In a scathing legal rebuke, President Donald Trump has been slapped with yet another courtroom defeat—this time over his deployment of military forces to Los Angeles. A federal judge ruled that Trump’s decision to send troops into the city in response to protests was not only overreaching but flat-out illegal.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer didn’t mince words. He ruled that Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act—a law that bars the federal government from using the military as domestic law enforcement.
“The evidence at trial established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles,” Judge Breyer wrote in the ruling.
The judge made it clear: this was not a gray area. Trump’s deployment of 4,000 National Guard members and 700 active-duty U.S. Marines in June—reportedly in response to protests sparked by his administration’s immigration raids—crossed a constitutional line.
Breyer flat-out accused the administration of transforming the military into a personal security detail for Trump.
“He was using the military as a ‘national police force with the president as its chief,’” Breyer stated, echoing concerns voiced by civil liberties groups and legal scholars throughout the summer.
The court ruling prohibits Trump and then-Secretary of Veterans Affairs Pete Hegseth from using troops for a wide range of domestic policing actions, including “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”
That’s a laundry list of law enforcement functions that, according to the judge, should never have been assigned to armed military personnel in an American city in the first place.
While the judge gave the administration until Friday to appeal before the ruling takes effect, the damage is done—both legally and politically. The decision reinforces growing criticism that Trump often views the military not as an institution to protect the country, but as a tool to enforce his own political will.
