Appeals Court Says L.A. Wasn't in Rebellion When Trump Sent the Guard

A 2-1 Ninth Circuit panel upheld an order blocking the deployment of 4,000 California National Guard troops in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles wasn't in a state of rebellion when President Trump took command of California's National Guard last year, a split federal appeals court ruled Friday, ABC7 reported.

The 2-1 decision by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer's order that blocked the deployment of 4,000 Guard members to the L.A. area and gave control back to Gov. Gavin Newsom. The troops left in December, so the ruling doesn't move a single soldier. What it changes is the law.

The panel reversed its own earlier call. In June 2025, Judges Mark J. Bennett, Eric D. Miller and Jennifer Sung paused Breyer's order and let the Guard stay, the Los Angeles Times reported. This time Miller, a Trump appointee, sided with Sung, a Biden appointee, while Bennett, also a Trump pick, dissented. In between came the Supreme Court. On Dec. 23, in a fight over sending troops into Chicago, the justices read the law to allow a Guard call-up only when the regular military can't get the job done.

That left the administration's other theory, that the immigration protests amounted to a rebellion. Breyer's findings, as laid out by the court-watching newsletter @ashtalks, put 300 to 400 protesters in Paramount and Compton on June 7, 2025. Officers there faced rocks and fireworks from some in the crowd, plus one Molotov cocktail and mangoes. The Sheriff's Department sent 200 deputies, local police had things under control by 4 a.m., and about 11 people were arrested.

The majority defined a rebellion as an armed, organized, violent uprising against the government as a whole, and found Trump hadn't shown anything close to that. Calling conditions in Los Angeles on June 7, 2025, a rebellion "does not reflect a colorable assessment within a range of honest judgment," Sung wrote for the majority.

The administration's defense has rested on the protests against the immigration raids, which it says turned violent downtown and in other parts of the region. In January, with the troops gone, the Justice Department asked to drop its own appeal. The panel refused, California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office said. Bennett would have let it go. He argued his colleagues had let through a kind of lawsuit the Supreme Court has limited: "In today's majority opinion, that Hail Mary pass scores," he wrote, @ashtalks reported. The Justice Department didn't immediately respond to ABC7 after business hours.

Newsom's office cast the ruling as a warning ahead of next month's elections. The governor's office said Trump "is on notice that the courts will swat down any false claims of emergencies and rebellions." Bonta, whose office filed the suit, called the deployment federal overreach. The Times reported that the ruling appeared to shut down the administration's effort to keep the option of calling up California's troops again under the same statute.

It isn't the end of the case. The panel held only that California is likely to win, and no court has entered a final judgment on the June 2025 takeover. Breyer's separate injunction barring troops from doing police work under the Posse Comitatus Act is still on appeal, which the 9th Circuit is holding in abeyance, Bonta's office said.

The administration's remaining moves are to ask the full 9th Circuit for a fresh hearing or to take the fight to the Supreme Court. Bennett's dissent named those same two exits. Without a ruling from one of them, he warned, the opinion binds every three-judge panel of the court that comes after.

Source: abc7.com, retrieved October 25, 2026. Other sources: yahoo.com, ashtalks.substack.com, State of California, State of California (2), krcrtv.com.