unlawful

California officials on Monday filed a federal lawsuit over the mobilization of the state’s National Guard during the weekend’s immigration protests in Los Angeles, accusing President Trump of overstepping his federal authority and violating the U.S. Constitution.

As thousands of people gathered in the streets to protest raids and arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump mobilized nearly 2,000 members of the National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said that state officials could handle the situation and that Trump was sowing chaos in the streets for political purposes.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said the decision by Trump and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which spells out the limits of federal power. Bonta said the state will seek a restraining order for the “unlawful, unprecedented” deployment of the National Guard, and argues in the 22-page lawsuit that an impending deployment of U.S. Marines was “similarly unlawful.”

“Trump and Hegseth ignored law enforcement’s expertise and guidance and trampled over our state’s, California’s, sovereignty,” Bonta said at a news conference.

Experts and state officials say Trump’s actions and the subsequent lawsuit have thrust the U.S. into uncharted legal territory. Bonta said there have not been many court rulings on the questions at play because the statute Trump cited “has been rarely used, for good reason.”

“It is very unusual and unnecessary, and out of keeping with our constitutional tradition, that they are there without the consent of the governor, in a situation where the governor says that state authorities have the situation under control,” said Laura A. Dickinson, a professor at the George Washington University Law School.

Whether Trump’s action was illegal, Dickinson said, “is really untested.”

Trump and the White House say the military mobilization is legal under Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Forces. The statute 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,” but says the Guard must be called up through an order from the state’s governor.

Because founders distrusted military rule, the Constitution allows the president to deploy the military for civil law enforcement only in “dire, narrow circumstances,” Bonta’s complaint argues. But, the lawsuit says, the Trump administration appears to be using the statute “as a mechanism to evade these time-honored constitutional limits.”

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.”

Days of protests after the ICE raids included some violent clashes involving protesters, local police and federal officials and some vandalism and burglaries. Local officials have decried those actions but have defended the right of Angelenos to peacefully demonstrate.

“It was heading in the wrong direction,” Trump said at the White House. “It’s now heading in the right direction. And we hope to have the support of Gavin, because Gavin is the big beneficiary as we straighten out his problems. I mean, his state is a mess.”

The part of the law that “the Trump administration is going to have difficulty explaining away” requires that orders to call up the National Guard “be issued through the governors, which is obviously not happening here,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

Less black and white, she said, is what happens “if the president tries to exercise the authority provided by that law to federalize the National Guard and the governor refuses to issue the orders.”

As the governor, Newsom is the commander in chief of the California National Guard. On Saturday night, Hegseth sent a memo to the head of the California Guard to mobilize nearly 2,000 members. The leader of the state National Guard then sent the memo to Newsom’s office, the complaint says. Neither Newsom nor his office consented to the mobilization, the lawsuit says.

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.”

Hegseth issued another memo Monday night deploying another 2,000 members of the National Guard, the lawsuit says.

Newsom has warned that the executive order that Trump signed applies to other states as well as to California, which will “allow him to go into any state and do the same thing.”

Legal experts said the statute that the White House used to justify the National Guard mobilization is usually invoked in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807, a wide-reaching law that gives presidents the emergency power to call up the military in the United States if they believe the situation warrants it.

Goitein said presidents generally invoke the Insurrection Act, then use the statute that Trump cited as the “call-up authority” to actually mobilize the military. How the law stands on its own, she said, “is one of the legal questions that have not come up before in the courts.”

The Insurrection Act has been invoked 30 times in the history of the country, and Trump has not invoked it in Los Angeles. It was last invoked in 1992, when then-Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to federalize the National Guard in the wake of the Rodney King verdict.

The last time a president sent the National Guard into a state without a request from the governor was six decades ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson mobilized troops in Alabama to defend civil rights demonstrators and enforce a federal court order in 1965.

Bonta’s office said the specific statute that Trump is using has been invoked only once before, when President Nixon mobilized the National Guard to deliver the mail during a U.S. Postal Service strike in 1970.

