The NPR Politics Podcast - Protests In L.A. Over Trump's Immigration Policies

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

After a series of immigration raids in and around Los Angeles, protestors demonstrated against the actions & the broader immigration policies of the Trump administration. In response, the president federalized the California National Guard without asking state and local officials. The rare move has drawn strong criticism from California lawmakers. This episode: political correspondent Sarah McCammon, immigration policy reporter Ximena Bustillo, and Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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and today I'm taking my final exam. I know that the things I learned from a government teacher and listening to this show every day will help me nail the test. This podcast was recorded on 1 32 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday June 9th 2025. Things might have changed by the time you hear this but I will have taken my government exam and hopefully killed it. Here's the show. Congrats on I guess completing senior year soon. Yeah big moments. Hey there it's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon, I cover politics.

I'm Jimena Bustia, and I cover immigration policy. I'm Tom Bowman, I cover the Pentagon. And today on the show, we're looking at the major demonstrations in Los Angeles in response to President Trump's immigration policies. Jimena, you cover immigration. First, if you could just walk us through what's happened recently, how did we get here? So we have seen immigration and customs enforcement officers conduct, you know, immigration arrests across the country, but that includes California.

And last week there were several arrests throughout the state, but particularly on Friday, there were at least three specific immigration enforcement operations and those can be arrests, raid variations. And then on Saturday, ICE said that it had arrested 118 people through these operations. These arrests were met with a lot of resistance from people living in LA, people who decided to take to the streets and protest that these arrests were happening in their community. And that led to clashes with law enforcement.

And then that bubbled up, resulting in President Trump federalizing the National Guard on Saturday night. Yeah, and that's what's so out of the ordinary here, right? I mean, Tom, the president called in the guard without asking local officials about it first. Usually the way it works is the governor calls in their state's National Guard if they need help. I mean, how unusual is this?

It's pretty unusual. It has happened in the past. Last time was 60 years ago when Lyndon Johnson federalized, he took control of the Alabama Guard so he could protect civil rights protesters down there. John Kennedy did it to desegregate his school in Alabama as well. And Eisenhower also used it for the same purpose, to desegregate a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. So it has happened in the past, very, very unusual. And I think you have to look at the National Guard

as a governor's army. And generally what it does is respond to natural disasters, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes. They rescue people, they clear debris, they fill sandbags and so forth. That's generally what you see the Guard doing. But in this case, again, local officials said, no, we can handle this. The police can handle this, right? People are throwing bottles and so forth, but local police can handle it. And as it expanded, right, the president clearly said on Saturday, no, we have to send in the

National Guard. I'm taking control of the California National Guard. And by law, he can do it. Which again, isn't how things normally work. So, Himenda, I mean, how is President Trump justifying that decision? So, he has been very vocal on social media. Earlier today, he posted on Truth Social that they made that decision to send in the National Guard to, quote, deal with the violent instigating riots in California. He carries on to say that if they had not done so, LA would be, quote, completely obliterated. And so what we have seen over the past, you know, three-ish days

is a very united front from the Trump administration, his cabinet members, and the leaders within DHS and other security agencies to paint this picture that California would have fallen politically, economically, socially, if they had not gone in with a full security force. That is their justification. As Tom says, that's not the picture that California leaders are painting. And Tom, this comes just after some exclusive reporting that you've done. There's this new memo from the Department of Homeland Security that you reported on, which allows for the Guard to be essentially more readily available for whatever the President wants or needs?

Tell us about this memo and what it would allow. Well, first of all, we all reported that there was a request from DHS for 20,000 National Guard members to help out in some of these deportations. We finally got some great detail into exactly who those folks would be, what they would be doing. So this memo from May 9th from Homeland Security to the Pentagon said we need up to 3,500 guard personnel for field investigative units for high priority fugitive cases, surveillance, and get this, night operations and rural interdiction. Rural interdiction, they don't define what it is, but presumably it's we're going to

go to, you know, vineyards and large farms where many migrants will be working to round them up. And also, they want up to 2,500 personnel for guard duty at federal detention facilities and other locations inside the detention centers and also riot control and search teams as well. Now, the bulk of the other 20,000 would be up to 10,000 personnel, it says here, for intra and interstate transport of detainees, which is really interesting because usually a guard operates within a state, right? So it sounds like-

By nature, it's a state organization. Correct. It sounds like what they're planning to do is let's say, you know, sending, you know, a guard from Ohio to maybe LA or San Francisco or St. Louis or other places. That is very, very interesting if they're planning on doing that. Because let's say, you know, a governor of one state says,

yeah, you can use my guard, but wait a minute, where are they going? I don't want them to go to another state. So we'll, we have to keep an eye on that as well. And does that create jurisdictional issues? You know, this is uncharted waters, frankly. We don't know. This has never been done before, particularly on this scale.

