LA protests: judge declines to issue emergency order limiting powers of marines and national guard – live

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday evening, Donald Trump just denied that he had accused California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, of paying agitators to turn the protests in the city violent.

Asked about the accusation, Trump denied that he had made it. “No, I don’t say the governor and the mayor; I said, somebody’s paying them, I think” the president said.

But Trump clearly did make that accusation in his speech at Fort Bragg a few hours earlier. Here is video of him doing so:

Just before 4pm local time in Los Angeles on Tuesday, protesters spilled on to the 101 freeway in downtown, video from an ABC7 news helicopter showed.

About 100 protesters, several of whom were live-streaming video on TikTik, including a man in a Mexican wrestler style mask who calls himself Pink P, blocked both sides of the freeway before being quickly cleared from the major artery by the California Highways Patrol within minutes.

A Los Angeles Times reporter, James Queally, captured video of the scene from the ground.

Back on the quieter side of the federal building block, a young man from South Central Los Angeles was selling a selection of flags to demonstrators, including a large printed mashup of the US and Mexican flags.

Mexican flags have long been a part of pro-immigrant protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and have also long sparked rightwing criticism, even though some Mexican-Americans say they are a symbol of pride in their heritage families and no different from Irish Americans carrying flags on Saint Patrick’s Day.

Trump has taken the criticism of flags a step further, saying earlier today that LA had seen “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.

The Mexican/American fusion flags cost $20, and he had already sold two, the young man said, declining to give his name. He said he wasn’t sure who had made the flags, but thought they were probably made in China.

While most Angelenos are going about their normal days today, a few have shown up at the one protest block downtown to express their frustration at Trump’s actions.

Among them was Nora, 45, from Los Angeles, who came to demonstrate with her young niece.

Earlier this afternoon, only a tiny number of protesters stood in front of the Federal Building at 300 North Los Angeles, watched by California national guard members sent in by Donald Trump over the objections of California’s governor, a move California officials are arguing was illegal.

A woman carrying an upside down American flag strode up and down in front of the guard members, warning them that they were going to have to make a choice. “Make the right choice!” she called.

It’s a sunny, normal day in downtown Los Angeles – except for one square block, where some weird things are happening, mostly involving the police.

That one square block near Little Tokyo, bordered by Temple, North Los Angeles, East Aliso, and Alameda streets, is the location of several federal buildings that were the site of protests this weekend, including the Metropolitan detention center.

Early this afternoon, a handful of bored-looking California national guard members were leaning on their riot shields in front of the heavily graffitied federal building, with 25 or so media and protesters milling around in front of them.

A federal district court judge declined California’s request to issue an immediate temporary restraining order that would bar Marines and National Guard troops dispatched to Los Angeles from doing anything other than guardian federal buildings.

The judge, Charles Breyer, instead scheduled a hearing for Thursday on the state’s request for a restraining order.

A note on the San Francisco judge’s website explains the order of events:

In the case of Newsom v Trump (25-4870), the opposition to the motion for a temporary restraining order is due by 11:00 A.M. on Wednesday, June 11, 2025. Plaintiffs may file a response to that opposition by 9:00 A.M. on Thursday, June 12, 2025. The Court will hold a hearing on Plaintiffs’ motion in open court at 1:30 P.M. on Thursday, June 12, 2025. Any party wishing to appear by Zoom may do so.

Earlier on Tuesday, California governor Gavin Newsom and attorney general Rob Bonta on Tuesday had asked the court to issue an emergency restraining order by 1pm local time.

In a coincidence that the president will no doubt soon amplify, the judge, who was assigned by a random selection process to the case, is the younger brother of retired supreme court justice Stephen Breyer.

Charles Breyer is a former Watergate prosecutor, and a graduate of Harvard, who was first nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 1997.

At one point in Trump’s recently completed speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, during which he repeatedly attacked Democratic political rivals in a way that used to be off-limits for the commander-in-chief of the avowedly non-partisan US military, the president told soldiers that he was giving them all a raise.

