federal court

Six years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld highly partisan state election maps in North Carolina and Maryland — ruling that federal courts cannot block states from drawing up maps that favor one party over the other — one of the court’s liberal justices issued a warning.

“If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government,” Associate Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent.

Kagan argued that Republicans in North Carolina and Democrats in Maryland — the two examples before the court — had rigged elections in a way that “deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights,” “debased and dishonored our democracy” and turned “upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”

“Ask yourself,” Kagan said as she recounted what had happened in each state: “Is this how American democracy is supposed to work?”

That’s the question Californians are now weighing as they decide how, or whether, to vote on Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to scrap congressional maps drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission and replace them with maps drawn by legislators to favor Democrats through 2030.

Democrats don’t deny that the measure is a deliberate attempt to dilute GOP voting power.

From the start, they’ve argued that the point of redistricting is to weaken Republicans’ voting power in California — a move they justify on the grounds that it is a temporary fix to offset similar partisan gerrymandering by Texas Republicans. This summer, President Trump upped the ante, pressing Texas to rejigger maps to shore up the GOP’s narrow House majority ahead of the 2026 election.

Experts say opponents of Proposition 50 have no viable federal legal challenge against the new maps on the basis that they disenfranchise a large chunk of California Republicans. Even since the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision Rucho vs. Common Cause, complaints of partisan gerrymandering have no path in federal court.

Already, Proposition 50 has survived challenges in state court and is unlikely to be successfully challenged if passed, said Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law.

“If you’re a Republican in California, or you’re a Democrat in Texas, you’re about to get a lot less representation in Congress,” Hasen said. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that.”

If Californians vote in favor of the measure on Tuesday, the number of Republicans in the state’s House — nine of 52 total members — would likely be reduced by five. That could mean Republicans have less than 10% of California’s congressional representation even though Trump won 38% of the 2024 vote.

“All of this is unconstitutional, but the federal courts aren’t available to help,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School.

“Every time you redraw a district specifically to protect some candidates and punish others,” Levitt said, “what you’re basically saying is it shouldn’t be up to the voters to weigh in on whether they think the candidates are doing a good job or not.”

Possible legal avenues

But even if the issue of partisan gerrymandering is blocked in federal courts, there are other potential legal avenues to challenge California’s new legislative maps.

One route would be to claim that Proposition 50 violates the California Constitution.

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law, said that if Proposition 50 passes, he expects a barrage of “see what sticks” lawsuits raising California constitutional claims. They stand little chance of success, he said.

“Voters created the redistricting commission,” he said. “What the voters created they can change or abolish.”

Attorneys might also bring racial discrimination claims in federal court alleging California lawmakers used partisan affiliation as a pretext for race in drawing the maps to disenfranchise one racial group or another, Carrillo said. Under current law, he said, such claims are very fact-dependent.

Attorneys are already poised to file complaints if the referendum passes.

Mark Meuser, a conservative attorney who filed a state complaint this summer seeking to block Proposition 50, said he is ready to file a federal lawsuit on the grounds that the new maps violate the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“We’re saying that race was a predominant factor in drawing the lines,” Meuser said. “When race is a predominant factor in drawing the lines without a compelling interest, strict scrutiny will mandate the maps be stricken.”

Some legal experts believe that would be a tricky case to prove.

“It sure seems like the new map was oriented predominantly around politics, not race,” Levitt argued. “And though they’d be saying that race was a predominant factor in drawing the lines, that’s very, very, very different from proving it. That’s an uphill mountain to climb on these facts.”

Some experts think the new maps are unlikely to raise strong Voting Rights Act challenges.

Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who specializes in elections, said the new districts appeared to have been carefully carved to preserve Latino- or Black-majority districts.

A successful challenge is possible, McGhee said, noting there are always novel legal arguments. “It’s just the big ones that you would think about that are the most obvious and the most traditional are pretty closed,” he said.

Supreme Court looms large

Ultimately, legal experts agree the fate of California maps — and other maps in Texas and across the nation — would depend on the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on a redistricting case from Louisiana.

Last month, conservative Supreme Court justices suggested in a hearing that they were considering reining in a key part of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

“Whatever happens with Proposition 50 — pass or fail — almost doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” Carrillo said, noting that the Supreme Court could use the Louisiana case to strike Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. “There’s a big litigation storm coming in almost any scenario.”

Levitt agreed that the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act, which could come any time between now and June, could change current law. But he stressed it is impossible to predict how broad the ruling could be.