The argument that Trump has violated the 10th Amendment is a clever subversion of a line of thinking that has traditionally been backed by conservative judges, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

The 10th Amendment says that the federal government has only the powers specifically assigned by the Constitution, and other powers are controlled by the states.

“Deploying over 4,000 federalized military forces to quell a protest or prevent future protests despite the lack of evidence that local law enforcement was incapable of asserting control and ensuring public safety during such protests represents the exact type of intrusion on state power that is at the heart of the 10th Amendment,” state lawyers argue in the lawsuit.

“The state has a strong argument that … by nationalizing the state guard, that Trump is commandeering the state,” Chemerinsky said.

He said the Supreme Court has ruled on the 10th Amendment only a handful of times in recent decades, including saying that Congress couldn’t require states to accept federal mandates related to sports betting, background checks for guns and radioactive waste disposal.

Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

Panel of judges finds the president overstepped his authority by imposing across-the-board duties on imports from trading partners.

A United States trade court has ruled that President Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed blanket tariffs on imports from US trading partners, issuing a permanent injunction that immediately halts the tariffs and demands a government response within 10 days.

The Court of International Trade, based in New York, said the US Constitution grants Congress exclusive authority to regulate commerce with other countries that is not overridden by the president’s emergency powers to safeguard the US economy.

“The court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President’s use of tariffs as leverage,” a three-judge panel wrote on Wednesday. “That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [federal law] does not allow it.”

The ruling, if it stands, could derail Trump’s global trade strategy to use steep tariffs to wring concessions from trading partners. It creates deep uncertainty around multiple simultaneous negotiations with the European Union, China and many other countries.

The court struck down Trump’s tariff orders issued since January under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a statute meant for addressing rare and extraordinary national emergencies. Tariffs introduced under other laws, such as those targeting specific industries like steel, autos and aluminium, were not addressed in this ruling.

The Trump administration swiftly filed an appeal, disputing the court’s jurisdiction. A White House spokesperson insisted trade imbalances posed a national crisis. “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” said Kush Desai, the White House deputy press secretary, defending Trump’s executive actions as necessary to protect US industry and security.

Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, noted the court’s impartiality. “This particular court cannot be accused of being an activist one, as Trump and his followers have accused other courts that have ruled against him,” Hanna said. “One of the judges was appointed by Trump himself, another by former President Barack Obama and the third by the former Republican President Ronald Reagan.”

The Court of International Trade handles matters relating to customs and trade law. Its rulings can be challenged in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and eventually taken to the Supreme Court.

Financial analyst Robert Scott told Al Jazeera the tariffs failed to deliver tangible results even in Trump’s first term. “Most of those tariffs did not see the US trade position improve,” he said. “US trade deficits continued to grow and China’s exports to the world kept rising. They simply rerouted goods through other countries.”

The ruling came in a pair of lawsuits, one filed by the nonpartisan Liberty Justice Center on behalf of five small US businesses that import goods from countries targeted by the duties, and the other by 12 US states.

The companies, which range from a New York wine and spirits importer to a Virginia-based maker of educational kits and musical instruments, have said the tariffs will hurt their ability to do business.

“There is no question here of narrowly tailored relief; if the challenged Tariff Orders are unlawful as to Plaintiffs they are unlawful as to all,” the judges wrote in their decision.

At least five other legal challenges to the tariffs are pending.

Supreme Court finds no factual basis for Ronen Bar’s dismissal, highlighting irregularities and lack of formal hearing.

Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that the government’s decision to fire domestic security chief Ronen Bar was “unlawful”, marking the latest twist in a bitter power struggle between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the country’s justice system.

The top court “ruled that the government’s decision to terminate the head of the Shin Bet’s tenure was made through an improper and unlawful process,” its ruling said on Wednesday.

It also said that Netanyahu had a conflict of interest in moving to get Bar fired, as the Shin Bet was also conducting a probe into alleged ties between the prime minister’s close aides and Qatar.

