In the aftermath of a series of recent court setbacks to the Donald Trump administration, the federal government has dropped its opposition to a court order returning control of National Guard troops in Los Angeles to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
In a terse filing with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers indicated they are no longer opposing the administrative stay of the State of California’s request to ban the use of military forces in the enforcement of federal immigration law. The federal government will, for the time being at least, withdraw its request to keep the state militia under federal control.
The federal government is now up against four federal court rulings which have seemingly ended the Trump Administration’s ability to rely on back-up from military force when the agencies devoted to immigration control encounter rough sledding in the form of civil resistance when rounding up suspected illegal aliens. One of those rulings applies to California, one applies to Oregon and a third applies to the situation involving the Illinois National Guard in Chicago. A fourth decision by the U.S. Supreme Court let the ruling against the Trump Administration in Illinois stand. That determination presumably applies across the board to all cases where President Trump had assumed the authority to use the National Guard to support federal law enforcement in situations where the nation’s citizenry passively or even actively obstructs federal agents.
Immediately after Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025, his administration began gearing up for an aggressive enforcement of U.S. immigration law. That effort included Tom Homan, who had served as the director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency during Donald Trump’s first term in office and had been designated to act as his “border czar” during his second term in office, taking charge of the former agency he headed as well as orienting himself with regard to all aspects of the function of the Border Patrol, Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Enforcement and Removal Operations and the Department of Justice.
California, with its roughly 2.7 million undocumented foreigners within its confines, was a priority for the administration’s intended immigration enforcement program, and Homan and others recognized that there would be strenuous resistance to their efforts in the most heavily populated and Democrat-leaning areas of the state such as Los Angeles and San Francisco counties. Consequently, they hoped to initiate the enforcement program in areas such as San Bernardino, Riverside, Amador, Santa Barbara and Tulare counties, where they believed sheriffs Shannon Dicus, Chad Bianco, Gary Redman, Bill Brown and Mike Boudreaux would provide federal agents with the necessary support to conduct sweeps on a massive scale. A show of resolve and effectiveness in which approaching 300,000 unregistered aliens would be detained, processed and expelled from the country within three months would send a message that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE meant business and reduce the incidence of resistance, federal officials calculated, thus bolstering the effort throughout the state and serving to convince a substantial number of illegal aliens to self-deport and accept government assistance in doing just that. However, Dicus and Bianco, the highest ranking law enforcement officials in the state’s fifth and fourth most populous counties at a combined 4.5 million and some 127,681 undocumented foreigners and approximately 145,882 in their respective counties, indicated that they were unwilling to lend their deputies to an effort to round up those without federal permission to be in the country because they did not want to risk the Hispanic population in their jurisdictions discontinuing its cooperation with law enforcement. This stymied Homan and the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Enforcement, and the immigration effort in the Golden State, dubbed Operation Alta California, did not start in earnest until April.
Meanwhile, Homan and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, the Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security initiated action in Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Washington. Virginia, Maryland, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Tennessee, Connecticut, Michigan and Ohio, which ranked as the states with the second through the nineteenth largest number of undocumented foreigners living within them. Less intense, what were referred to as “token” efforts were taking place in Oregon, Indiana, Utah, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Montana.
When Homan and other Trump Administration officials launched Operation Alta California in April, they encountered obstruction and active resistance. In 2017, during the first Trump Administration, the California legislature passed into law and then-Governor Jerry Brown signed California Senate Bill 54, commonly known as the “California Values Act” which prevents state and local law enforcement agencies from using their resources on behalf of federal immigration enforcement agencies. Senate Bill 54 was passed in response to Executive Order 13768, an initiative in the early stages of the first Trump Administration to neutralize the creation of sanctuary cities, a large number of which had cropped up in California, declaring themselves jurisdictions outside the reach of federal immigration authorities while simultaneously codifying ordinances, regulations and restrictionss and creating policies that prevented state and local public employees from assisting federal authorities in the deportation of illegal immigrants.
As Summer 2025 approached, intense resistance to the federal government’s immigration law enforcement was in full swing, most notably in California, Oregon and Illinois. The Trump Administration asserted, with some though not an overwhelming degree of evidence, that the resistance was organized and coordinated, aggressive and potentially or actually violent and dangerous. On June 7, over the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom, President Trump called upon the California National Guard to assist with maintaining order as crowds of protesters and resisters began throwing rocks, bricks and bottles at ICE agents and overturning vehicles in Los Angeles. Some 700 national guardsmen were dispatched to hotspots around Los Angeles.