“Whether that leaves any of California’s districts vulnerable — either in the current map or in the map if Prop. 50 passes — depends entirely on what Scotus says,” Levitt argued. “There are only nine people who know what they’ll actually say, and there are a lot of possibilities, some of which might affect California’s map pretty substantially, and some of which are unlikely to affect California’s map at all.”

Will Congress intervene?

As the redistricting battle spreads across the country and Democratic and Republican states look to follow Texas and California, Democrats could ultimately end up at a disadvantage. If the overall tilt favors Republicans, Democrats would have to win more than 50% of the vote to get a majority of seats.

Congress has the power to block partisan gerrymandering in congressional map drawing. But attempts so far to pass redistricting reform have been unsuccessful.

In 2022, the House passed the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have prohibited mid-decade redistricting and blocked partisan gerrymandering of congressional maps. But Republicans were able to block the bill in the Senate, even though it had majority support, due to that chamber’s filibuster rules.

Another option is a narrower bill proposed this summer by Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley, who represents parts of the Sacramento suburbs and Lake Tahoe and could lose his seat if Proposition 50 passes. Kiley’s bill, along with similar legislation introduced by California Democratic representatives, would ban mid-decade redistricting.

“That would be the cleanest way of addressing this particular scenario we’re in right now, because all of these new plans that have been drawn would become null and void,” McGhee said.

But in a heavily deadlocked Congress, Kiley’s bill has little prospect of moving.

“It may have to get worse before it gets better,” Hasen said.

If the redistricting war doesn’t get resolved, Hasen said, there will be a continued race to the bottom, particularly if the Supreme Court weakens or strikes down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Another scenario, Hasen argued, is Democrats regain control of Congress and the presidency, overcome the filibuster rule and pass redistricting reform.

If that doesn’t happen, Levitt said, the ultimate power rests with the people.

“If we want to tell our representatives that we’re sick of this, we can,” Levitt said. “There’s a lot that’s competing for voters’ attention. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have agency here.”

Four years after the “Rust” movie shooting, New Mexico officials have moved Alec Baldwin’s lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution to federal court.

This week’s filing is the latest twist in the long legal saga after the October 2021 on-set death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Baldwin, the 67-year-old star and a producer of the western film, had been facing a felony involuntary manslaughter charge for his role in Hutchins’ accidental shooting. But the judge overseeing Baldwin’s case abruptly dismissed the charge against him during his July 2024 trial after concluding that prosecutors withheld evidence that may have been helpful to his legal team.

Six months later, Baldwin sued New Mexico’s district attorney and special prosecutors, asserting malicious prosecution. The actor claimed he had been made a celebrity scapegoat because of the intense media pressure on local authorities to solve the high-profile case.

His lawsuit targeted New Mexico special prosecutor Kari T. Morrissey, 1st Judicial Dist. Atty. Mary Carmack-Altwies and Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputies, who led the investigation into Hutchins’ death.

The defendants have denied Baldwin’s allegations.

Baldwin’s wrongful prosecution suit was first filed in New Mexico court in Santa Fe.

On Tuesday, the defendants, including Morrissey, exercised their legal right to shift the case to federal court. The decision was made, in part, because “Mr. Baldwin brought federal civil rights claims in his lawsuit,” said Albuquerque attorney Luis Robles, who represents the defendants.

In addition, Baldwin does not live in New Mexico, where the case was filed.

Baldwin could object to the move and petition for it to be brought back to state court. On Wednesday, his team was not immediately available for comment.

A New Mexico judge had dismissed Baldwin’s malicious prosecution claims in July, citing 90 days of inactivity in the case. Baldwin’s legal team petitioned to get the case reinstated and the judge agreed to the request.

That prompted the defendants’ move to shift the case to the higher court.

During his Santa Fe trial last year, Baldwin’s lawyers had sought to turn the focus away from whether Baldwin pulled his gun’s trigger in the accidental shooting to where the lethal bullet came from.

Baldwin’s attorneys repeatedly accused law enforcement officers and prosecutors of bungling the case, including by allegedly hiding potential evidence — a batch of bullets that they said may have been related to the one that killed Hutchins.

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.

A legal aid group has sued to preemptively block any efforts by the U.S. government to deport a dozen Honduran children, saying it had “credible” information that such plans were quietly in the works.

The Arizona-based Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, known as FIRRP, on Friday added Honduran children to a lawsuit filed last weekend that resulted in a judge temporarily blocking the deportation of dozens of migrant children to their native Guatemala.

