Appeals Court Rules Trump Unlawfully Federalized California National Guard for Los Angeles Deployment

A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that President Donald Trump acted unlawfully when he took control of about 4,000 California National Guard members and sent them into Los Angeles in June 2025 over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit voted 2-1 in the case, Newsom v. Trump, and affirmed a lower-court order that barred the deployment and directed the administration to hand command of the Guard back to the governor. The opinion, filed Oct. 23, 2026, was written by Judge Jennifer Sung, an appointee of former President Joe Biden. Judge Eric Miller, who was nominated by Trump, joined it. Judge Mark Bennett, also a Trump nominee, dissented.

What the court decided

The president had relied on a federal statute, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, which lets the federal government call state Guard troops into national service under certain emergencies. The panel examined two parts of that law and found that neither one supported the order.

On the first, which applies when the president cannot carry out federal law with “the regular forces,” the court relied on the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Trump v. Illinois. That decision said a president must first show he has legal authority to use the regular military to enforce the law and that those forces were not enough. The Ninth Circuit wrote that the administration had “not made either of the required threshold showings here.”

On the second, which covers “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” the panel concluded that California was likely to win its argument that treating the conditions in Los Angeles on June 7, 2025, as a rebellion did not reflect “a colorable assessment” within “a range of honest judgment.”

Because neither provision applied, the court said the order went beyond the president’s legal authority and “encroached on Congress’s calling forth power, in violation of the constitutional separation of powers.” The panel also found that California was likely to succeed on its Tenth Amendment claim, which it described as depending entirely on the statutory question.

Why the case was still alive

The deployment has already ended, and the administration had asked the court to dismiss its own appeal. The panel refused to do so for the appeal of the original federalization order. It said a ruling on the merits could protect the state if similar orders come in the future, that the court and the parties had already spent substantial time on the case, and that allowing a dismissal could let a party avoid an unfavorable precedent. The panel did dismiss a separate appeal over the extension of the deployment.

According to The Hill, the decision will bind future Ninth Circuit panels if Guard troops are federalized in California again. The same court had sided with the administration at an earlier stage of the case, when it temporarily paused the lower-court order.

The dissent

Judge Bennett agreed with dismissing the extension appeal but said the court should have dismissed the main appeal as well and sent the case back to the trial court. He wrote that the majority was “relying primarily on outdated briefs prepared amid a shifting legal landscape,” because the parties never fully briefed the effect of the Supreme Court’s Illinois decision. He also said he believes the Tenth Amendment claim is unlikely to succeed.

Reaction

Newsom welcomed the ruling in a statement released by his office. “Today is a crucial day for the rule of law, upholding the Constitution, and defending democracy,” he said. State Attorney General Rob Bonta brought the suit for Newsom and California.

The Hill reported that Trump’s separate National Guard deployment in Washington, D.C., which rests on a different legal authority, is still in place.