It was the most explosive domestic standoff of 2025, and most of America has forgotten it ever happened. On June 6, 2025, federal immigration agents launched workplace raids across Los Angeles, and the city erupted — crowds besieged the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown, cars burned, and rocks and Molotov cocktails flew at officers. The next day, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum federalizing 4,000 members of the California National Guard for 60 days “to protect federal property and personnel” — the first time since 1965 that a president had seized a state's Guard over its governor's objection. Some 700 active-duty Marines followed. Governor Gavin Newsom called it an illegal takeover and sued. On Friday, sixteen months later, that court fight finally reached its end — and Newsom won.
What happened on the streets at the time is also part of the record, and it should be stated plainly: while the Guard was deployed, the riot was brought to an end. The violence ebbed within days of the troops taking up positions around federal buildings, and on June 17, 2025, Mayor Karen Bass lifted the downtown curfew she had imposed at the height of the unrest, saying it had protected businesses and helped restore order. Los Angeles went quiet. The lawyers did not. Judge Charles Breyer blocked the deployment, a Ninth Circuit panel let the President keep control of the troops while the case ran, the Marines were pulled out in July 2025, and the legal war ground on long after the last guardsman had left the streets — until this week.
On Friday, October 23, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled 2–1 in Newsom v. Trump that the President acted unlawfully when he federalized the California Guard and deployed it to Los Angeles. The published opinion affirmed Judge Breyer's order barring the deployment and directing that control of the Guard be returned to Governor Newsom, and it held the federalization order exceeded the President's statutory authority, encroached on Congress's power to call forth the militia, and was, in the panel's words, ultra vires and unconstitutional. Because the opinion is published, it is now binding precedent for federal courts across the nine Western states of the Ninth Circuit — a standing shield for every governor in the region. Judge Jennifer Sung, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote the majority opinion. Judge Eric D. Miller, appointed by President Trump in 2019, joined it in full and added a concurrence. Judge Mark J. Bennett, a 2018 Trump appointee, dissented.
The court dismantled both legal grounds the administration had invoked under 10 U.S.C. § 12406, the statute that lets a president call a state Guard into federal service. On the first — that there was “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” in Los Angeles — the panel adopted the definition of rebellion as a violent, armed, organized, open and avowed uprising against the government as a whole, and held that the President's determination that Los Angeles met it “does not reflect a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a 'range of honest judgment.'” The majority did not pretend the unrest was peaceful: “While many individuals peacefully protested against the federal government's handling of immigration issues, there were bad actors who committed serious breaches of the peace and acts of violence,” Judge Sung wrote. The trial court's findings describe protesters who threw rocks and a Molotov cocktail, burned a vehicle, looted a gas station and clashed with officers. But the same findings record “no evidence of organized, as apart from sporadic or impromptu, violence” — and sporadic violence, the court held, is not a rebellion. “Accordingly, § 12406(2) did not authorize the President's order federalizing the California National Guard.”
On the second ground — that the President was “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws” — the panel applied the Supreme Court's decision of December 23, 2025, in the Illinois Guard case, which read “regular forces” to mean the regular U.S. military and required the government to show it could not execute the laws with that military. The government here made neither showing, the panel held. The court also rejected the administration's argument — built on the Supreme Court's 1827 decision in Martin v. Mott — that a president's emergency determination is conclusive and beyond judicial review. The President's finding is reviewable, the panel held, under a standard that remains highly deferential: the court wrote that it is “mindful that the President's range of discretion in this context is necessarily broad.” Measured even against that forgiving standard, the June 2025 order failed.
Governor Newsom, who filed the challenge with Attorney General Rob Bonta and has now beaten the administration in both the trial court and the court of appeals, claimed the ruling as a landmark for every state. “Today is a crucial day for the rule of law, upholding the Constitution, and defending democracy,” Newsom said in a statement issued by his office. “California fought back against this potential power grab, and in doing so created essential legal precedent that not only protects Californians but all Americans. California continues to stand as a first line of defense against Donald Trump's authoritarianism.”
Attorney General Bonta, whose office litigated the case, was just as direct. “Once again, the courts have rejected the Trump Administration's attempts to circumvent the law for his own political agenda,” Bonta said. “Deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles with no rhyme or reason was a clear example of federal overreach, and it will not be tolerated. When the President tramples on the Constitution and the rights of Californians, we'll fight to hold him accountable — and we will win.” The governor's office added that the rejection of the “rebellion” claim stands as a safeguard ahead of next month's elections, putting the President on notice that courts will test any future claim of emergency against the facts.
The road to Friday's ruling ran through every level of the federal courts. When the panel first heard the case, on June 19, 2025 — with the deployment live and the unrest only just ended — it sided with the President, staying Judge Breyer's injunction and finding he had likely acted within his authority. Breyer later ruled in September 2025 that the troops' use in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the law barring the military from civilian law enforcement. Then the Supreme Court changed the legal ground entirely: in the Illinois case it held the government had failed to show it was “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws,” and the California case had to be re-argued under that new test. By the end of December 2025 the administration had ended the deployment and returned control of the Guard to the state — the President announcing on December 31 that he was pulling the Guard from Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, while warning, “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form.” In January 2026, the Justice Department asked the Ninth Circuit to simply dismiss its own appeal. By a separate order issued alongside Friday's opinion, the same 2–1 panel refused, and confirmed that “the California National Guard is no longer federalized or deployed in Los Angeles.”
Judge Bennett, in dissent, argued the court should never have decided the case at all. The appeal's “unique procedural posture,” with only scant briefing on the Supreme Court's intervening Illinois decision, counseled against “reaching the difficult and important questions that the majority opinion resolves,” he wrote, invoking the principle of judicial restraint. “But the majority insists on pressing forward, relying primarily on outdated briefs prepared amid a shifting legal landscape,” Bennett wrote. He maintained that the majority applied the wrong legal standard, that it should not have reached California's Tenth Amendment claim, and that “[t]he federal government has the power to press state National Guardsmen into federal service.” He would also have granted the government's request to drop its own appeal.
What the ruling changes, and what it does not, is now a matter of record. It does not touch ICE's own arrest and detention authority, and nothing in it stops the administration from sending more federal agents into any city. What it fences off — across California and the eight other states of the Ninth Circuit — is the path President Trump used in June 2025: taking a governor's Guard troops under § 12406 to shield immigration operations, unless a president can point to a genuine rebellion under the court's demanding definition or show that the regular military cannot lawfully do the job. The panel pointedly left open the separate question of the Insurrection Act, a different statute that expressly authorizes the forces it calls up and that was not the basis of the Los Angeles order. The administration can still ask the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case before an eleven-judge panel, or petition the Supreme Court directly — and Judge Bennett's dissent, with its road map of the majority's procedural and legal vulnerabilities, is the natural brief for that fight. As of publication, neither the White House nor the Justice Department had issued a public response to Friday's ruling. But the case Gavin Newsom filed in the heat of the June 2025 riots is decided, and on every question the panel reached, the governor of California won.
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