After a degree of back and forth, President Trump relented, instead sending over 700 Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms to specific locations in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties to “protect federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.”
Subsequently, with the spectacle of Marines on patrol in the nation’s second largest city sinking in on all concerned, the Marines 2nd Battalion was withdrawn and were replaced with 300 National Guardsmen.
After the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel took up the cause of three immigrants, a single U.S. citizen and a dual U.S./Mexican citizen – Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, Carlos Alexander Osorto, Isaac Antonio Villegas Molina, Jason Brian Gavidia and Jorge Luis Hernandez Viramontes – who had been taken into custody by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May, United States Judge for the Central District of California Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in July 2025 concluded that “masked” federal agents had erred and violated the constitutional rights of those they had arrested by utilizing their place of work, their presence in a particular place, their ethnicity or race, the type of work they were engaged in and their language or accent as the basis of probable cause to detain, question them and ultimately take them into custody. Judge Frimpong ruled that blanket detentions and/or arrests are illegal and that laws relating to specific crimes, such as violating immigration statutes, cannot be applied broadly but must be applied against each defendant specifically, with a credible recitation of the crimes alleged to have been committed by the arrestee and the grounds for making the stop and the arrest. Judge Frimpong opined that the federal agents were engaging, essentially, in racial profiling by questioning those who were speaking a language other than English, engaging in “roving patrols” in areas where those government agents believed undocumented aliens might be present, patrolling places such as big box hardware store parking lots where day laborers congregated or raiding businesses where in the past undocumented foreigners were known to have been employed. She ordered that the federal officers desist in making the arrests based upon the criteria they were using.
Penultimately, when the Trump Administration appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the panel consisting of justices Marsha Berzon, Jennifer Sung and Ronald Gould upheld Judge Frimpong.
Ultimately, however, the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal in September rejected in a 6-to-3 ruling the lower courts’ conclusions that federal officials were engaged in a “racist deportation scheme,” accepting the Trump Administration’s assertion that federal agents working in Southern California, where 71 percent of the illegal immigrants originated in Latin America, were not engaging in discriminatory behavior by considering the speaking of Spanish to be a criterion distinguishing undocumented aliens from the native population or concentrating their patrols in or around businesses which have a demonstrated prior history of employing or attracting individuals in the country illegally.
Meanwhile, as the California case was playing out before Judge Frimpong, Justices Berzon, Sung and Gould and the Supreme Court, the intensity of the deportation effort was being focused elsewhere. Resistance on the streets of Portland in Oregon and in Chicago was proving to be as spirited as it had been in Los Angeles in June, which prompted the administration to revive the approach of utilizing the National Guard as a martial element in the immigration control program. In the case of Chicago, the federal government turned to the Illinois National Guard. Fresh from the federal victory in the Perdomo, et al case, the Trump Administration moved to send members of the California National Guard to quell the civil disturbances in Oregon.
Ongoing throughout the duration of the Trump Administration’s reliance on the National Guard to shore up the immigration enforcement activities of several agencies in various locales across the country there have been multiple challenges of the president’s authority to bring those state militias to bear. In virtually all of those cases, the federal use of the National Guard has continued, with motions to have them stand down pending the outcome of the litigation. Over the course of the first ten months of Donald Trump’s second term as president, there developed a pattern of lower federal courts generally making findings or rulings favoring the state authorities in those states with Democrat leadership who have challenged the Trump Administration only to see the Supreme Court, with six of its nine current members having been appointed by Republican presidents, reversing the lower courts again and again in one fast-track decision after another, reliably granting the administration’s emergency appeals, consistently setting aside rulings from district judges or appeals panels that had temporarily obstructed the Trump Administration’s programs.
On only a handful of decisions relating to immigration enforcement had the administration suffered setbacks. When the administration acted to quickly and summarily deport migrants with criminal records who were tied to foreign criminal gangs or organizations or terrorist groups by labeling them “enemy aliens,” the Supreme Court checked the administration, ruling that it had to provide those to be shown the nation’s door with due process to give them an opportunity to challenge the accusations against them.
With the overwhelming number of resolutions in such cases with regard to immigration across the country that came before the U.S. Supreme Court registering in President Trump’s win column and defeats that could be counted on two fingers, the administration’s assumption that the president held sway over virtually every state governor in the union when it came to directing the use of National Guard troops seemed sound. From late spring through the summer into the fall and into the winter, virtually everyone, including better than 40 of the country’s 50 governors seemed to accept that no matter how much governors of the states whose military forces had been commandeered by President Trump howled in protest, the naton’s chief executive had the authority to order the National Guard into Chicago and Portland and Los Angeles to ensure that his immigration policy is carried out.
