LOS ANGELES/WASHINGTON: The US military will temporarily deploy about 700 Marines to Los Angeles until more National Guard troops can arrive, marking another escalation in President Donald Trump’s response to street protests over his aggressive immigration policies.
Tensions have been rising since Trump activated the National Guard on Saturday after street protests erupted in response to immigration raids in Southern California. It is the biggest flashpoint yet in the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to deport migrants living in the country illegally.
The announcement that marines would be deployed was made on the fourth straight day of protests. Late on Monday police began to disperse hundreds of demonstrators who gathered outside a federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles where immigrants have been held.

National Guard forces had formed a human barricade to keep people out of the building. Then a phalanx of Los Angeles police moved up the street, starting to push people from the scene and firing “less lethal” munitions such as gas canisters. Police had used similar tactics since Friday.
The LAPD said late on Monday afternoon that some protesters had started throwing objects at officers and the use of less lethal munitions had been authorized, adding in an X post: “Less lethal munitions may cause pain and discomfort.”
California sued the Trump administration to block deployment of the National Guard and the Marines on Monday, arguing that it violates federal law and state sovereignty.

US Marines have been deployed domestically for major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the September 11, 2001, attacks, but it is extremely rare for US military troops to be used for domestic policing.
For now, the Trump administration was not invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow troops to directly participate in civilian law enforcement, according to a US official speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Pentagon confirmed on Monday that a contingent of 2,000 National Guard troops would be doubled to 4,000. Trump said on Monday he felt he had no choice but to increase the level of force to prevent violence from spiraling out of control.
Trump also said he supported a suggestion by his border czar Tom Homan that California Governor Gavin Newsom should be arrested over possible obstruction of his administration’s immigration enforcement measures. “I would do it if I were Tom. I think it’s great,” Trump told reporters.

Democrats said Trump’s decision to deploy military force to handle the protests amounts to an abuse of presidential power, and California’s lawsuit claimed it was illegal.
“The level of escalation is completely unwarranted, uncalled for, and unprecedented,” Newsom’s press office said on X.
Four days of protests
The protests so far have resulted in a few dozen arrests and some property damage, including some self-driving Waymo vehicles that were set ablaze on Sunday evening. The Los Angeles Police Department said five officers sustained minor injuries on Saturday and Sunday, as did five police horses used in crowd control.
Before the police intervention on Monday, several hundred protesters chanted “free them all” outside the Los Angeles federal detention facility where immigrants have been held.
“What is happening effects every American, everyone who wants to live free, regardless of how long their family has lived here,” said Marzita Cerrato, 42, a first-generation immigrant whose parents are from Mexico and Honduras.
Some in the crowd punched and tossed eggs at a Trump supporter at the event, while others fired paintballs from a car at the federal building.

Protests also sprang up in at least nine other US cities on Monday, including New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, according to local news outlets.
The Trump administration has argued that Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration allowed far too many immigrants to enter the country and that Democratic-run cities such as Los Angeles are improperly interfering with efforts to deport them. Trump has pledged to deport record numbers of people who are in the country illegally and to lock down the US-Mexico border, setting a goal of at least 3,000 daily arrests.
Trump can deploy Marines under certain conditions of law or under his authority as commander in chief.
The last time the military was used for direct police action under the Insurrection Act was in 1992, when the California governor at the time asked President George H.W. Bush to help respond to Los Angeles riots over the acquittal of police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King.
More than 50 people were killed in the 1992 riots, which also caused some $1 billion in damage over six days.
Federal law allows the president to deploy the National Guard if the nation is invaded, if there is “rebellion or danger of rebellion,” or the president is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

BERLIN: Russia is determined to test the resolve of the NATO alliance, including by extending its confrontation with the West beyond the borders of Ukraine, the Germany’s foreign intelligence chief told the Table Media news organization.
Bruno Kahl, head of the Federal Intelligence Service, said his agency had clear intelligence indications that Russian officials believed the collective defense obligations enshrined in the NATO treaty no longer had practical force.
“We are quite certain, and we have intelligence showing it, that Ukraine is only a step on the journey westward,” Kahl told Table Media in a podcast interview.
“That doesn’t mean we expect tank armies to roll westwards,” he added. “But we see that NATO’s collective defense promise is to be tested.”
Germany, already the second-largest provider of armaments and financial support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, has pledged to step up its support further under the new government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, promising to help Ukraine develop new missiles that could strike deep into Russian territory.
Without detailing the nature of his intelligence sources, Kahl said Russian officials were envisaging confrontations that fell short of a full military engagement that would test whether the US would really live up to its mutual aid obligations under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
“They don’t need to dispatch armies of tanks for that,” he said. “It’s enough to send little green men to Estonia to protect supposedly oppressed Russian minorities.”
Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea involved occupation of buildings and offices by Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms and civilian clothes, who came to be known as the “little green men” when Moscow initially denied their identity.
Kahl did not specify which officials in Moscow were thinking along these lines.
Merz, who visited Donald Trump in Washington last week, pushed back against the US president’s assertion that Ukraine and Russia were like two infants fighting, telling Trump that where Ukraine targeted Moscow’s military, Russia bombed Ukraine’s cities.
Kahl said his contacts with US counterparts had left him convinced they took the Russian threat seriously.
“They take it as seriously as us, thank God,” he said.