SACRAMENTO — California is challenging President Trump’s grip on the state’s National Guard, telling a federal court the White House used claims of unrest in Los Angeles as a pretext for a deployment that has since expanded nationwide — including now sending troops to Illinois.
The Trump administration deployed 14 soldiers from California’s National Guard to Illinois to train troops from other states, according to a motion California filed Tuesday asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to end the federal government’s control of its National Guard.
Trump’s decision to move California troops who had been sent to Portland on Sunday and redeploy them to Illinois escalates tensions in the growing fight over who controls state military forces — and how far presidential power can reach in domestic operations.
Federal officials have told California they intend to issue a new order extending Trump’s federalization of 300 members of the state’s Guard through Jan. 31, according to the filing.
“Trump is going on a cross-country crusade to sow chaos and division,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday. “His actions — and those of his Cabinet — are against our deeply held American values. He needs to stop this illegal charade now.”
Officials from California and Oregon sought a restraining order after Trump sent California Guard troops to Oregon on Sunday. Trump deployed the California Guard soldiers just a day after a federal judge temporarily blocked the president’s efforts to federalize Oregon’s National Guard.
That prompted Judge Karin Immergut to issue a more sweeping temporary order Sunday evening blocking the deployment of National Guard troops from any other state to Oregon.
California’s own lawsuit against Trump challenging the deployment in Los Angeles since June resulted in Senior District Judge Charles R. Breyer blocking the administration from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using” the state’s troops to engage in civilian law enforcement.
The new motion filed Tuesday in that case by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta asks the 9th Circuit to vacate its earlier stay that allowed federalization to continue under strict limits on what they can do. California argues that the Guard’s federalized troops are now being used for missions outside the limited purposes the court allowed — drug raids in Riverside County, a show-of-force operation in MacArthur Park and deployments into other states.
“The ever-expanding mission of California’s federalized Guard bears no resemblance to what this Court provisionally upheld in June,” the state wrote in the filing. “And it is causing irreparable harm to California, our Nation’s democratic traditions, and the rule of law.”
Illinois leaders have also gone to court to attempt to block Trump from sending troops to Chicago. Trump has responded by saying that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker should be jailed.
No, a federal judge ruled, Trump cannot command the California National Guard to invade Portland, Ore. At the request of California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and others, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut broadened a temporary restraining order that had blocked Oregon’s National Guard from being used by the federal government. It now includes not just California’s troops but troops from any state. At least for the next two weeks.
It’s the kind of legal loss Trump should be used to it by now, especially when it comes to the Golden State. Since Trump 2.0 hit the White House this year with Project 2025 folded up in his back pocket, the state of California has sued the administration 42 times, literally about once a week.
While many of those cases are still pending, California is racking up a series of wins that restored more than $160 billion in funding and at least slowed down (and in some cases stopped) the steamrolling of civil rights on issues including birthright citizenship and immigration policy.
“We have won in 80% of the cases,” Bonta told me. “Whether it be a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order, and more and more now permanent final injunctions after the whole trial court case is done.”
I’ll take it. We all need some positive news. I don’t often write just about the good, but in these strange days, it’s helpful to have a reminder that the fight is always worth having when it comes to protecting our rights. And, despite the partisan Supreme Court, the reason that we are still holding on to democracy is because the system still works, albeit like a ’78 Chevy with the doors rusting off.
While Gov. Gavin Newsom has made himself the face of California’s fights against Trump, taking on a pugnacious and audacious attitude especially on social media, the day-in, day-out slugging in those battles is often done by Bonta and his team in courtrooms across the country.
It’s hard to recall, but months ago, Newsom called a special session of the Legislature to give Bonta a $25-million allowance to defend not just California but democracy. And in a moment when many of us fear that checks and balances promised in the Constitution have turned out to be little more than happy delusions, Bonta has a message: The courts are (mostly) holding and California’s lawyers aren’t just fighting, they’re winning.
“We can do things that governors can’t do,” Bonta said. “No role and no moment has been more important than this one.”
