House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Sunday that deploying the Marine Corps to Los Angeles to suppress protests, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has suggested, would not be “heavy-handed.”
“Secretary Hegseth said that active-duty Marines there at Camp Pendleton, there by San Diego, are on high alert and could be mobilized. Could we really see active-duty Marines on the streets of Los Angeles?” ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked on “This Week.”
“You know, one of our core principles is maintaining peace through strength. We do that on foreign affairs and domestic affairs as well. I don’t think that’s heavy-handed,” Johnson responded.
Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard members to the Los Angeles area on Saturday amid protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the action was due to “violent mobs” attacking federal agents “carrying out basic deportation operations.”
“The National Guard, and Marines if need be, stand with ICE,” Hegseth said in a post on the social platform X on Sunday morning.
Deploying active-duty forces against Americans on U.S. soil would be an extraordinary move and would require bypassing laws that prevent the military from being used for domestic law enforcement purposes.
There’s also little precedent for deploying the National Guard to states that have not requested the help.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday went after Trump over the deployment of the National Guard to the Los Angeles area, saying the president “thinks he has a right to do anything.”
“He does not believe in the Constitution; he does not believe in the rule of law,” Sanders told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
“My understanding is that the governor of California, the mayor of the city of Los Angeles, did not request the National Guard, but he thinks he has a right to do anything he wants,” he added.
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