California Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing back and taking legal action against the Trump administration.
On Monday, June 9, Newsom said he plans to sue the administration for sending National Guard troops into Los Angeles amid a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
“This is exactly what Donald Trump wanted,” the governor tweeted. “He flamed the fires and illegally acted to federalize the National Guard. The order he signed doesn’t just apply to CA. It will allow him to go into ANY STATE and do the same thing. We’re suing him.”
Related: BET ‘Monitoring’ Anti-ICE Protests, Fires, Clashes in LA Near Site of BET Awards
A defiant Newsom also called out Trump administration border czar Tom Homan for suggesting the governor could be arrested over protests in L.A.
“Come after me. Arrest me. Let’s just get it over with, tough guy,” Newsom said in an interview Sunday with NBC, which he later posted on the X platform.
“The fear, the horror — [who] the hell is this guy,” Newsom added. “I don’t give a damn. But I care about this community.”
Trump’s border czar is threatening to arrest me for speaking out.
Come and get me, tough guy.
I don’t give a damn.
It won’t stop me from standing up for California.pic.twitter.com/DvVQljAgir
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 9, 2025
The back-and-forth began when Homan, Trump’s former acting ICE director and now border czar, told MSNBC that Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass could face felony charges for interfering with federal immigration enforcement.
“You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job,” Homan claimed.
Trump also weighed in on his Truth Social platform, and resorted to calling California leaders names.
“Governor Gavin Newscum and ‘Mayor’ Bass should apologize to the people of Los Angeles for the absolutely horrible job that they have done, and this now includes the ongoing L.A. riots.”
According to federal officials, more than 100 people were detained in the Los Angeles area during immigration enforcement operations in the past few days. ICE said it’s taken gang members, drug traffickers and people with a “history of assault, cruelty to children, domestic violence, robbery, and smuggling” into custody.
Additional arrests were made during protests, including that of a prominent union leader accused of impeding law enforcement.
Trump authorized the deployment of 2,000 National Guard members, invoking a federal law that allows troop mobilization in response to what he called “a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
It marked the first time since 1965 that a president has activated the National Guard without a governor’s consent, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
In a follow-up interview Monday, Homan defended the enforcement actions, especially in sanctuary cities like Los Angeles.
“We’re going to enforce immigration law,” he said. “When we can’t get the bad guy in the safety and security of a jail… we got to go to the street and find them.”
“And when we find them many times they are with others, others that are in the United States illegally. May not be a criminal target but guess what, if ICE is there to arrest that bad guy and other illegal aliens are there, we are going to arrest them. That’s what sanctuary cities get,” he continued.
The protests began in Los Angeles in response to large-scale immigration sweeps that began on June 6, and the National Guard presence has only fueled more tension and fear among some residents.
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