President Donald Trump said "Los Angeles was safe and sound for the last two nights" on Thursday morning. By evening, Marines were positioned on the outskirts of the city.
Around 200 Marines armed with rifles, riot control equipment, gas masks, roughly 20 hours of civil disturbance training and the ability to temporarily detain civilians arrived in the country's second-largest city after days of public anticipation. They departed a naval base roughly 30 miles south of LA on Thursday night bound for the Wilshire Federal Building near Beverly Hills.
Their stated mission -- along with 4,000 National Guard troops who were called up -- is to protect federal functions, personnel and property in the city amid protests that began last week against the Trump administration's aggressive immigration raids across Southern California. Their deployment in the face of public unrest on American streets marks a precarious use of Marines for domestic purposes not seen in more than 30 years.
Read Next: The Army Parade Poses Potential Pitfalls like a Tank Breakdown. Soldiers Say They're Prepared.
The troops deployed to LA are not allowed to conduct law enforcement functions but, under the authorities they've been granted to temporarily detain citizens and accompany federal law enforcement, legal experts and former top service officials have said that is a distinction with little real difference, blurring the line between forces meant to police the public and those that fight the country's wars.
"To me, you can get into a real mess in this because you have the wrong kind of force for the wrong mission," retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, told Military.com on Thursday. "It's not something that they are ready to do."
But "we do what we're told," he added. "We don't reject missions that come down. It's just in our nature, so they're going to go out, they're going to take this on, they're going to do the best they can. They'll maximize the training time they have, and I am sure they're going to hope it never happens again."
Trump's decision to deploy troops to the LA area has placed the military squarely in the midst of a political battle between the commander in chief and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who -- along with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, local officials and law enforcement -- fervently opposed the move.
Over the last week, protests were largely confined to a small section of downtown LA, a portion of which has been on an overnight curfew since Tuesday. Some protesters did become violent, prompting arrests for assaults on police officers and at least one case of attempted murder, according to the LA Police Department.
Newsom filed an emergency motion in court Monday to block Trump from federalizing the California National Guard over his objections, claiming that the presence of troops in LA has only worsened the situation. By Thursday, a federal judge ordered Trump to return control of the Guard to the governor, which was met with a swift appeal from the administration that resulted in the Guard remaining in the president's control for now.
But the court proceedings have yet to address the use of active-duty Marines on LA streets, now a reality fraught with legal and physical hazards placed on the shoulders of those sent into whatever fray, real or oversold, awaits them in the city.
U.S. Northern Command said as early as Wednesday that the Marines could be deployed within 48 hours after the completion of additional civil disturbance training, suggesting the condition for their entry into the city was based on how soon they finished training rather than in response to the size and scope of unrest at any given moment.
"The conditions necessary to employ the Marines in the protection of federal personnel, property, and functions include the completion of necessary training and coordination to ensure a seamless and safe handover with the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team," a U.S. Army North spokesperson said.
U.S. Army North scheduled a media engagement late in the week between reporters and the Task Force 51 commander, Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, who oversees the military operations in LA.
Sherman told reporters Friday that the troops on the ground "will not participate in law enforcement activities, saying, "They'll be focused on protecting federal law enforcement personnel." The commander added that no soldiers or Marines had detained anyone, walking back a comment he had made earlier this week stating otherwise.
Marines are allowed to temporarily detain protesters if they feel threatened before handing them over to law enforcement. But when asked what constitutes a threat, a spokesperson for the combatant command overseeing the operation said that "each person will end up having to make their own individual determination on whether or not the threat that they're facing meets" approved response criteria.
"What you're taking is a young private first class, and you're putting it all on him," Zinni said in response to the statement, adding that junior Marines will likely have seasoned leaders around them.
But any ambiguity around the rules of force is laden with risk: "That's a recipe for disaster," Zinni said.
Training Never Meant for the US
On Monday afternoon, 700 Marines loaded on to white buses and departed an arid base east of LA to Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, an installation in Orange County where they embarked on a roughly 20-hour training package that included the use of batons, riot shields, reactions to civil unrest, martial arts, and the standing rules for the use of force, or SRUF, which are essentially criteria for domestic military escalation or deescalation operations.
Those standing rules prohibit service members from firing warning shots and allow self-defense; however, the specific parameters of the SRUF are unclear.
"I am not concerned. I have great faith in my Marines and their junior leaders and their more senior leaders to execute the lawful tasks that they're given," Gen. Eric Smith, the commandant of the Marine Corps, said Tuesday on Capitol Hill in response to Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal's concerns about Marines using lethal force in LA.
The contingent is part of 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, an infantry unit out of Twentynine Palms, California, known as the "War Dogs." Prior to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announcing their "high alert" status last weekend, they were not trained in the use of nonlethal force and crowd control tactics.
To those who have been part of Marine infantry units before or who understand that such a unit's primary mission is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy, that was unsurprising. But the use of nonlethal force for active-duty military is not without precedent; it's just not intended for domestic applications.
Following the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991, the United Nations attempted to address the conflict through humanitarian relief, but troops assigned to support the mission soon found themselves contending with crowds of desperate people clamoring onto trucks loaded with aid.
"It struck me that when we get into situations like that, if we're on peacekeeping operations, humanitarian operations, sometimes non-combatant evacuation operations, we can get into these situations," said Zinni, who was the director of operations for the Unified Task Force in Somalia. "Without the capability of controlling crowds with nonlethal capabilities, we're sort of stuck."
