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A US appeals court has temporarily blocked a ruling that ordered Donald Trump to return control of California’s National Guard to the state’s governor, intensifying the legal wrangling over the US president’s anti-immigration crackdown.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Thursday night halted a lower court’s ruling that had just hours earlier temporarily barred the federal government from deploying National Guard troops to Los Angeles.
The appellate court paused a decision that threatened to dent Trump’s efforts to clamp down on immigration and quash protests by federalising the National Guard in California. It will hold a hearing on June 17 to decide whether the lower court’s ruling should stand.
Charles Breyer, the San Francisco district court judge who had issued the shortlived bar on federalising the National Guard, said the US president’s “actions were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution”, which defines the concept of federalism.
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California who has forcefully opposed Trump’s orders, told reporters after the appeals court decision that he was “confident” Breyer’s ruling would stand.
He had previously warned that the president’s “action to turn the military against its own citizens threatened our democracy and moved us dangerously close to authoritarianism”.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case stems from a lawsuit filed by California on Monday that alleged Trump’s order to mobilise the National Guard was illegal and unconstitutional. It stressed that orders to federalise such troops should be issued through state governors, as per the statute Trump cited.
Breyer said the government had not notified Newsom prior to issuing its order.
During a hearing earlier on Thursday, Breyer questioned the government’s argument that the president had complete discretion and that courts therefore could not weigh in on the issue.
“How is that any different from what a monarchist does?” the judge, brother of former liberal Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, told a packed courtroom. That is “not where we live . . . this country was founded in response to a monarch”.
The “president is of course limited to his authority”, added Breyer, a former Watergate prosecutor. “That’s the difference between a constitutional government and King George.”
The Trump administration argued that California was seeking “an extraordinary, unprecedented and dangerous court order” that would interfere with the federal government’s “ability to carry out operations”.
The government also mobilised hundreds of US Marines to Los Angeles, but Breyer did not rule on this move.
His order came hours after California and other states on Thursday filed a separate lawsuit against the Trump administration, escalating the clash between Newsom and the president.
The plaintiffs alleged that a resolution blocking California’s ban on new petrol-powered cars by 2035 was illegal and unconstitutional.
The resolution signed by Trump on Thursday morning revokes a waiver that former president Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency gave to California to let the state implement extremely strict emissions standards and require all new vehicle sales be electric by 2035. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this lawsuit.
Additional reporting by Jamie Smyth in New York and Lauren Fedor in Washington
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