Trump Gives Up on 3 National Guard Deployments

The long-running tug-of-war over who controls California's National Guard has ended with a quiet retreat from Washington. State Attorney General Rob Bonta says the Trump administration has dropped its bid to block a federal court order that returns command of the Guard to Gov. Gavin Newsom, ABC10 reports. The move means an order from the US District Court for the Northern District of California now takes full effect, ending months of extended federal control. In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump said he was also dropping his push to deploy troops in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, the AP reports.

• "We are removing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, despite the fact that CRIME has been greatly reduced by having these great Patriots in those cities, and ONLY by that fact," Trump said. "Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago were GONE if it weren't for the Federal Government stepping in. We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again - Only a question of time!"

Troops had already left Los Angeles and while they were deployed to Portland and Chicago, legal challenges meant that they were never on the streets, the AP notes. "We won in court," said Newsom spokesman Izzy Gardon, per the New York Times. "Trump's rambling here is the political version of 'you can't fire me, I quit.'"

ABC10 reports that the reversal in California came after the US Supreme Court, in a related case out of Illinois, rejected what California officials had described as a sweeping view of the president's power to seize control of state Guard units and direct their missions. A Ninth Circuit panel had already refused to put the California district court's injunction on hold, ordering the Guard deployment in and around Los Angeles to wind down earlier this month. The troops, however, remained under federal authority until the administration formally backed off its request to stall the ruling.

Bonta, a Democrat, framed the case as a test of constitutional limits on executive power, accusing Trump of treating Guard members as "political pawns" and using them inappropriately in immigration operations and public displays. "There is a reason our founders decided military and civilian affairs must be kept separate; a reason that our military is, by design, apolitical," he said. "Now, in the face of a stinging rebuke by the US Supreme Court, the Trump Administration is backing away from its efforts to federalize and deploy California National Guard troops."