Bonta told me that he often hears that Trump is disregarding the courts, so “what’s the point of litigation at all? What’s the point of a court order at all? He’s just going to ignore them.”
But, he said, the administration has been following judges’ rulings — so far. While there have been instances, especially around deportations, that knock on the door of lawlessness, at least for California, Trump is “following all of our court orders,” Bonta said.
“We’re making a difference,” he said.
A few days ago, the U.S. Department of Education was forced to send out a final chunk of funds it had attempted to withhold from schools. Bonta, in a multistate lawsuit, successfully protected that money, which schools need this year to help migrant children and English learners, train teachers, buy new technology and pay for before- and after-school programs, among other uses.
That’s a permanent, final ruling — no appeals.
Another recent win saw California land a permanent injunction against the feds when it comes to stopping their payments for costs associated with state energy projects. That a win both for the climate and consumers, who benefit when we make energy more efficiently.
Last week, Bonta won another permanent injunction, blocking the Trump administration’s effort to tie grants related to homeland security to compliance with his immigration policies. Safety shouldn’t be tied to deportations, especially in California, where our immigrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding community members.
Those are just a few of Bonta’s victories. Of course, Trump and his minions aren’t happy about them. Stephen Miller, the shame of Santa Monica, seems to have especially lost his marbles over the National Guard ruling. On social media, Miller seems to be attacking the justice system, and attorneys general such as Bonta.
“There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” Miller wrote. “It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
Never mind that the Oregon judge who issued the National Guard ruling is a Trump appointee.
“Their goal, I think, is to chill and pause and worry judges; to chill and pause and worry the press; to chill and pause and worry attorneys general who stand up for the rule of law and for democracy, who go to court and fight for what’s right and fight for the law,” Bonta said.
Bonta expects the administration, far from learning any lessons or harboring self-reflection during this mad dash toward autocracy, to continue full speed ahead.
“We’re going to see more, and we’re going to see it fast, and we’re going to see it escalate,” he said. “None of that is good, including putting military in American cities or, you know, Trump treating them like his royal guard instead of the National Guard.”
Even when the Trump administration loses, “they always have this like second move and maybe a third, where they are always trying to advance their agenda, even when they’ve been blocked by a court, even when they’ve been told that they’re acting unlawfully or unconstitutionally,” he said.
On Monday, Trump threatened to use the Insurrection Act to circumvent the court’s ruling on the National Guard, a massive escalation of his effort to militarize American cities.
But California remains on a winning streak, much to Trump’s dismay.
It’s my bet that as long as our judges continue to honor the rule of law, that streak will hold.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Sunday that he intends to seek a court order in an attempt to stop President Trump’s deployment of California National Guard troops to Oregon.
Calling the president’s action a “breathtaking abuse of power,” Newsom said in a statement that 300 California National Guard personnel were being deployed to Portland, Ore., a city the president has called “war-ravaged.”
“They are on their way there now,” Newsom said of the National Guard. “This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power.”
Trump’s move came a day after a federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the federalization of Oregon’s National Guard.
The president, who mobilized the California National Guard amid immigration protests earlier this year, has pursued the use of the military to fight crime in cities including Chicago and Washington, D.C., sparking outrage among Democratic officials in those cities. Local leaders, including those in Portland, have said the actions are unnecessary and without legal justification.
“The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words — ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents,” Newsom said.
In June, Newsom and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a federal lawsuit over Trump’s mobilization of the state’s National Guard during immigration protests in Los Angeles. California officials are expected to file the court order over Sunday’s deployment using that existing lawsuit.
Newsom has ratcheted up his rhetoric about Trump in recent days: On Friday, the governor lashed out at universities that may sign the president’s higher education compact, which demands rightward campus policy shifts in exchange for priority federal funding.
“I need to put pressure on this moment and pressure test where we are in U.S. history, not just California history,” Newsom said. “…This is it. We are losing this country.”
Ever since President Trump seized control of the California National Guard and deployed thousands of troops to Los Angeles, calls from distressed soldiers and their families have been pouring in to the GI Rights Hotline.
