Marines Will Begin Withdrawing From Los Angeles

Pentagon officials will begin withdrawing 700 active-duty Marines who were sent to Los Angeles last month, the latest scaling back of the Trump administration’s contentious military deployment in Southern California.

The withdrawal of the Marines follows the departure of nearly 2,000 California National Guard soldiers and a smaller contingent of about 150 specialized Guard firefighters. The troops had been dispatched to Los Angeles by President Trump starting on June 7, after protests erupted there over immigration raids. More than half will now have been ordered back to base; an 1,892-member brigade of military police remains.

The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, framed the pullout as the natural closure of a successful military response that was needed to quell civil unrest in the nation’s second-largest city. A Defense Department official said the Marines were expected to complete their withdrawal by as soon as Tuesday.

“With stability returning to Los Angeles, the secretary has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: Lawlessness will not be tolerated,” Mr. Parnell said Monday in a statement, referring to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law. We’re deeply grateful for their service, and for the strength and professionalism they brought to this mission.”

Democratic leaders in California have accused the Trump administration of provoking the protests by sending masked federal agents to carwashes and other sites to detain immigrants, and then using the subsequent public outrage over the raids as a pretext for military action. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles has compared the deployment to an “armed occupation,” and Gov. Gavin Newsom has condemned it as “a solution right now in search of a problem.” Both have called for the removal of all the deployed troops.

On Monday, Mayor Bass called the withdrawal “another sign of progress" in a unified and sustained push by Southern Californians.

“There have been no disturbances here for almost a month, and even when there were the Marines are not trained in crowd control and are not supposed to be, by law, used for domestic reasons,” she said. “They had nothing to do here. They’ve just been standing in front of federal buildings when there are no protests and nothing is going on. It’s an inappropriate use of our men and women who choose to serve.”

Since June, the troops have stood guard outside federal office buildings and have accompanied agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol and other agencies during immigration raids. Pentagon officials estimated that the cost of deploying the Marines and National Guard soldiers would run to about $134 million.

California officials say the deployment violates federal law prohibiting the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement, but an early attempt to halt the deployment through a court order was blocked by a federal appeals court. That appellate court ruled in June that the president had broad, though not “unreviewable,” authority to send the U.S. military into American cities.

A federal trial to determine whether the National Guard and Marines were used illegally in California is scheduled for next month.

Federal authorities have called the deployment a response to the so-called sanctuary law in California, enacted during the first Trump administration. The law limits the role of local sheriffs’ deputies and police officers in immigration enforcement, so that fear of deportation would not deter immigrants from reporting crimes.

The law includes extensive exceptions that allow local law enforcement authorities to turn over noncitizens who have committed serious crimes to be deported by federal authorities. But the Trump administration has contended that California still places too many limits on cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities. The U.S. Department of Justice recently asked sheriffs across California to provide it with lists of inmates in state jails who are not U.S. citizens; doing so could potentially be a violation of the state’s sanctuary law.

At a congressional hearing last month, Democratic lawmakers grilled Secretary Hegseth about the troop deployment, calling it unlawful and excessive.

“The president’s decision to call the National Guard troops to Los Angeles was premature, and the decision to deploy active-duty Marines as well is downright escalatory,” Representative Betty McCollum, Democrat of Minnesota, told Mr. Hegseth.

Mr. Hegseth defended the deployment, telling lawmakers, “We ought to be able to enforce immigration law in this country.”

Those debates have loomed large over the military presence in Los Angeles. Critics of the deployment have noted, among other things, that the Marines and the National Guard — who are trained to shoot to kill on the battlefield — do not receive the extensive training in de-escalation techniques, crowd control and use of force that are core parts of local law enforcement training. Within the U.S. military, concerns about the optics of armed troops rolling into American cities have also limited what the deployment could accomplish.

As a result, the use of the troops in the Los Angeles area has been heavily scrutinized and fraught with potential constitutional constraints. National Guard contingents were seen earlier this month facing protesters in a field outside a cannabis farm in Ventura County as gunfire erupted. And they were observed sitting in trucks in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Los Angeles while immigration agents marched through an all-but-vacated MacArthur Park, to prove that they could do so.

In interviews with The New York Times, members of the California National Guard said that morale has been low during the deployment, re-enlistment rates were plummeting and more than 100 troops had sought counseling in a period of a few weeks. Six soldiers spoke on condition of anonymity because their federal orders forbade them from talking to the news media.

In the tent city that was built to house the Guard troops on a small base in Los Alamitos, a suburb, soldiers said that several troops had been reassigned because they raised objections to the mission, and that few of the troops there had been sent off the base on assignments.

National Guard officials said that only about 400 of the 3,882 deployed Guard members had actually been sent on assignments away from the base. The military’s Northern Command said earlier this month that the troops overall had participated in slightly more than 200 operations in support of federal law enforcement agencies.

“We wake up to go to sleep,” one Guard member told The Times.

The Marines, who have been based at a separate military facility nearby, have been used sparingly as well.

Early in the deployment, on June 13, Marines briefly detained an Army veteran who was running an errand and was trying to enter a Veterans Affairs office at a federal building in Los Angeles. The veteran said the detention was brief and he was not bothered by it. Federal troops are rarely seen detaining U.S. civilians on American soil, even temporarily.

Mayor Bass has compared the deployment to an “armed occupation,” and Gov. Gavin Newsom has condemned it as “a solution right now in search of a problem.” Both have called for the removal of all the deployed troops.