LOS ANGELES — Another 2,000 National Guard troops along with 700 Marines are headed to Los Angeles on orders from President Donald Trump, escalating a military presence local officials and Gov. Gavin Newsom don’t want and the police chief says creates logistical challenges for safely handling protests.

An initial 2,000 Guard troops ordered by Trump started arriving Sunday, which saw the most violence during three days of protests driven by anger over Trump’s stepped-up enforcement of immigration laws that critics say are breaking apart migrant families.

A protester offers a flower to Los Angeles police officers in riot gear while they attempt to clear a street in downtown Los Angeles on Monday, June 9, 2025. (AP Photo Jae Hong)

Monday’s demonstrations were far less raucous, with thousands peacefully attending a rally at City Hall and hundreds protesting outside a federal complex that includes a detention center where some immigrants are being held following workplace raids across the city.

Trump has described Los Angeles in dire terms that Mayor Karen Bass and Newsom say are nowhere close to the truth. They say he is putting public safety at risk by adding military personnel even though police say they don’t need the help.

Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said in a statement he was confident in the police department’s ability to handle large-scale demonstrations and that the Marines’ arrival without coordinating with the police department would present a “significant logistical and operational challenge” for them.

An injured protester is tended to by another during protests over the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles, Monday, June 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)

Newsom called the deployments reckless and “disrespectful to our troops” in a post on the social platform X.

“This isn’t about public safety,” Newsom said. “It’s about stroking a dangerous President’s ego.”

The protests began Friday after federal immigration authorities arrested more than 40 people across the city. The smell of smoke hung in the air downtown Monday, one day after crowds blocked a major freeway and set self-driving cars on fire as police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades.

Additional protests against immigration raids continued into the evening Monday in several other cities including San Francisco and Santa Ana, California, and Dallas and Austin, Texas.

California pushes back against presence of federal troops

California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit over the use of National Guard troops following the first deployment, telling reporters that Trump had “trampled” the state’s sovereignty.

“We don’t take lightly to the president abusing his authority and unlawfully mobilizing California National Guard troops,” Bonta said. He sought a court order declaring Trump’s use of the Guard unlawful and asking for a restraining order to halt the deployment.

Trump said the city would have been “completely obliterated” if he had not deployed the Guard.

U.S. officials said the Marines were being deployed to protect federal property and personnel, including immigration agents. A convoy of 10 to 15 buses with blacked-out windows and escorted by sheriff’s vehicles, left the base at Twentynine Palms in the desert east of Los Angeles late Monday and headed toward the city, stopping around 1 a.m. at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, around 20 miles (35 kilometers) south of downtown Los Angeles.

Despite their presence, there has been limited engagement so far between the Guard and protesters while local law enforcement implements crowd control.

Early protests remained peaceful

On Monday, thousands flooded the streets around City Hall for a union rally ahead of a hearing for arrested labor leader David Huerta, who was freed a few hours later on a $50,000 bond. Huerta’s arrest Friday while protesting immigration raids has become a rallying cry for people angry over the administration’s crackdown. He is the president of the Service Employees International Union California, which represents thousands of the state’s janitors, security officers and other workers.

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Early protests had a calm and even joyful atmosphere at times, with people dancing to live music and buoyed by Huerta’s release.

Protesters linked hands in front of a line of police officers outside the downtown federal detention center where Huerta was being held. Religious leaders joined the protesters, working with organizers at times to de-escalate moments of tension.

There was a heavy law enforcement presence in the few square blocks including the federal detention facility, while most in the immense city of some 4 million people went about their normal business on peaceful streets.

As the crowd thinned, police began pushing protesters away from the area, firing crowd-control munitions as people chanted, “Peaceful protest.” Officers became more aggressive in their tactics in the evening, occasionally surging forward to arrest protesters that got too close. At least a dozen people remaining in the busy Little Tokyo neighborhood were surrounded by police and detained.

Other protests took shape Monday across LA County. Outside a clothing warehouse, relatives of detained workers demanded at a news conference that their loved ones be released.

The family of Jacob Vasquez, 35, who was detained Friday at the warehouse, where he worked, said they had yet to receive any information about him.

“Jacob is a family man and the sole breadwinner of his household,” Vasquez’s brother, Gabriel, told the crowd. He asked that his last name not be used, fearing being targeted by authorities.

Several dozen people were arrested throughout the weekend protests. Authorities say one was detained Sunday for throwing a Molotov cocktail at police and another for ramming a motorcycle into a line of officers.

Guard deployment is a nearly unprecedented escalation

The deployment appeared to be the first time in decades that a state’s National Guard was activated without a request from its governor, a significant escalation against those who have sought to hinder the administration’s mass deportation efforts.

The last time the National Guard was activated without a governor’s permission was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

In a directive Saturday, Trump invoked a legal provision allowing him to deploy federal service members when there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Sullivan reported from Minneapolis and Baldor reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Dorany Pineda in Los Angeles, Amy Taxin in Orange County, California, Hallie Golden in Seattle, Stefanie Dazio in Berlin, Jake Offenhartz in New York, and Greg Bull in Seal Beach, California contributed to this report.