Some National Guard members and their loved ones have called to say they were agonizing over the legality of the deployment, which is being litigated in federal court, according to Steve Woolford, a resource counselor for the hotline, which provides confidential counseling for service members.
Others phoned in to say the Guard should play no part in federal immigration raids and that they worried about immigrant family members who might get swept up.
“They don’t want to deport their uncle or their wife or their brother-in-law,” Woolford said. “… Some of the language people have used is: ‘I joined to defend my country, and that’s really important to me — but No. 1 is family, and this is actually a threat to my family.’ ”
Although active-duty soldiers are largely restricted from publicly commenting on their orders, veterans’ advocates who are in direct contact with troops and their families say they are deeply concerned about the morale of the roughly 4,100 National Guard members and 700 U.S. Marines deployed to Los Angeles amid protests against immigration raids.
In interviews with The Times, spokespeople for six veterans’ advocacy organizations said many troops were troubled by the assignment, which they viewed as overtly political and as pitting them against fellow Americans.
Advocates also said they worry about the domestic deployment’s potential effects on military retention and recruitment, which recently rebounded after several years in which various branches failed to meet recruiting goals.
“What we’re hearing from our families is: ‘This is not what we signed up for,’ ” said Brandi Jones, organizing director for the Secure Families Initiative, a nonprofit that advocates for military spouses, children and veterans. “Our families are very concerned about morale.”
Horse riders make their way past U.S. Marines near the Paramount Home Depot during the Human Rights Unity Ride on June 22, 2025.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
Janessa Goldbeck, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and chief executive of the nonprofit Vet Voice Foundation, said that, among the former Marine Corps colleagues she has spoken to in recent weeks, “There’s been a universal expression of, ‘This is an unnecessary deployment given the operational situation.’”
“The fact that the LAPD and local elected officials repeatedly said deploying the National Guard and active duty Marines would be escalatory or inflammatory and the president of the United States chose to ignore that and deploy them anyway puts the young men and women in uniform in an unnecessarily political position,“ she said.
She added that the “young men and women who raised their right hand to serve their country” did “not sign up to police their own neighbors.”
Trump has repeatedly said Los Angeles would be “burning to the ground” if he had not sent troops to help quell the protests.
“We saved Los Angeles by having the military go in,” Trump told reporters last week. “And the second night was much better. The third night was nothing much. And the fourth night, nobody bothered even coming.”
The troops in Los Angeles do not have the authority to arrest protesters and were deployed only to defend federal functions, property and personnel, according to the military’s U.S. Northern Command.
Task Force 51, the military’s designation of the Los Angeles forces, said in an email Saturday that “while we cannot speak for the individual experience of each service member, the general assessment of morale by leadership is positive.”
The personnel’s “quality of life,” the statement continued, is “addressed through the continued improvement of living facilities, balanced work-rest cycles, and access to chaplains, licensed clinical social workers, and behavioral health experts.”
U.S. Marines guard the Federal Building at the corner of Veteran Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
It is unclear whether the National Guard troops, federalized under Title 10 of the United States Code, had been paid as of this weekend.Task Force 51 told The Times on Saturday that the soldiers who received 60-day activation orders on June 7 “will start receiving pay by end of the month” and that “those that have financial concerns have access to resources such as Army Emergency Relief,” a nonprofit charitable organization.
U.S. Rep. Derek Tran (D-Orange), an Army veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he has asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “for his plan to manage the logistics of this military activation, but he has failed to provide me with any clear answers.”
Tran said in a statement to The Times that “the pattern of disrespect this Administration has shown our Veterans and active-duty military personnel is disgraceful, and I absolutely think it will negatively impact our ability to attract and retain the troops that keep America’s military capacity the envy of the world.”
Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokeswoman for Gov. Gavin Newsom, said in an email that the governor is “worried how this mission will impact the physical and emotional well-being of the soldiers deployed unnecessarily to Los Angeles.”
On June 9, Newsom posted photos on X depicting National Guard soldiers crowded together, sleeping on concrete floors and what appeared to be a loading dock. Newsom wrote that the president sent troops “without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep.”
