Gavin Newsom should get out of Trump’s way in LA | Opinion
“Donald Trump has manufactured a crisis and is inflaming conditions.” So says California Gov. Gavin Newsom after an X poster sent him video of his constituents setting police cars on fire and throwing rocks.
What Donald Trump is doing is enforcing the law. By sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents into Los Angeles to arrest undocumented immigrants and then sending in the National Guard to restore order after riots erupted, Trump is doing nothing more than his job, something the Biden administration and Newsom himself largely abdicated.
Joe Biden’s border policies – somewhere between an open invitation and abject surrender before a late-term reversal – allowed waves of unwelcome migrants to enter the United States, millions of them, making it necessary for a tough surge of enforcement around the country to restore some respect for our borders. Gavin Newsom’s sanctuary state policies made sure that plenty of that enforcement would need to take place in California.
If Newsom didn’t want to see flash bang grenades deployed in Los Angeles restaurant kitchens and heavily armed federal agents in donut shops and Home Depots, maybe he shouldn’t have spent billions of taxpayer dollars making California a more welcoming home for people who broke the law.
The biggest move he made was to spend the state into a deficit offering Medical (California’s version of Medicaid) to those without legal status. It is a decision he has tried to partially reverse as the budget impact became clear.
More appalling was a law passed by California’s Democrat-dominated legislature to make undocumented immigrants eligible for six-figure housing down payment assistance or making poor citizens complete with the undocumented for scarce work-study opportunities at state universities and community colleges. You know, the places of education where citizens of El Salvador and Mexico already got cheaper tuition than those interloper immigrants from Missouri or Idaho.
Newsom says “Commandeering a state’s National Guard without consulting the Governor of that state is illegal and immoral.” That’s not exactly right. It wasn’t “illegal and immoral” for Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to use commandeered National Guard units to enforce civil rights laws in 1965. And it isn’t now for the threat to American sovereignty caused by Biden’s feckless border policy and the violent reaction to efforts to rectify it, dangers just as grave as Alabama civil rights scofflaws were a half century ago. In both cases, protests threatened to derail the enforcement of federal law.
And while Newsom says the National Guard is an unneeded provocation, the LA police chief has had second thoughts. “Looking at the violence today, I think we’ve got to make a reassessment,” Jim McDonnell, told The New York Times.
He’s right. The Guard hasn’t engaged with protestors yet, but they are an important backstop to the police who face not only local riots but the threat that others with broader anti-American agendas will come to take advantage of the chaos caused by the original timorous response from California law enforcement.
It is unclear what message rioters were sending by setting multiple Waymo taxis on fire in downtown LA, but it is surely clear that unmanned transportation isn’t exactly a symbol of Trump administration overreach. Maybe the violent protestors have more in mind than a confrontation over immigration enforcement. That was certainly the case in the violent riots over the murder of George Floyd that killed nine and cost billions.
I have my problems with the Trump approach to immigration. Afghan patriots who served our military in trying to tame that terrorist-infested land deserve our thanks, not the boot. The U.S. has a long history of welcoming those who flee communism. Why that doesn’t apply to Venezuelans, I don’t know. Kicking out either group seems kinda dumb. And the policy of refusing to allow China to send full-fair paying students to our schools to subsidize American students’ education doesn’t make much fiscal sense to me.
But if America is to return to its roots as a land built on exploiting the hard work, innovations and and entrepreneurialism of wave after wave of migrants, we have to have a reckoning over the lawlessness of the Biden years. It might get ugly in some cases, but in trying his best to kick out undocumented immigrants, Trump is only doing what we elected him for. Gavin Newsom should get out of the way.
This story was originally published June 9, 2025 at 1:11 PM with the headline "Gavin Newsom should get out of Trump’s way in LA | Opinion."