He put in a request for tools to help control the crowds, but "the only thing that we received was pepper spray" from the Air Force. As the commanding general of I Marine Expeditionary Force, he trained and equipped his Marines with nonlethal means and returned to Somalia in 1995 to facilitate the withdrawal of U.N. troops from the country.
Zinni soon became an outspoken advocate for integrating official nonlethal training into the military, arguing that it broadened the range of options troops had at their disposal when faced with an increasingly varied mission set, though the idea was controversial at the time.
He testified before Congress about nonlethal means and, by 1996, the Department of Defense sanctioned an official program. But the extent to which infantry units across the Marine Corps routinely train on those tactics decades later is minimal and "is certainly not for domestic law enforcement," Zinni said.
The Corps has an official nonlethal weapons course, and Marine Expeditionary Units readying for non-combatant evacuations will train on those tactics, but it is doubtful that the 700 Marines deployed to Los Angeles -- ones contending with "limited instructors" and having to source gear from "across the Marines in Southern California," according to a defense official -- have mastered skills they've been given roughly 20 hours to adopt.
Northern Command said that the battalion "had just completed a pre-deployment workup," but did not specify when it occurred, if it was specific to this mission, or whether the Marines had been diverted from a different deployment. Zinni was concerned that the move was taking away from "their normal infantry training," adding that "no one's talking about the training time that's taken away."
When asked whether he ever envisioned the nonlethal force program he helped champion being used domestically, he said "no, not at all," and that "it was never intended for domestic use. We never saw ourselves in that kind of law enforcement role."
How LA's Rodney King Riots Differed
The most recent deployment of Marines to LA has inevitably been compared to the last time they descended on the city more than 30 years ago. As the saying goes, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes -- and in this case, the comparisons run thin.
One of most glaring differences between the two deployments is that when President George H.W. Bush deployed Marines to the city in 1992, he invoked the Insurrection Act after the governor of California requested help in response to deadly riots. Widespread violence broke out after four white police officers were acquitted of brutally beating a Black man named Rodney King.
As of midday Friday and as Marines are on the streets of LA, Trump had not invoked the centuries-old law. The Insurrection Act allows a president to deploy troops within the U.S. under specific circumstances, such as "any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy" that "hinders the execution of the laws."
It is the principal exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, another law that bars active-duty service members from conducting law enforcement activities domestically.
There had been no reported deaths by Friday afternoon that were directly connected to the protests in LA over the past week, but there have been hundreds of arrests, including for vandalism and assaults. The 1992 riots included multiple shootouts, dozens of deaths, thousands injured and more than 12,000 arrests made in roughly the same time period and across more parts of the city.
While video of police beating King and LA destruction ran on every network in the early 1990s, 21st-century media coverage has been riddled with misinformation and had complicated the situation even before the Marines entered the city limits.
Videos of Marine helicopters flying around the city, supposedly there to quell unrest, were actually taken weeks before during the Los Angeles Fleet Week celebration. Popular meme and social media pages posted videos of tactical vehicles and service members, claiming they were Marines days before the service members actually left the naval base they were training at.
The accessibility of information on the internet caused the Marine Corps to remove 2/7's official webpage out of concern about harassment of leadership and their families, and the ability to communicate during emergencies after unit lines were flooded with calls, Military.com reported Wednesday. Meanwhile, networks blasted aerial footage of Marines practicing crowd control on an athletic field across TVs, phones and computer screens.
At least one image of a Marine taking a mirror selfie went viral on social media, with the caption, "I hope the protesters realize Marines don't play games, especially the ones from 29," referencing the base in California. That Marine wasn't in the same unit as Marines in LA, let alone the same time zone as California, and the selfie drew online ire, ridicule from fellow Marines and media attention.
Amid the differences, some similarities ring true, or at least are widely remembered as cautionary tales going into situations like this.
In one now-infamous incident from 1992, Marines reportedly accompanied local law enforcement to a domestic disturbance when two shotgun blasts exploded from the residence. One of the police officers yelled, "cover me!" in an effort to get the Marines prepared to respond, but instead they apparently opened fire on the house, demonstrating the risk of miscommunication between two organizations that don't typically work together.
A spokesperson for the LAPD declined to comment on whether the Marines or Task Force 51, the overall unit for the mission that includes thousands of members of the National Guard, had coordinated with them. An Army North spokesperson said Friday that the Department of Homeland Security, the agency overseeing immigration raids, was in charge of communications with local authorities.
It is unclear what will happen with Marines in the city in the next few hours, days, weeks or even months. Hegseth said that troops will be there for 60 days, and the Pentagon's acting comptroller, Bryn MacDonnell, estimated that the mission would cost $134 million.
What is clear is that whatever does happen on the mission -- good or bad -- will have a lasting impression on the Corps, the Marines who participated in it, and the public's perception of the military.
"These Marines aren't going into Beirut, they're not going into Fallujah -- they're going home," said retired Col. Craig Tucker, who once commanded 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, himself, recalling that many of his Marines were from across the state.
While the geographic makeup of the Marines on the streets of LA now is unknown, Tucker said he worries that those deployed close to home are being put in a position where they "become the military unit that beat up their neighbors," and beyond that, their fellow Americans.
"The damage to the Marine Corps would be severe," he said. "If the Marines are used as a force against American citizens for some manufactured reason, it would be severe."
Related: Hegseth Won't Say He'd Follow Court Order on LA Troop Deployment