Task Force 51 told The Times that the soldiers in the photos “were not actively on mission, so they were taking time to rest.” At the time, the statement continued, “it was deemed too dangerous for them to travel to better accommodations.”
Since then, according to Task Force 51, the military has contracted “for sleeping tents, latrines, showers, hand-washing stations, hot meals for breakfast, dinner and a late-night meal, and full laundry service.”
“Most of the contracts have been fulfilled at this time,” the military said.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to The Times that Newsom “should apologize for using out-of-context photos of National Guardsmen to try and make a political argument.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership military morale is sky high because our troops know they finally have a patriotic Commander-In-Chief who will always have their backs,” Jackson wrote.
Troops have been posted outside federal buildings in an increasingly quiet downtown Civic Center — a few square blocks within the 500-square-mile city.
Their interactions with the public are far different from those earlier this year, when Newsom deployed the National Guard to L.A. County to help with wildfire recovery efforts after the Eaton and Palisades fires.
At burn zone check points, National Guard members were often spotted chatting with locals, some of whom brought food and water and thanked them for keeping looters away.
But downtown, soldiers have stood stone-faced behind riot shields as furious protesters have flipped them off, sworn at them and questioned their integrity.
Members of the California National Guard stand by as thousands participate in the “No Kings” protest demonstration in downtown Los Angeles on June 14.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
During the boisterous “No Kings” protests on June 14, a woman held up a mirror to troops outside the downtown Federal Building with the words: “This is not your job. It’s YOUR LEGACY.” On a quiet Wednesday morning, a UCLA professor, standing solo outside the Federal Building, held up a sign to half a dozen Guard members reading: “It’s Called the Constitution You F—ers.”
James M. Branum, an attorney who works with the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, said that, in recent weeks, the task force has received two to three times more than the usual volume of referrals and direct calls. The upward trend began after Trump came into office, with people calling about the war in Gaza and increased military deployment to the U.S. southern border — but calls spiked after troops were sent to Los Angeles, he said.
“A lot of these folks joined because they want to fight who they see as the terrorists,” Branum said. “They want to fight enemies of the United States … they never envisioned they would be deployed to the streets of the United States.”
In his June 7 memo federalizing the National Guard, Trump called for their deployment in places where protests against federal immigration enforcement were occurring or “are likely to occur.” The memo does not specify Los Angeles or California.
California officials have sued the president over the deployment, arguing in a federal complaint that the Trump administration’s directives are “phrased in an ambiguous manner and suggest potential misuse of the federalized National Guard.”
“Guardsmen across the country are on high alert, [thinking] that they could be pulled into this,” said Goldbeck, with the Vet Voice Foundation.
Jones, with the Secure Families Initiative, said military families “are very nervous in this moment.”
“They are so unprepared for what’s happening, and they’re very afraid to speak publicly,” she said.
Jones said she had been communicating with the wife of one National Guard member who said she had recently suffered a stroke. The woman said her husband had been on Family and Medical Leave Act leave from his civilian job to care for her. The woman said his leave was not recognized by the military for the domestic assignment. He was deployed to Los Angeles, and she has been struggling to find a caregiver, Jones said.
Jones said her own husband, an active-duty Marine, deployed to Iraq in 2004 with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment based at Twentynine Palms — the same infantry unit now mustered in Los Angeles.
The unit was hard hit in Afghanistan in 2008, with at least 20 Marines killed and its high rate of suicide after that year’s deployment highly publicized.
Jones said she was stunned to learn the battalion — nicknamed the War Dogs — was being deployed to Los Angeles.
“I said, ‘Wait, it’s 2/7 they’re sending in? The War Dogs? Releasing them on Los Angeles?’ It was nuts for me,” Jones said. “To hear that unit affiliated with this — for my family that’s been serving for two decades, it brings up a lot.”
The Los Angeles deployment comes at a time of year when the California National Guard is often engaged in wildfire suppression operations — a coincidence that has raised concerns among some officials.
On June 18, Capt. Rasheedah Bilal was activated by the California National Guard and assigned to Sacramento, where she is backfilling in an operational role for Joint Task Force Rattlesnake, a National Guard firefighting unit that is now understaffed because roughly half its members are deployed to Los Angeles.
