Charlie Savage and Laurel Rosenhall at NYT:
A federal appeals court on Thursday cleared the way for President Trump to keep using the National Guard to respond to immigration protests in Los Angeles, declaring that a judge in San Francisco erred last week when he ordered Mr. Trump to return control of the troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
In a unanimous, 38-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the conditions in Los Angeles were sufficient for Mr. Trump to decide that he needed to take federal control of California’s National Guard and deploy it to ensure that federal immigration laws would be enforced.
A lower-court judge had concluded that the protests were not severe enough for Mr. Trump to use a rarely-triggered law to federalize the National Guard over Mr. Newsom’s objections. But the panel, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., disagreed with the lower court.
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Supreme Court precedent “does not compel us to accept the federal government’s position that the president could federalize the National Guard based on no evidence whatsoever, and that courts would be unable to review a decision that was obviously absurd or made in bad faith,” the appeals court wrote.
But, the judges said, the violent actions of some protesters in Los Angeles had hindered immigration enforcement, and that was sufficient for the judiciary to defer to Mr. Trump’s decision to invoke the call-up statute.
The appeals court also rejected the state’s contention that the call-up order was illegal because Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent the directive to a general in charge of the National Guard, even though the statute says any such edict must go “through” the governor. The court said the general was Governor Newsom’s agent, and that was good enough.
“Even if there were a procedural violation, that would not justify the scope of relief provided by the district court’s” order stripping Mr. Trump of control of the guard, the ruling added.