By CHRIS MEGERIAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump plans to speak at Fort Bragg on Tuesday to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army as he deploys the military in an attempt to quiet immigration protests in Los Angeles.

Fort Bragg, located near Fayetteville, North Carolina, serves as headquarters for U.S. Army Special Operations Command. Highly trained units like the Green Berets and the Rangers are based there.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll will also be at Tuesday’s event, along with service members, veterans and their families.

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Trump has promoted the Army’s anniversary as a reason to hold a military parade in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, which is also his 79th birthday. Tanks and other vehicles will roll down city streets in a reminder of how the Republican president is reshaping the armed forces after returning to the White House this year.

Trump, who sees the military as a critical tool for domestic goals, has used the recent protests in Los Angeles as an opportunity to deploy the National Guard and U.S. Marines to quell disturbances that began as protests over immigration raids.

Trump has authorized the deployment of 4,000 National Guard soldiers to the city over the objections of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. About 700 Marines were also due to formally deploy to Los Angeles.

California sued Trump over the deployment, with the state attorney general arguing that the president had “trampled” the state’s sovereignty. California leaders accused Trump of fanning protesters’ anger, leading crowds to block off a major freeway and set self-driving cars on fire.

“We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” Trump said over the weekend. “We’re not going to let this happen to our country.”

Fort Bragg has been in the middle of a cultural tug-of-war over the military. It was named after a Confederate general, then renamed to Fort Liberty two years ago.

Hegseth brought back the Bragg name but said it was being used to honor an Army paratrooper who served in World War II.

At the heart of the debate over diversity, equity and inclusion is a question: How much should the law treat a person as an individual rather than as a member of a group?

For a very long time, American law and American institutions answered that question unequivocally. People were defined primarily by the group they belonged to, and if they happened to be Black or Native American or a woman, they were going to enjoy fewer rights, fewer privileges and fewer opportunities than the people who belonged to the categories white and male.

That was — and remains — a grievous injustice. At a minimum, justice demands that a nation and its institutions cease and desist from malicious discrimination. But doesn’t justice demand more? Doesn’t it also require that a nation and its institutions actually try to provide assistance to targeted groups to help increase diversity in employment and education and help targeted groups overcome the systemic effects of centuries of discrimination?

On Thursday, the Supreme Court unanimously decided a case that was directly relevant to the latter question, and while the outcome wasn’t surprising, the court’s unanimity — and the identity of the author of the court’s opinion — certainly was.

The facts of the case

The facts of the case, Ames v. Ohio, are simple. In 2004, the Ohio Department of Youth Services hired a heterosexual woman named Marlean Ames to work as an executive secretary. By 2019, she’d worked her way up to program administrator and set her sights higher — applying for a management position in the agency’s Office of Quality and Improvement.

The department interviewed Ames for the job but decided to hire someone else, a lesbian. The department then demoted Ames and replaced her with a gay man. Believing she’d been discriminated against on the basis of her sexual orientation, she filed suit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

She lost her case in the trial court and at the court of appeals. So she appealed to the Supreme Court. She argued that the lower courts had applied a discriminatory standard to her simply because she was straight.

Ordinarily, Title VII discrimination suits are resolved through what’s called a burden-shifting framework. Initially, the plaintiff, in this case Ames, bears the burden of demonstrating a prima facie case of discrimination, providing facts “by producing enough evidence to support an inference of discriminatory motive.”

If the employee can clear that bar, the burden shifts back to the employer for it to show that it had a “legitimate nondiscriminatory reason” for its actions.

When an employer makes its case, the employee then gets a “fair opportunity” to show that the employer’s justifications were mere pretext for discrimination.

Typically, how the law operates

During my law practice, I litigated a number of Title VII cases, and let me share a typical example of how the law operates. Imagine you represent a group of Black plaintiffs who claim they were fired because of their race, and you present evidence that the last five employees who were fired were Black, even though Black employees were only a small percentage of the workforce.

The employer admits that it fired the employees, but it presents evidence that each was guilty of absenteeism; they had skipped work.

That’s game over, right? If there’s evidence employees had skipped work, then shouldn’t they lose? Not so fast. You were ready for this defense and present evidence that white employees were retained despite much worse disciplinary records, including worse records of absenteeism.

By doing so, you’ve established that absenteeism was just an excuse. The real reason for the adverse job action was racial animus.

That’s the normal rule. But in the Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit — the federal court of appeals that covers Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky — the rule was different for members of so-called majority groups.

And the 6th Circuit wasn’t alone. Four other circuits also had long-standing rules imposing heightened evidentiary requirements on majority groups.

If you were a member of a majority group — such as a straight person claiming to be the victim of sexual-orientation discrimination — you had an extra legal burden. You had to establish “background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”

The result was a two-tiered system of justice, with different legal tests dependent on whether you were a man or a woman, white or Black, gay or straight.

