California Governor Gavin Newsom said he would sue US President Donald Trump for deploying the National Guard to quell protests in Los Angeles without his consent, accusing the president of acting like a “dictator.”
It marks the first time that federal troops have been deployed on domestic soil against the wishes of state authorities since the 1960s. Police officers clashed with crowds Sunday, the third day of protests sparked by border authorities’ raids on suspected undocumented migrants.
Trump is testing the boundaries of executive power, the Financial Times’ Washington correspondent wrote: He used a rarely invoked law originally written to suppress rebellions against the federal government to deploy the troops, with legal scholars arguing the moves are in breach of the US Constitution.