700 US Marines arrived in Los Angeles by Tuesday under executive orders from US President Donald Trump—in addition to 4,100 National Guard troops—to quell anti-ICE protests in the city, despite strong objections from California Governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and other local leaders.
The Pentagon claimed (under Congress pressure) that the deployment of the National Guard and the Marines—done without Newsom's permission—would collectively cost about $134 million.
Bryn MacDonnell, a comptroller to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who provided this figure, explained that the amount would be sourced from operations and maintenance accounts, as per an Associated Press report.
National Guard troops facing off against protesters in Los Angeles | AP
This is the fifth day of public outrage over Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy, a hardline immigration policy forcing the deportation of illegal migrants, with more than 100 protesters arrested on Monday, most of whom were reportedly non-violent.
Although state officials call the signing of executive Title 10 orders and the deployment of troops an overreaction on Trump's part, the US president remains alarmingly calm, insisting that the troops would stay on “until there's no danger”.
If the Los Angeles riots are to complete Hegseth's stated 60-day-period, the costs incurred by the US government for deploying and maintaining armed forces in the city may shoot up to the $480 million it cost in 2021, as per an Axios article citing a Bloomberg report.
The Capitol riots, which required more prolonged and expansive federal intervention, cost $480 million due to the deployment of more than 25,000 National Guard troops in Washington. Later on, 5,000 of these troops were also asked to remain in Washington as late as March, two months after the riots took place.
The US Capitol building | AP
This figure, however, excludes the millions that the government and/or taxpayers incurred in deploying Washington D.C. Police forces ($8.8 million) for the week of January 6, Capitol damage repair (almost $30 million), and other miscellaneous costs (more than $2 million). The total cost of the Capitol riots then rose up to $519 million, as per a Washington Post report.
In the current scenario at Los Angeles, two important factors that could intensify the riots are protests in other states and the invocation of an extreme emergency legislation called the Insurrection Act. The first is already underway, while the second is highly likely.
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“If there’s an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We’ll see ... But I can tell you last night was terrible, and the night before that was terrible,” Trump had told reporters on Tuesday, opening up the possibility of the Act being invoked, one that would bring military forces into the country to violently quash the protests.
L.A Mayor Bass told reporters on Tuesday that she would be phoning Trump, urging him to de-escalate the conflict that brought about “a sense of intimidation and fear that is just so unnecessary and so corrosive to our city”. This comes amid a lawsuit filed against the Trump and Hegseth by governor Newsom for the “unlawful” deployment of troops in the city.
