Los Angeles: Pentagon arranges partial deduction from National Guard

US defense minister Pete Hegseth ordered the withdrawal of around half of the 4,000 national guards sent to Los Angeles in June. “Thanks to the reinforcement of our troops, lawlessness in Los Angeles is succeeding,” said Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell on Tuesday (local time). “For this reason, the minister ordered the dismissal of 2000 soldiers from the California National Guard from the federal protective mission,” the statement said.

At the beginning of June, US President Donald Trump had requested the National Guard in the state of 60 days against the will of the Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom and sent to Los Angeles in order to restore the order there after collapsing against the harsh immigration policy of his government.

Mayor Karen Bass attributed the partial “withdrawal” of the National Guard to the peaceful course of the protests in her city. “This happened because the people in Los Angeles have been united and remained strong. We organized peaceful protests, we got together for rallies, we put the Trump government on trial-all of this led to today’s retreat,” said the democratic mayor on Tuesday.

For his part, newsoma asked Trump to “end the theater and also send the remaining soldiers home on site”. Thousands of members of the National Guard are “still under federal command in Los Angeles for no reason and cannot fulfill their important tasks in the whole of the state,” said Newsom on X and referred to the support of the National Guard in combating forest fires.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in Los Angeles without papers. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the city has been the focus of its strict action against migrants announced in the election campaign. Again and again there are raids by the immigration authority ICE.

The National Guard is often used in natural disasters and less often in unrest. Trump’s arrangement is for the first time since 1965 that the national guard is used over the head of the governor concerned.

Most recently, the National Guard was sent to California due to unrest. At that time, the occasion was riots that had been triggered by police violence by the death of African American George Floyd.