After President Trump sent the National Guard to Chicago, Illinois Governor J.B.Pritzker objected and the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago sued the Trump Administration, asserting the federalization of the Illinois National Guard was illegal. In October, U.S. District Judge April Perry ruled in favor of Pritzker, Illinois and Chicago, finding that the federal government had greatly exaggerated the lawlessness in Chicago that it claimed justified making the deployments in the Windy City. The Trump Administration’s rationale for ordering the federalization and deployment of the National Guard within Illinois lacked credibility, Judge Perry said, and she issued a temporary order blocking the Trump administration from taking command of the National Guard.
In November, Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee to the U.S. District Court in Oregon, sided with Democrat-aligned Oregon state government officials, including Governor Tina Kotek, who sued the Trump Administration for mobilizing the National Guard to assist in immigration law enforcement in Portland. Judge Immegut stated, “[T]hese deployments, which were objected to by Oregon’s governor and not requested by the federal officials in charge of protection of the ICE building, exceeded the president’s authority” and violated both the 10th Amendment and Title 10, Section 12406 of the U.S. Code. She issued a temporary restraining order blocking the mobilization.
Subsequently, in California, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer likewise ruled against the Trump Administration in a lawsuit brought by the Golden State’s overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled state government, saying the president did not have the authority to federalize the California National Guard, and blocked its deployment to Los Angeles, directing that control of the state’s military arm be returned to Governor Newsom.
Breyer also said the Trump administration was improperly and “effectively creating a national police force made up of state troops” by sending California National Guardsmen to assignments outside California, including Oregon and Illinois.
Despite the plethora of pending lawsuits within various federal courts asserting the president was overstepping his power and was violating the Constitution in making use of state militias, no one was rushing off to Las Vegas to place money on the prospect that the administration was going to lose in any of those suits. Motions made in conjunction with both the California suit and the Oregon suit were held in abeyance while the Illinois suit and the decision by Judge Perry were being appealed to the U..S. Supreme Court.
On December 23, the Supreme Court left Judge Perry’s ruling barring the Trump administration from deploying National Guard troops in Illinois in place. In a three-page unsigned order, by margin of 6-to-3, the justices turned down the government’s request to put the temporary restraining order issued by Judge Perry on October 9 on hold while litigation continues in the lower courts. “At this preliminary stage,” the court said, “the government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.”
Three justices dissented from the order. Justice Samuel Alito, in a 16-page decision joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, “Whatever one may think about the current administration’s enforcement of the immigration laws or the way ICE has conducted its operations, the protection of federal officers from potentially lethal attacks should not be thwarted.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch appeared to side with justices Alito and Thomas on their position that the federal government’s request was not unreasonable. Those three votes were not enough to carry the day, however, with six justices backing Judge Perry.
Although the dispute came to the Supreme Court in its preliminary stages, the case was an important test of the president’s power to utilize federalized National Guard troops, which are normally controlled by the states, domestically where martial law has not been declared. President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops to the Chicago area, announced in early October, followed the use of National Guard troops in other major cities with Democratic mayors, including Washington, D.C. In deploying the National Guard, Trump cited lawlessness on the streets during protests of the federal agents’ presence and/or the agents’ need for back-up in their enforcing efforts.
In her November 7 ruling relating to the use of troops for crowd control during immigrant round-ups in Portland, Judge Immergut acknowledged that “violent protests did occur in June.” Nevertheless, she stated that the Trump Administration’s expression of need for National Guard troops to quell protests near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility there did not comport with the actual circumstance. The June protests, Judge Immergut determined “quickly abated due to the efforts of civil law enforcement officers.” Since that time, she wrote, protests at the facility have been “predominately peaceful.” Immergut concluded that “even giving great deference to the president’s determination,” his administration “did not have a lawful basis” to call up the National Guard in Portland.
The departments of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department, which already went to Plan B when they did not get law enforcement agency help with implementing Operation Alta California, are now formulating Plan C, consisting of utilizing access to communications, digital data and other information pertaining to the presence of unregistered foreigners in “soft” locations such as residences and other places where obstruction by a substantial number of protestors is unlikely or impossible. “Swarms” of agents are then to quickly detain and hand them off to transportation specialists before moving to the next designated location. The transportation specialists will deliver these pre-identified targets, for whom paperwork is to be prepared in advance, to an immigration detention facility augmented with on-site hearing facilities manned by an attorney working for the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review and designated as a federal immigration judge, thus expediting deportations to be effectuated within 24-to-36 hours.