The two men have traded accusations and barbs over deep-seated security failures surrounding the Hamas-led October 7 attack.

Netanyahu first said he would fire Bar due to a breakdown in “trust”, suggesting it was linked to October 7, which then led to the Gaza war. But Bar said Netanyahu’s decision was motivated by a series of events between November 2024 and February 2025.

In the unclassified part of the court submission, Bar said Netanyahu had told him “on more than one occasion” that he expected Shin Bet to take action against Israelis involved in anti-government demonstrations, “with a particular focus on monitoring the protests’ financial backers”.

The Shin Bet head also said he had refused to sign off on a security request aimed at relieving Netanyahu from testifying at an ongoing corruption trial in which he faces charges of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust.

The court said the decision to dismiss Bar was made without “a factual basis” and without giving him a formal hearing before firing him, according to a report by the Times of Israel.

Wednesday’s ruling noted “irregularities” in the process that led to Bar’s sacking, as well as “a disregard for fundamental principles regarding internal security.”

The Israeli cabinet voted to dismiss Bar in March, triggering mass protests and accusations of autocratic pursuits by the far-right government.

The High Court of Justice halted the decision until a hearing could be held. Several groups, including opposition politicians, had filed petitions with the court against the government’s decision.

In April, the government revoked the decision to fire Bar a day after he said he would step down.

Following Bar’s decision to quit the job, Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling said that “this announcement puts an end to the [legal] procedure.”

May 19 (UPI) — A federal judge ruled Monday that a DOGE-lead takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace by the Trump administration was “unlawful.”

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said the removal of USIP’s president and his replacement by a DOGE-appointed official along with the termination of “nearly all” its staff and transfer of USIP property to the U.S. General Services administration was “effectuated by illegitimately-installed leaders who lacked legal authority to take these actions, which must therefore be declared null and void,” she wrote.

Personnel from White House adviser Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the U.S. Institute of Peace after originally being turned away in March. USIP then sued the administration for “unlawful dismantling,” with its acting chief saying DOGE “has broken into our building.”

Legislation signed in 1984 by then-President Ronald Reagan had created the USIP to be an “independent nonprofit corporation established by Congress.”

The Trump administration fired most of USIP’s 12-member board, leaving U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Defense University President Peter Garvin as its three remaining board members.

The three then installed Kenneth Jackson as acting USIP president.

In March, nearly two months to the day of Monday’s ruling, Howell rejected an initial complaint filed by the U.S. Institute of Peace against the Trump administration’s attempted takeover, but questioned the tactics used by DOGE in its appropriation.

“By design, USIP was established by the two political branches to advance a safer, more peaceful world with the specific tasks of conducting research, providing training on peacemaking techniques, and promoting peaceful conflict resolution abroad — without formally involving the U.S. government in foreign disputes,” Howell wrote in a 102-page memorandum opinion.

“The President second-guessed the judgment of Congress and President Reagan in creating USIP 40 years ago,” Howell, an appointee of ex-President Barack Obama, wrote Monday.

Meanwhile, USIP stated in its complaint that the White House “incorrectly labeled” the institute a “governmental entity” part of the “federal bureaucracy.”

However, Howell declined to issue a temporary restraining order, saying USIP was a “very complicated entity” with both qualities of non-governmental organizations and features of government agencies, such as having to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests.

In 2003, a USIP spokesman said the think tank is required by law to be a non-partisan institution, and is mandated only to address issues related to overseas conflict.

In her 4-page ruling, Howell wrote Monday that USIP Acting President George Moose would stay as its leader and banned the administration from “further trespass against the real and personal property belonging to the Institute and its employees, contractors, agents and other representatives.”

The White House, meanwhile, contended that the U.S. Institute of Peace had existed for 40 years but “failed to deliver peace.”

“President Trump is right to reduce failed, useless entities like USIP to their statutory minimum, and this rogue judge’s attempt to impede on the separation of powers will not be the last say on the matter,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told NBC Monday.