And this kind of also comes in the broader project that DHS has in terms of wanting to bring in as many reinforcements as possible into immigration enforcement. So we've reported before that they have brought in several people from Treasury that work in IRS law enforcement, people from the FBI, ATF, DEA, that normally don't do immigration enforcement, but for the last several months have been, this is a part of bringing in additional people to help with that ICE mission. But, you know, at the same time, you're bringing in a lot of people, there's a lot of like mixed coordination. One of the things that, you know, Tom has been looking into as well is what governors might also facilitate their guards for this.

One of the reasons that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem came to the national stage is she mobilized her state, South Dakota's National Guard, down to Texas to help Texas construct, you know, border wall infrastructure when she was governor. And so there are some states that we might see be very willing to help with this. Again, if you're looking for large numbers of people, a good place to go is a National Guard, right? Sure. That's why they're asking for 20,000 Guard members. Because every state has a force. Right. And what DHS wants to do and the White House wants to do is have 3,000 arrests per day. That's at least triple what they have now. Okay, let's take a break. We'll have more in just a moment. On the Indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the

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the NPR app wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So as these protests have been breaking out in Los Angeles, Hemenna, how are officials in California responding to all this? Well, we're seeing local leadership really push back, particularly on any rationale to deploy the National Guard in this way. We've seen LA Mayor Karen Bass say that this kind of coordination to deploy the National Guard was not the right move. She says that it's an effort to, quote, sow chaos. Governor Gavin Newsom has said on social media that he has asked Trump to rescind the, quote, unlawful deployment. And he has indicated that the state plans

to sue the president over this. And how likely is it that this step that the president has taken of calling in the National Guard, federalizing it, is actually taking control? How likely are we to see that move beyond the state of California? I think it's highly likely, again, based on this memo we see and based on what the administration

has said, right? Yeah, I mean, we have known, and this has been widely reported for months, that the Department of Homeland Security wanted to tap into the Pentagon in this way. And now we're seeing that as recently as May 9th, there has been active communication between the agencies about how to best do this. And so, you know, I think that just because we haven't seen it yet doesn't mean that the May 9th, there has been active communication between the agencies about how to best do this. And so, you know, I think that just because we haven't seen it yet doesn't mean that the groundwork is clearly not being laid out in order to facilitate it.

And you know, there was other major immigration news this weekend on a story we've also been following. Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongfully sent to El Salvador, according to the courts, was returned to the US to face new charges. Jimena, you've been covering that case too. Just remind us, what happened to Abrego Garcia and what's happening now? So, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a man who was living in Maryland and he was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement earlier this year on a traffic stop. And he within days of being arrested and detained was deported to El Salvador on one of the

planes that took hundreds of men to that notorious prison, Ciccote. Now, this came into the limelight because he was never supposed to be deported to El Salvador. He is from El Salvador, but an immigration judge in 2019 had issued a special protection that said he could be deported, but just not to El Salvador. Where he would be in danger. Where he would be in danger. Now, this has resulted in about two months of litigation,

including a Supreme Court opinion that agreed that the Trump administration needed to facilitate and return Abrego Garcia to the United States. But the administration has really put up every reason to not saying that they can't. It's not their decision. State secrets privilege have been enacted to withhold kind of that broader process. But the attorney general has announced that he is back now. How did we get here? On Friday, we got a bit of a surprise announcement that he was in route and had landed back in

the United States. But the context of this is a little bit new. So the Department of Justice and Attorney General Pam Bondi are pursuing federal charges against him, particularly one count of conspiracy to commit alien smuggling and then a second count of committing alien smuggling, essentially alleging that between a nine-year period, he transported people without legal status between Texas and Maryland in his car. And now this indictment came down in the Middle District of Tennessee. It was filed under seal about two weeks ago.

And so we'll have to see how that entire process plays out in court. I mean, Jimena, what I'm trying to understand here is, hadn't the Trump administration essentially said, we can't get him back, but he is back. I mean, what changed in the last several weeks? So the administration is arguing that they were able to bring him back because they served El Salvador with the warrant to extradite him back into the United States to be tried and serve a full sentence if he is convicted and receives a sentence, and then he will be deported after he potentially serves a sentence. So that's- Depending on the outcome of that case.

Depending on the outcome of that case. So, that's what they're saying is what changed. I mean, there are still a lot of questions about, you know, what will happen in that case. You know, an indictment is just an indictment. It can still play out in many different ways. And we still have, you know, kind of yet to see what happens in the Maryland case as well, where they were fighting for his return. All right. We'll leave it there for today. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics. I'm Ximena Bustione. I cover immigration policy. I'm Tom Bowman. I cover the Pentagon.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Before talking to computational social scientist, Sandra Matz, I asked her to spy on me. I did some snooping around your online life yesterday night, which was extremely fun to do. Our lack of digital privacy, especially in the age of AI, and what we can do about it. I'm Manusha Zomorodi. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. When hurricanes tear through communities,

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