Ruling: All plaintiffs approach the law equally

In its ruling, the Supreme Court rejected the 6th Circuit’s test. It held that all plaintiffs approach the law equally, regardless of their group identity, and all plaintiffs have to meet the same legal burdens to win their case. There can be no extra hurdle for members of majority groups.

I wasn’t surprised by the outcome, but I was at least mildly surprised that it was unanimous. And I was definitely surprised by the author of the majority opinion — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s most liberal members.

Jackson’s words were clear. Nondiscrimination law is focused on protecting individuals. Quoting previous Supreme Court cases, she wrote, “Discriminatory preference for any group, minority or majority, is precisely and only what Congress has proscribed.” As a consequence, “Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone.”

Crucially, the court didn’t rule that Ames had been discriminated against. Instead, it sent the case back down to the lower court to be decided under the proper, equal standard.

Discrimination that’s legally suspect

Standing alone, the Ames case is relatively narrow in scope. It holds only that all employment discrimination plaintiffs have to meet the same test. Taken together with the court’s other recent cases, including most notably 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which prohibits race preferences in university admissions, the lesson is plain: Any discrimination rooted in immutable characteristics, such as race, sex or sexual orientation, will automatically be legally suspect, regardless of whether the motivation for discrimination was malign or benign.

I don’t want to overstate the degree of judicial consensus here. Jackson was in the majority in the Ames case but dissented from the court’s Harvard ruling, as did the court’s two other liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. But the cumulative effect of all the court’s precedents — unanimous and otherwise — is still quite clear.

As a result, much of the political and cultural debate around efforts to increase diversity, equity and inclusion has been decided by the courts. The precedent is settling around a statement by Chief Justice John Roberts in a 2007 case called Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But if the law is going to require individualized decisions, does that eliminate the possibility of systemic change? Does it leave minority groups permanently behind?

No, it does not. The Ames decision didn’t raise the bar for nondiscrimination cases. It just placed everyone in the same legal position. And as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in the Harvard case, schools may grant “an admissions preference to identified victims of discrimination.” It can also take into account their individual struggles with, say, income or health.

Collectively, these individualized decisions can have a systemic effect. When there has been systemic injustice, individualized assessments of resilience and achievement will have a disproportionate positive effect on marginalized communities. Systemic injustice will always have individual effects, and addressing those individual effects will ultimately result in systemic change.

As Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion in the Harvard case: “Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations.” Yes, and that means that when admissions committees (or hiring committees) consider the socioeconomic status of applicants, then that will disproportionately benefit victims of past discrimination.

At the same time, however, you can’t use skin color, sex or sexual orientation as a proxy for adversity.

A cardinal rule of the Constitution

It’s tragic that the words diversity, equity and inclusion have been caught up in the culture war. Each of those values matters, but they cannot be used as a pretext for inflicting new injustices. As Jackson affirmed in Ames, “Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs.” Any effort to combat historical injustice must comply with a cardinal rule of the Constitution: We are all equal before the law.

David French writes a column for the New York Times.

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Today is Tuesday, June 10, the 161st day of 2025. There are 204 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On June 10, 2018, the rover Opportunity sent its last message from the surface of Mars. Originally expected to serve a three-month mission, Opportunity functioned for over 14 years, traveling over 28 miles across Mars and unveiling critical discoveries about the planet’s geology.

Also on this date:

In 1692, the first execution resulting from the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts took place as Bridget Bishop was hanged.

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In 1854, the U.S. Naval Academy held its first graduation ceremony.

In 1940, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared war on France and Great Britain, formally entering Italy into World War II.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law the Equal Pay Act of 1963, aimed at eliminating wage disparities based on gender.

In 1967, six days of war in the Mideast involving Israel, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq ended as Israel and Syria accepted a United Nations-mediated ceasefire.

In 1977, James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee with six others. He was recaptured three days later.

In 1978, racehorse Affirmed, ridden by Steve Cauthen, won the 110th Belmont Stakes to claim the 11th Triple Crown. Alydar, ridden by Jorge Velasquez, finished a close second in each of the Triple Crown races.

In 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard of Meyers, California, was abducted by Phillip and Nancy Garrido; Dugard was held by the couple for 18 years before she was found by authorities.

In 2009, James von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist, opened fire in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., killing security guard Stephen T. Johns. (Von Brunn died at a North Carolina hospital in January 2010 while awaiting trial.)

In 2020, protesters pulled down a century-old statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy.

Today’s Birthdays:

Political commentator Jeff Greenfield is 82.
Actor Frankie Faison is 76.
Football Hall of Famer Dan Fouts is 74.
Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., is 72.
Actor Gina Gershon is 63.
Actor-model Elizabeth Hurley is 60.
Comedian Bill Burr is 57.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is 53.
R&B singer Faith Evans is 52.
Actor Hugh Dancy is 50.
Country musician Lee Brice is 46.
Actor Leelee Sobieski is 42.
Olympic figure skating gold medalist Tara Lipinski is 43.
Model Kate Upton is 33.
Former first daughter Sasha Obama is 24.