Pentagon Deploys 700 Active-Duty Marines to the Streets of Los Angeles

On June 9, 2025, U.S. Northern Command announced that roughly 700 Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, based at Twentynine Palms, California, were deploying to Los Angeles. They were folded into Task Force 51, the Army North contingency command led by Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, alongside about 2,100 federalized National Guard soldiers in Title 10 status. The stated mission was to provide continuous protection of federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area. NORTHCOM said task force personnel had been trained in de-escalation, crowd control and the standing rules for the use of force.

Sending active-duty combat troops into an American city in response to civil unrest is a step the executive branch has taken only rarely, and it sharpened the legal question at the center of the Los Angeles dispute: the Posse Comitatus Act generally bars the use of federal armed forces for civilian law enforcement, and the boundary between guarding federal property and policing a protest is not self-defining.

The deployment proceeded while California's challenge to the underlying federalization was pending; the Ninth Circuit allowed the federalized force to remain in place on June 19, 2025.