From PBS NewsHour.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked Wednesday during testimony before a Senate subcommittee whether President Donald Trump’s deployment order of military forces to Los Angeles could be applied nationwide.
U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, noted that the publicly available order, in response to anti-immigration protests in Los Angeles, doesn’t specify locations that the National Guard and Marines would be sent.
Hegseth said the deployment order relates to the “ongoing situation in Los Angeles, which could expand to other places.”
Schatz pressed for more info on the scope of the order.
“I’m trying to figure out if you decided to do this collectively in Kansas or any other place, would you need to specify a new sort of fact pattern, or do you think this order applies to any guard anywhere, any service branch anywhere?”
Hegseth noted that there was an initial order to mobilize 2,000 National Guard troops in California, followed by a second order of another 2,000 “with a recognition that the situation there required more resources in order to support law enforcement.”
“Part of it is getting ahead of a problem,” Hegseth added, “so that if in other places, if there are other riots in places where law enforcement officers are threatened, we would have the capability to surge National Guard there if necessary."
Hegseth told lawmakers Tuesday that the some 4,000 National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines activated by the president are expected to stay in Los Angeles for 60 days. The mobilization will also cost the Defense Department roughly $134 million, said Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, Hegseth’s acting comptroller.
Hegseth, again in Wednesday’s hearing, strongly defended President Donald Trump’s militarized response to the protests over federal immigration raids in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities.
California is suing the Trump administration over the deployment, arguing there was presidential overreach. Some legal experts have questions Trump’s justification for mobilizing these forces.
On this, Hegseth said, “thankfully, in most of those states, you’d have a governor that recognizes the need for it.” In California, he added, “unfortunately, the governor wants to play politics with it.”
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