegally performed law enforcement duties in LA. Can you remind us what he said?
Ellis: Yeah, he basically said that you can’t have these federal groups doing local law enforcement duties, which is effectively what he said they were doing. He said it was illegal. Now at that point, most of these guys had already left.
Miller: Are any troops still there?
Ellis: Not that I am aware of. This really died down within a few weeks. And then there were a few, maybe 1,000 or so, who were here for a while, though we didn’t really see them. I believe everyone has left at this point.
Miller: Does anything that you saw in LA give you a sense for what might happen in Portland in the coming days or weeks?
Ellis: Something I was thinking about when I first heard that news is just … I don’t really know what they’re going to be doing in Portland, obviously, but it does just create this very tense situation when you have protesters standing off against armed federal officers. Obviously, that’s just a very kind of frightening, tense situation. When I was there during the daytime, I was just thinking back to what it was like in Portland and thinking “wow, how would these guys be responding to that protest?” If they are just guarding buildings and they’re the face for the protest, and you see these massive, big crowds come out. I don’t know. It’s kind of a frightening prospect.
Miller: You were imagining, in LA recently, what if the protests of Portland circa 2020 happened with federal troops there.
Ellis: Yeah, had been that size. Exactly.
Miller: Before we say goodbye, do you see longer term impacts of this relatively brief federal deployment in LA? A lingering fear that it could happen again, for example?
Ellis: There’s a little bit of that. I think this city is now just so focused on the ICE raids that have been happening, so the protests and the activism, a lot of it is focused at that as opposed to the federal troops. Because again, it’s not like they were in the streets, they were just centered downtown. I’ve heard some anxieties about that, but I think it’s mostly focused on immigration right now here.
Miller: Rebecca, thanks very much.
Ellis: Thanks so much.
Miller: Rebecca Ellis is a staff writer at the LA Times. She is a former Portland city government reporter for OPB.
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