“INTIMIDATION”
But Republicans lined up behind Trump to dismiss the pushback.
“I have no concern about that at all,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, accusing Newsom of “an inability or unwillingness to do what is necessary”.
Demonstrators told AFP the purpose of the troops did not appear to be to keep order.
“I think it’s an intimidation tactic,” Thomas Henning said.
“These protests have been peaceful. There’s no one trying to do any sort of damage right now and yet you have the National Guard with loaded magazines and large guns standing around trying to intimidate Americans from exercising our First Amendment rights.”
Marshall Goldberg, 78, told AFP that deploying Guardsmen made him feel “so offended.”
“We hate what they’ve done with the undocumented workers, but this is moving it to another level of taking away the right to protest and the right to just peaceably assemble,” he said.
Raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in other US cities have triggered small-scale protests in recent months, but the Los Angeles unrest is the biggest and most sustained against Trump’s immigration policies so far.
A CBS News poll taken before the Los Angeles protests showed a slight majority of Americans still approved of the crackdown.