“That’s a large amount to pull off that mission … so you have to activate additional Guardsmen to cover on those missions,” said Bilal, speaking in her capacity as executive director of the nonprofit National Guard Assn. of California.
National Guard members are primarily part-time soldiers, who hold civilian jobs or attend college until called into active duty. In California — a state prone to wildfires, earthquakes and floods — they get called into duty a lot, she said.
Many of the same National Guard soldiers in downtown Los Angeles are the same ones who just finished a 120-day activation for wildfire recovery, she said.
“You have the state response to fire and then federal activation? It becomes a strain,” Bilal said.
“They haven’t complained,” she added. “Soldiers vote with their feet. We’re mostly quiet professionals and take a lot of pride in our job. [But] you can only squeeze so much of a lemon before it is dry. You can only pound on the California Guardsmen without it affecting things like retention and recruiting.”
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Thursday to leave troops in Los Angeles in the hands of the Trump administration while California’s objections are litigated in federal court, finding the president had broad — though not “unreviewable” — authority to deploy the military in American cities.
“We disagree with Defendants’ primary argument that the President’s decision to federalize members of the California National Guard … is completely insulated from judicial review,” Judge Mark J. Bennett of Honolulu, a Trump appointee, wrote for the appellate panel. “Nonetheless, we are persuaded that, under longstanding precedent interpreting the statutory predecessor … our review of that decision must be highly deferential.”
Legal scholars said the decision was expected — particularly as the 9th Circuit has moved from the country’s most liberal to one of its most “balanced” since the start of Trump’s first term.
“It’s critically important for the people to understand just how much power Congress has given the president through these statutes,” said Eric Merriam, a professor of legal studies at Central Florida University and an appellate military judge.
“Judges for hundreds of years now have given extreme deference to the president in national security decisions, [including] use of the military,” the expert went on. “There is no other area of law where the president or executive gets that level of deference.”
The appellate panel sharply questioned both sides during Tuesday’s hearing, appearing to reject the federal government’s assertion that courts had no right to review the president’s actions, while also undercutting California’s claim that President Trump had overstepped his authority in sending troops to L.A. to quell a “rebellion against the authority of the United States.”
“All three judges seemed skeptical of the arguments that each party was making in its most extreme form,” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
“I was impressed with the questions,” she went on. “I think they were fair questions, I think they were hard questions. I think the judges were wrestling with the right issues.”
The ruling Thursday largely returns the issue to U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer.
Unlike Breyer, whose temporary restraining order on June 12 would have returned control of the National Guard to California, the appellate court largely avoided the question of whether the facts on the ground in Los Angeles amounted to a “rebellion.”
Instead, the ruling focused on the limits of presidential power.
Bennett’s opinion directly refuted the argument — made by Assistant Atty. Gen. Brett Shumate in Tuesday’s hearing — that the decision to federalize National Guard troops was “unreviewable.”
“Defendants argue that this language precludes review,” the judge wrote. “[But Supreme Court precedent] does not compel us to accept the federal government’s position that the President could federalize the National Guard based on no evidence whatsoever, and that courts would be unable to review a decision that was obviously absurd or made in bad faith.”
He also quoted at length from the 1932 Supreme Court decision in Sterling vs. Constantin, writing “[t]he nature of the [president’s] power also necessarily implies that there is a permitted range of honest judgment as to the measures to be taken in meeting force with force, in suppressing violence and restoring order.”
Shumate told the judge he didn’t know the case when Bennett asked him about it early in Tuesday’s hearing.
“That is a key case in that line of cases, and the fact he was not aware of it is extraordinary,” Goitein said.
Merriam agreed — to a point.
“That’s a nightmare we have in law school — it’s a nightmare I’ve had as an appellate judge,” the scholar said.
However, “it’s actually a good thing that the attorney representing the U.S. was not planning to talk about martial law in front of the 9th Circuit,” Merriam said.
One thing Thursday’s ruling did not touch is whether the administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act by deputizing the military to act as civilian law enforcement — an allegation California leveled in its original complaint, but which Breyer effectively tabled last week.