In a statement, the organization said it had received reports that the U.S. government will “imminently move forward with a plan to illegally remove Honduran children in government custody as soon as this weekend, in direct violation of their right to seek protection in the United States and despite ongoing litigation that blocked similar attempted extra-legal removals for children from Guatemala.”

FIRRP did not immediately provide the Associated Press with details about what information it had received about the possible deportation of Honduran children. The amendment to the organization’s lawsuit is sealed in federal court. The Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to email requests for comment Friday and Saturday.

Over Labor Day weekend, the Trump administration attempted to remove Guatemalan children who had come to the U.S. alone and were living in shelters or with foster care families in the U.S.

Advocates who represent migrant children in court filed lawsuits across the country seeking to stop the government from removing the children, and on Sunday a federal judge stepped in to order that the kids stay in the U.S. for at least two weeks.

Children began crossing the border alone in large numbers in 2014, peaking at 152,060 in the 2022 fiscal year. July’s arrest tally translates to an annual clip of 5,712 arrests, reflecting how illegal crossings have dropped to their lowest levels in six decades.

Guatemalans accounted for 32% of residents at government-run holding facilities last year, followed by Hondurans, Mexicans and Salvadorans. A 2008 law requires children to appear before an immigration judge with an opportunity to pursue asylum, unless they are from Canada and Mexico. The vast majority are released from shelters to parents, legal guardians or immediate family while their cases wind through court.

The lawsuit was amended to include 12 children from Honduras who have expressed to the Florence Project that they do not want to return to Honduras, as well as four additional children from Guatemala who have come into government custody in Arizona since the suit was initially filed last week.

Some children have parents who are already in the United States.

The lawsuit demands that the government allow the children their legal right to present their cases to an immigration judge, have access to legal counsel and be placed in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.

Willingham writes for the Associated Press.

CHICAGO — During Donald Trump’s campaign for president last year, he sought to ease the concerns of voters alarmed that the Supreme Court he helped shape during his first term had overturned the constitutional right to abortion, saying that he did not oppose abortion but thought the issue should be decided by individual states.

More than six months into Trump’s second term in the White House, a review by the Associated Press shows that several of his nominees to the federal courts have revealed antiabortion views, been associated with antiabortion groups or defended abortion restrictions.

Several have helped defend their state’s abortion restrictions in court, and some have been involved in cases with national impact, including on access to medication abortion.

The nominees, with lifetime appointments, would be in position to roll back abortion rights long after Trump leaves the White House.

Trump’s shifting positions

Trump has repeatedly shifted his messaging on abortion, often giving contradictory or vague answers.

In the years before the 2024 campaign, Trump had voiced support for a federal ban on abortion on or after 20 weeks in pregnancy and said he might support a national ban around 15 weeks. He later settled on messaging that decisions about abortion access should be left to the states.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has alternated between taking credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe vs. Wade and striking a more neutral tone. That’s been an effort to navigate the political divide between his base of antiabortion supporters and the broader public, which largely supports access to abortion.

Nominees’ views

One Trump nominee called abortion a “barbaric practice,” while another referred to himself as a “zealot” for the antiabortion movement. A nominee from Tennessee said abortion deserves special scrutiny because “this is the only medical procedure that terminates a life.”

One from Missouri spread misinformation about medication abortion, including that it “starves the baby to death in the womb” in a lawsuit aiming to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.

Legal experts and abortion rights advocates warn of a methodical remaking of the federal courts in a way that could pose enduring threats to abortion access nationwide.

Bernadette Meyler, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford University, said judicial appointments “are a way of federally shaping the abortion question without going through Congress or making a big, explicit statement.”

“It’s a way to cover up a little bit what is happening in the abortion sphere compared to legislation or executive orders that may be more visible, dramatic and spark more backlash,” she said.

White House’s position

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said that “every nominee of the President represents his promises to the American people and aligns with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.”

“The Democrats’ extreme position on abortion was rejected in November in favor of President Trump’s commonsense approach, which allows states to decide, supports the sanctity of human life, and prevents taxpayer funding of abortion,” Fields said in a statement to the AP.

Trump focused primarily on the economy and immigration during his 2024 campaign, the issues that surveys showed were the most important topics for voters.

Views across the abortion divide

Antiabortion advocates say it’s premature to determine whether the nominees will support their objectives, but they’re hopeful based on the names put forth so far.

“We look forward to four more years of nominees cut from that mold,” said Katie Glenn Daniel, director of legal affairs for the national antiabortion organization SBA Pro-Life America.

