National Guard members who were deployed to keep the peace in Los Angeles were sent to participate in immigration raids on marijuana farms 130 miles away in the Coachella Valley, according to court documents filed by the Trump administration on Monday.
Around 315 National Guard troops assisted the Drug Enforcement Administration in executing a federal search warrant in the small desert community of Thermal.
Recommended Stories
- ICE's migrant arrests shatter Trump record as jails struggle with overflow
- ICE says it arrested 11 Iranian illegal immigrants as Trump warns of sleeper cells in US
- 'Fire up the deportation planes': DHS welcomes Supreme Court ruling on third countries
During the raids, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested between 70 and 75 workers and one U.S. citizen on suspicion of impeding law enforcement.
It is the largest operation to involve troops in California since the Trump administration federalized them on June 7. It is also the farthest east that the troops have operated since being deployed.
Coachella Mayor Steven Hernandez said he and other city officials started hearing about the federal raids from activists and immigrant rights groups who said troops were “knocking on doors” in the area.
“It was obviously a really big mobilization and strategy in terms of how many sites that would physically have some kind of presence,” he told Task & Purpose on Monday.
News of the raid was included in a filing supporting President Donald Trump’s orders to send 4,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines to protect federal immigration officers and buildings in Los Angeles.
Lawyers from California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office challenged whether current conditions in Los Angeles still justified keeping the troops deployed — especially for operations such as the marijuana farm raids, which they argued in the federal court filing are “untethered to protection against the kinds of harms to federal personnel and property that the Ninth Circuit concluded likely justified the initial federalization.”
Bonta’s office also requested more information on National Guard deployments outside the city and a status report on why the Trump administration cannot enforce immigration laws in LA using regular federal agencies and whether it still deems the downtown Los Angeles area an emergency.
Lawyers for the Trump administration claimed that the Coachella raids were “in the same vein of other uses of service members to provide protection for immigration enforcement.”
They also claimed Bonta and his team provided “no persuasive factual or legal reason to question [the Trump administration’s] continued use of military service members.”
The deployment of the National Guard to the marijuana farm is the latest flashpoint in the escalating legal fight between Trump and California over whether the president has the authority to federalize troops to respond to unrest.
On Thursday, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in a 38-page decision that conditions in Los Angeles justified Trump’s decision to assume control of California’s National Guard to enforce federal immigration laws.
A lower court had previously found that the protests did not rise to the level required for Trump to invoke the rarely used law allowing him to federalize the Guard against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) wishes.
However, the appellate panel — comprised of two Trump appointees and one appointed by former President Joe Biden — overturned that ruling.
NEWSOM PUSHES FEDERAL JUDGE TO CONSIDER NEW PAUSE ON TRUMP NATIONAL GUARD USE
“Affording appropriate deference to the president’s determination, we conclude that he likely acted within his authority in federalizing the National Guard,” the court wrote.
Newsom criticized the decision and vowed that the “fight doesn’t end here.”