“The Posse Comitatus Act claim has not been resolved because it was essentially not ripe last Thursday,” when troops had just arrived, Goitein said. “It is ripe now.”
“Even if the 9th Circuit agrees with the federal government on everything, we could see a ruling from the district court next week that could limit what troops can do on the ground,” she said.
In the meantime, residents of an increasingly quiet Los Angeles will have to live with the growing number of federal troops.
“[Congress] didn’t limit rebellion to specific types of facts,” Merriam said. “As much as [Angelenos] might say, ‘This is crazy! There’s not a rebellion going on in L.A. right now,’ this is where we are with the law.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday night accused President Trump of intentionally fanning the flames of the Los Angeles protests and “pulling a military dragnet across” the city endangering peaceful protesters and targeting hardworking immigrant families.
The Democratic governor’s comments were a forceful rebuke to the president’s claims that deploying the California National Guard and U.S. Marines to the city was necessary to control the civil unrest.
“Donald Trump’s government isn’t protecting our communities — they’re traumatizing our communities,” Newsom said. “And that seems to be the entire point.”
The governor posted his video address to California on social media hours after Trump said at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina that he sent in troops to protect immigration agents from “the attacks of a vicious and violent mob.”
The picture Trump painted of the federal government’s role in the protests against immigration raids marks a sharp contrast to Newsom’s assertion that state and local law enforcement were successfully keeping the peace before federal authorities deployed “tear gas, “flash-bang grenades” and “rubber bullets” on Angelenos exercising their constitutional right to free speech and assembly.
Then Trump “illegally” called up the California National Guard, Newsom said.
“This brazen abuse of power by a sitting president inflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers, and even our National Guard at risk,” Newsom said. “That’s when the downward spiral began. He doubled down on his dangerous National Guard deployment by fanning the flames even harder. And the president, he did it on purpose.”
The governor, who has become a target for Republicans and a central figure in the political and legal battle over the protests, has said for days that an “unhinged” Trump deployed federal troops to intentionally incite violence and chaos, seeking to divert attention away from his actions in Washington and assert his “dictatorial tendencies.”
Newsom and state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a request for a restraining order earlier Tuesday asking a federal judge to call off the “Department of Defense’s illegal militarization of Los Angeles and the takeover of a California National Guard unit.” The request came the day after California filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration alleging that the deployment of the guard without the governor’s consent violated the U.S. Constitution.
After returning to Washington, Trump commented on the “good relationship” he’s always had with Newsom, before blaming the governor for the unrest.
“This should never have been allowed to start, and if we didn’t get involved, Los Angeles would be burning down right now,” Trump said, and then made a reference to the deadly wildfires in the Los Angeles area in January. “Just as the houses burned down.”
He said the military is in the city to de-escalate the situation and control what he described as paid “insurrectionists,” “agitators” and “troublemakers.”
“We have a lot of people all over the world watching Los Angeles,” Trump said. “We’ve got the Olympics, so we have this guy allowing this to happen.”
On Monday, Trump said his top border policy advisor Tom Homan should follow through on threats to arrest the governor. Newsom immediately jumped on the comment, comparing the federal administration to an “authoritarian regime.”
“I never thought I’d hear those words. Honestly, Democrat, Republican. Never thought I’d hear those in my lifetime — to threaten a political opponent who happens to be sitting governor,” Newsom said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declined to answer a question about whether Newsom should be arrested on Tuesday and instead said the governor should be “tarred and feathered.”
Newsom took a shot at Johnson during his address, saying the speaker has “completely abdicated” his responsibility for Congress to serve as a check on the White House. He warned that “other states are next.”
“At this moment, we all need to stand up and be held to account, a higher level of accountability,” Newsom said, imploring protesters to exercise free-speech rights peacefully. “I know many of you are feeling deep anxiety, stress and fear. But I want you to know that you are the antidote to that fear and anxiety.
“What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty. Your silence. To be complicit in this moment. Do not give in to him.”
Times staff writer Laura Nelson and Washington bureau chief Michael Wilner contributed to this report.
