Hundreds of US Marines were expected in Los Angeles on Tuesday as President Donald Trump again mused about declaring a full-blown “insurrection” following protests in a small part of the city.The 700 elite troops will join around 4,000 National Guard soldiers, a stunning militarization of the sprawling city, which is home to millions of foreign-born and Latino residents.Small-scale and largely peaceful demonstrations have taken place over four days, with sporadic but isolated violence erupting as protests dispersed and masked individuals confronted police.Streets were quiet on Tuesday as the Little Tokyo neighborhood cleaned up after overnight clashes that saw an unruly mob shooting fireworks at officers in riot gear, who fired back with volleys of tear gas.Several properties — including the Apple Store — had been looted.Protests that erupted Friday were sparked by a sudden intensification last week of Trump’s signature campaign to find and deport undocumented migrants, who he claims have mounted an “invasion” of the United States.Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Tuesday stressed the majority of protesters have been peaceful — and that local law enforcement could easily cope.”The unrest that has happened (is) a few blocks within the downtown area,” she said. “It is not all of downtown, and it is not all of the city. Unfortunately, the visuals make it seem as though our entire city is in flames, and it is not the case.”She also slammed the deployment of active-duty soldiers, which the Pentagon said would cost taxpayers $134 million.”What are the Marines going to do when they get here? That’s a good question. I have no idea,” she said.- ‘Behaving like a tyrant’ -Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom filed an emergency motion asking a court for a restraining order to prevent troops hitting the streets.”Sending trained warfighters onto the streets is unprecedented and threatens the very core of our democracy,” he said. “Donald Trump is behaving like a tyrant, not a President. We ask the court to immediately block these unlawful actions.”The filing to the US District Court in Northern California asking for an injunction by 1:00 pm local time (2000 GMT), names Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and charges they have violated the US Constitution.Trump has branded the LA protesters “professional agitators and insurrectionists.”Asked again if he intended to invoke the Insurrection Act, a mechanism that would allow active duty military to employ lethal force against Americans, he said: “If there’s an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We’ll see.”In an extraordinary move, Trump has also called for Newsom’s arrest, while the president’s ultra-loyal speaker in the House of Representatives, Republican Mike Johnson, on Tuesday declared the California governor “ought to be tarred and feathered.”- ‘Incredibly rare’ -Trump’s use of the military is an “incredibly rare” move for a US president, Rachel VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and a former lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force, told AFP.The National Guard — a fully equipped reserve armed forces — is usually controlled by state governors and used typically on US soil in response to natural disasters.The Guard has not been deployed by a president over the objections of a state governor since 1965, at the height of the civil rights movement.Deployment of regular troops, such as the Marines, on US soil is even more unusual.US law largely prevents the use of the military as a policing force — absent an insurrection. Speculation is growing that Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act giving him a free hand to use regular troops for law enforcement around the country.Trump “is trying to use emergency declarations to justify bringing in first the National Guard and then mobilizing Marines,” law professor Frank Bowman, at the University of Missouri, told AFP.Bowman said the “suspicion” is that Trump is aiming to provoke the kind of all-out crisis that would then justify extreme measures. “That kind of spectacle feeds the notion that there is a genuine emergency and, you know, a genuine uprising against the lawful authorities, and that allows him to begin to use even more force.”

US President Donald Trump has invoked emergency powers to deploy National Guard troops and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles to quell protests against federal immigration raids.Here is a look at some of the legal questions surrounding the move.- Is it legal? -Trump relied on a seldom-used law known as Title 10 to send an initial 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles. He has since ordered another 2,000 Guard members and 700 Marines to the Californian city.National Guard troops are normally mobilized by a state governor and used domestically to respond to natural disasters such as floods or wildfires.Trump, exceptionally, sent the troops to Los Angeles against the wishes of California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.The last time a president defied a state governor to deploy the Guard was in 1965, when president Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights protestors.Title 10 permits National Guard federalization in times of “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” but does not give the troops the powers to perform domestic law enforcement duties.The troops deployed to Los Angeles have been used so far only to provide security around federal buildings in the second-largest US city.Newsom has accused Trump of exceeding his authority by deploying the troops without his green light and has filed suit in federal court seeking to have the deployment declared unlawful.- Insurrection Act -Trump would need to invoke the rarely-used Insurrection Act of 1807 to allow troops to expand their current role in Los Angeles, according to legal analysts.The Insurrection Act gives a president the authority to deploy the military domestically to perform law enforcement duties such as conducting searches and making arrests.The Insurrection Act was most recently invoked by president George H.W. Bush at the request of the then California governor to help put down riots in Los Angeles in 1992 that followed the acquittal of police officers involved in the beating of a Black motorist, Rodney King.It was used by president Johnson in 1968 to quell riots that broke out in the nation’s capital and other cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.- Posse Comitatus -Using the military domestically to conduct law enforcement activities is normally barred by another law, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.The Insurrection Act lets a president sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act to suppress “armed rebellion” or “domestic violence” and use the armed forces “as he considers necessary” to enforce the law.William Banks, a professor emeritus of law at Syracuse University, said the Insurrection Act and waiving of Posse Comitatus has been infrequent because of a long US history of “leaving law enforcement to civilians.””To sum up the conditions where (the Insurrection Act) may be used, it’s for when all hell breaks loose,” said Banks, co-author of the book “Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military.””When state and local officials are unable to control civil affairs without federal involvement, the federal government may intervene,” he told AFP. “It’s normally been requested by the state officials, and the president simply agrees and decides to send a federal force.”Newsom has said repeatedly that there was no need for the deployment of the National Guard and Marines and that the Los Angeles Police Department was fully capable of handling the unrest.  

A senior US health official on Tuesday admitted President Donald Trump’s administration had gone too far in slashing biomedical research grants worth billions of dollars, and said efforts were underway to restore some of the funding.Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), made the remarks during a Senate committee hearing examining both recent cuts to his agency and deeper reductions proposed by the White House in next year’s budget. Bhattachartya said he had created an appeals process for scientists and laboratories whose research was impacted, and that the NIH had already “reversed many” of the cuts.”I didn’t take this job to terminate grants,” said the physician and health economist who left a professorship at Stanford University to join the Trump administration.”I took this job to make sure that we do the research that advances the health needs of the American people.”The hearing came a day after more than 60 NIH employees sent an open letter to Bhattacharya condemning policies they said undermined the agency’s mission and the health of Americans.They dubbed it the “Bethesda Declaration” — a nod both to the NIH’s suburban Washington headquarters and to Bhattacharya’s role as a prominent signatory of the 2020 “Great Barrington Declaration,” which opposed Covid lockdowns.Since Trump’s January 20 inauguration, the NIH has terminated 2,100 research grants totaling around $9.5 billion and $2.6 billion in contracts, according to an independent database called Grant Watch.Affected projects include studies on gender, the health effects of global warming, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer.Trump has launched a sweeping overhaul of the US scientific establishment early in his second term — cutting billions in funding, attacking universities, and overseeing mass layoffs of scientists across federal agencies.