Abortion-rights advocates said Trump is embedding abortion opponents into the judiciary one judge at a time.

“This just feeds into this larger strategy where Trump has gotten away with distancing himself from abortion, saying he’s going to leave it to the states, while simultaneously appointing antiabortion extremists at all levels of government,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the national abortion rights organization Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly known as NARAL Pro-Choice America,

Fernando writes for the Associated Press.

Information, in the second Trump administration, is a currency of power and fear. Last week, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi announced sweeping subpoenas targeting physicians and medical providers who offer care for transgender youth. The aim is not to initiate prosecutions: Indeed, the legal theories upon which such prosecutions might rest are tenuous at best.

By filing these investigative demands, the government plainly hopes to chill medical providers from offering expert care. This strategy can work even if, at the end of the day, the government’s threats are hollow as a matter of law. The White House’s plainly unconstitutional attacks on law firms, for example, have substantially worked — even though the minority of firms to challenge the orders rapidly won relief.

Fortunately, the legal system is not powerless in the face of such overreaching: Federal district courts have the authority, and the obligation, to recognize that patient-physician dealings are akin to attorney-client and spousal discussions. Both of the latter benefit from judicially created privileges — or legal shields that individuals can invoke against the state’s probing. At a moment when not just gender medicine but also reproductive care more generally is in peril, federal courts can and should step in and shield intimately private medical data as well.

We suspect that many people believe that what they tell their doctors is already private. They’re right, but only sort of. There’s a federal law called HIPAA that limits what your doctor can do with the information. It says that your doctor can’t, for instance, sell your medical records to the newspaper. In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services also issued a HIPAA “privacy rule” that heightened protections for reproductive healthcare information. (Last month, a federal district court in Texas declared the rule unconstitutional — so its future is uncertain.)

Even with the privacy rule, however, HIPAA hides a gaping hole: It allows disclosures “required by law.” And the law explicitly permits disclosures pursuant to subpoenas of all kinds — judicial, grand jury or administrative — including those issued by Bondi. So if the Justice Department subpoenas your intimate and sensitive healthcare information, HIPAA won’t stop that.

In previous academic work, we’ve urged Congress and state legislatures to fill this gap. Blue states have acted to curtail cooperation with other states — but there’s a limit to what states can do when the federal government demands information.

Yet there remains one entity that can, and should, act immediately to shield reproductive healthcare information: the same federal district courts that have been at the forefront of pushing back on the Trump administration’s many illegal and constitutional actions. We think federal courts should extend existing “privileges,” as evidentiary shields are called, to encompass both records of gender-affirming and transgender medical care, and also records of reproductive care more generally.

A privilege not only bars protected information from being admitted into evidence at trial, but also blocks subpoenas, warrants and other court orders.

Federal district courts have a general power to create privileges, and they often do so when people already have a reasonable expectation that their conversations will not be disclosed. Most people have heard of the attorney-client privilege, which means that you can confide in your lawyer without worrying that what you say will end up being used in court. But privileges can apply to all sorts of other information as well: what you tell your spouse, what you tell your spiritual advisor and even highway safety data that your state reports to the feds in exchange for funding. Existing court-created privileges protect not only attorney-client but also executive-branch communications.

Federal courts should recognize a privilege for doctor-patient communications in gender and reproductive medicine. They could do so if one of the physicians subpoenaed recently goes to court. The protection they seek is simply an extension of widely recognized legal principles and expectations of privacy. Federal courts already have recognized a privilege for patient communications with psychotherapists, and many state courts also offer privilege protections for broader doctor-patient communications.

Importantly, it is the job of federal district courts to craft evidence-related rules. After all, these are the judges who are closest to litigants and the mechanics of evidence protection. District courts don’t need to wait around for the Supreme Court to act on this, because the Federal Rules of Evidence left privileges to common law development in the district courts. And under the well-established balancing test that lower federal courts should follow when they create new privileges, we think our proposed privilege is an easy case: It serves a public purpose and protects what should be recognized as a valued interest of “transcendent importance” — privacy for our most intimate medical care.

The case for recognizing the privilege in respect to the recent subpoenas is especially strong: The attorney general is seeking to chill physicians from providing advice that is protected by the 1st Amendment and care that is guaranteed by federal statutes. Such subpoenas are directly at odds with the rule of law.

Today, it is trans kids; tomorrow, it will be people seeking an abortion or contraception. We should not have to wait for the federal government to go this far before our privacy gets the shield that it deserves.

