President Donald Trump’s deployment of soldiers to police American streets suffered an expected legal setback on Tuesday, with a federal judge saying that the recent use of the California National Guard to quell protests in Los Angeles clearly violated the law.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer concluded that Trump administration officials knew they were breaking the law as they did it, writing that they “violated the Posse Comitatus Act willfully,” referring to the law that limits the military’s involvement in domestic law enforcement.
The judge also pointed to evidence presented in court that military personnel had sketched out hard rules to abide by the laws, but still “contradicted their own training materials, which listed twelve functions that the Posse Comitatus Act bars the military from performing.”