The Pentagon will send a Marine battalion to Los Angeles in a major escalation of President Donald Trump’s response to anti-immigration enforcement protests, the United States military has said.
The statement on Monday confirmed the “activation” of 700 Marines to help protect federal personnel and property in the California city, where Trump had deployed the National Guard a day earlier.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said later on Monday that an “additional” 2,000 National Guard troops would also be mobilised.
The announcements came despite opposition from state officials, including California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, who has mounted a legal challenge to the deployment of the National Guard.
In a statement, the military said the “activation of the Marines” was meant to help “provide continuous coverage of the area in support of the lead federal agency”.
Speaking to the Reuters news agency, an unnamed Trump administration official said the soldiers would be acting only in support of the National Guard and other law enforcement.
The official said that Trump was not yet invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would suspend legal limitations that block the military from taking part in domestic law enforcement.
Speaking shortly before the reports emerged, Trump said he was open to deploying Marines to Los Angeles, but said protests in the city were “heading in the right direction”.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said.
Reporting from Los Angeles, Al Jazeera’s Rob Reynolds said protests on Monday organised in the city centre by union groups were peaceful.
He noted that the National Guard, which Trump had deployed to the city on Sunday, played a minimal role in responding to the protests, only guarding federal buildings. That raised questions over why the Trump administration would feel a Marine deployment was needed.
“[The National Guard] didn’t engage with the protesters. They didn’t do much of anything other than stand there in their military uniforms,” Reynolds said.
He added that there is an important distinction between the National Guard, a state-based military force usually composed of part-time reserves, and the more combat-forward Marines, which are the land force of the US Navy.
“Now the Marines, this is a whole different thing. The United States sends Marines overseas where US imperialist interests are at stake, but not to cities in the United States,” he said.
Newsom’s office, meanwhile, said that according to the information it had received, the Marines were only being transferred to a base closer to Los Angeles, and not technically being deployed onto the streets.
Still, it said the “level of escalation is completely unwarranted, uncalled