Aziz Huq and Rebecca Wexler are professors of law at the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School, respectively.

President Trump broke the law when he mobilized thousands of members of the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles amid protests over immigration raids, and must return control of the troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco granted the state of California’s request for a temporary restraining order Thursday evening, but also delayed enforcement of the order until noon Friday, giving the Trump administration time to file an appeal with the U.S. 9th Circuit.

In a 36-page decision, Breyer wrote that Trump’s actions “were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Breyer added that he was “troubled by the implication” inherent in the Trump administration’s argument that “protest against the federal government, a core civil liberty protected by the First Amendment, can justify a finding of rebellion.”

Newsom, who filed the lawsuit along with the state of California, called the ruling “a win for all Americans.”

“Today was really about the test of democracy, and today we passed the test,” Newsom told reporters in a building that houses the California Supreme Court in San Francisco.

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The ruling, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta told reporters, is “a critical early indication that upon quick review of the facts of our case, the court sees the merits of our argument.”

“We aren’t in the throes of a rebellion,” Bonta said. “We are not under threat of an invasion. Nothing is preventing the federal government from enforcing federal law. The situation in Los Angeles last weekend didn’t warrant the deployment of military troops, and their arrival only inflamed the situation.”

The Trump administration filed a notice of appeal in the case late Thursday, and is seeking to delay Breyer’s order until the 9th Circuit decides on the case. If the 9th Circuit granted the request for a stay, control of the National Guard would not revert back to Newsom on Friday, Bonta said.

If the 9th Circuit does not grant the stay, Breyer’s order will take effect Friday afternoon, sending the National Guard back to Newsom’s control. Newsom said troops would go back to working on counter drug enforcement, border security and forest management.

During a hearing Thursday, Breyer seemed skeptical of the Justice Department’s argument that courts could not question the president’s judgment on key legal issues, including whether the protests and unrest in Los Angeles constituted either “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion.”

“We’re talking about the president exercising his authority, and of course, the president is limited in his authority,” Breyer said. “That’s the difference between the president and King George.”

Trump and the White House have argued that the military mobilization is legal under Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Forces, which gives the president the authority to federalize the National Guard if there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.”

“The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of ‘rebellion,’” Breyer wrote. There were instances of violence, he said, but the Trump administration did not identify “a violent, armed, organized, open and avowed uprising against the government as a whole.”

“The evidence is overwhelming that protesters gathered to protest a single issue—the immigration raids,” Breyer wrote.

Title 10 of the U.S. Code also requires that orders from the president “be issued through the governors of the States.”

As governor, Newsom is the commander in chief of the California National Guard. Last Saturday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent a memo to the head of the California Guard to mobilize nearly 2,000 members, who then sent the memo to Newsom’s office, the state’s complaint said. Neither Newsom nor his office consented to the mobilization, the lawsuit said.

Newsom wrote to Hegseth on Sunday, asking him to rescind the troop deployment. The letter said the mobilization was “a serious breach of state sovereignty that seems intentionally designed to inflame the situation, while simultaneously depriving the state from deploying these personnel and resources where they are truly required.”

“I’m trying to figure out how something is ‘through’ somebody, if in fact you didn’t send it to him,” Breyer asked. “As long as he gets a copy of it at some point, it’s going through?”

Breyer was less willing, however, to engage in the legality of Trump’s deployment of U.S. Marines to Los Angeles. Attorneys for California noted that 140 Marines were scheduled to relieve and replace Guardsmen over the next 24 hours.

Protests emerged across Los Angeles on Friday in response to a series of flash raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents across the county. A handful of agitators among the protesters committed violence and vandalism, prompting Trump to quickly deploy the California National Guard to respond. He added active-duty Marines to the operation Monday. Protests, and some sporadic violent rioting, have continued since the deployments.

Trump has said that the mobilization was necessary to “deal with the violent, instigated riots,” and that without the National Guard, “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.”

Breyer said that the Trump administration had identified “some stray violent incidents relating to the protests,” and from there, he said, “boldly claim that state and local officials were ‘unable to bring rioters under control.’”

“It is not the federal government’s place in our constitutional system to take over a state’s police power whenever it is dissatisfied with how vigorously or quickly the state is enforcing its own laws,” Breyer wrote.

The attorneys general from 18 other states, as well as Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein-Soto, supported California’s position in the case.

Wilner reported from Washington, D.C., Wong from San Francisco and Nelson from Los Angeles.