He mockingly suggested that they could, as patriots, say that would not accept the additional pay and ask that it be given back to the federal government instead.

“Now, you don’t have to take this if you don’t want,” Trump said. Then he imagined the soldiers using his own crude nickname for California’s Democratic governor. “You could be great patriots, say, ‘I don’t want a raise, I will not accept it, let it go back into our country. Let’s give it to Gavin Newscum, so he can waste it in Los Angeles.’”

Donald Trump just wrapped up his deeply partisan, political speech to the avowedly non-partisan US army and leaves to the campaign staple YMCA.

During his remarks to troops at Fort Bragg, Trump also spread a wild conspiracy theory that should not be overlooked, claiming something for which there is no evidence at all: that California’s Democratic elected officials have paid protesters to attack federal officers.

“In Los Angeles, the governor of California, the mayor of Los Angeles, they’re incompetent and they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists. They’re engaged in this willful attempt to nullify federal law, and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders,” the president said without reference to reality.

The president also called Los Angeles “a trash heap” and claimed, falsely, that “entire neighborhoods under control” of criminals.

“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,” Trump said.

After repeating a series of deeply partisan claims about his 2024 election victory, Donald Trump turned to the announced subject of the speech, the founding of the US army 250 years ago.

Trump then went on to narrate highlights of the army’s history, including its role in defeating the British in the war of 1812.

Trump told the tale of Francis Scott Key, whose poem about a battle in that war was later transformed into the current US national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. Trump then greeted Major Kyle Key, a descendant of the poet. Trump also praised the major’s looks, suggesting that was the result of “great genetics”. (Trump has long held and celebrated eugenicist views.)

The last time Trump attempted to discuss this history, at a Fourth of July speech in Washington in 2019, he memorably struggled to read the rain-streaked teleprompter, and made the improbable claims that the Continental Army was “named after” George Washington in 1775, and that, during the War of 1812, “Our army manned the amperth, ranned the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.”

As his increasingly partisan speech to the military at Fort Bragg continues, Trump referenced a viral conspiracy theory that pallets of bricks were left out for protesters to hurl at police officers in Los Angeles. “They came in with bricks,” Trump said.

This claim was made repeatedly in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

In June 2020, the week after Floyd was murdered, the Trump White House boosted the viral conspiracy theory by releasing a compilation of video clips posted on social media by people who believed, wrongly, that piles of bricks they came across had been planted there by “antifa and professional anarchists” to inspire violence at protests.

Within hours, after reporters showed that those clips showed bricks from construction projects that were in process before the protests started, the White House deleted the video from its official social media accounts, without apology or explanation, but only after it had been viewed more than a million times on Twitter alone.

Our colleague Blake Montgomery has looked more closely at the rampant spread of misinformation about what’s happening in Los Angeles that is spreading on social media platforms controlled by pro-Trump billionaires.

In a deeply partisan speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Donald Trump just made the baseless claim that the protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles are being led by paid “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.

Trump goaded the crowd of soldiers listening to his speech at the base to boo and jeer first the former president, Joe Biden, and then the governor of California, Gavin Newsom.

He moved on to recite a series of conspiracy theories he has aired at political rallies, attacking Biden as mentally incompetent, and then boasted about what he called the great success of his fiscal policies.

Trump told the assembled crowd that the leaders of three Gulf monarchies had told him on his recent visit that the United States was “the hottest” country in the world, thanks to his policies – which have caused chaos in the financial markets.

Trump announces that he is not done changing the names of military bases back to honor confederates, saying that the next changes will be to restore the names of: Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort AP Hill, and Fort Robert E Lee.

Donald Trump just began his remarks by boasting that he had restored the name Fort Bragg to the military base in North Carolina. When he complained about the base having been renamed Fort Liberty by the Biden administration, to stop honoring a confederate general who fought to preserve slavery in the US civil war, the assembled soldiers behind him jeered the decision of the previous commander-in-chief.

Trump enters, first to the strains of the presidential anthem, Hail to the Chief, and then to his walk-on music at political rallies, the country star Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.