Appeals Court Tells Trump California National Guard Members Are No Longer His To Use And Abuse

Given the recent Supreme Court ruling that (surprisingly!) said Trump did not have the executive power to commandeer National Guard troops to aid and abet law enforcement/deportation efforts in Illinois, this ruling [PDF] from the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court was, perhaps, inevitable.

If it’s illegal to do it in Illinois, it’s equally illegal in California (as well as Oregon and any other state the administration has targeted). It may still be legal in Washington DC, but it’s probably only a matter of time before that deployment of National Guard troops (especially those from other states) is declared equally illegal.

The extremely short order by the Appeals Court vacates the stay it had placed on the lower court’s ruling in favor of the rule of law (which is, of course, a ruling against the Trump administration), allowing it to take force. It only runs two pages, but it does contain at least one surprising element: capitulation by Trump’s DOJ.

On December 23, 2025, this court issued an order directing defendants to file a supplemental brief “explaining why the partial administrative stay should not be lifted” in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Illinois, No. 25A443 (U.S. Dec. 23, 2025).

Defendants filed their supplemental brief on December 30, 2025. Defendants represented that “[w]ithout prejudice as to any other arguments defendants may present, defendants do not oppose lifting of the partial administrative stay and hereby respectfully withdraw their motion for a stay pending appeal.”

Trump, meanwhile, continues to operate in his usual fashion, sporting the sort of reckless “never say die” attitude that usually results in death by misadventure.

Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he was, for now, abandoning his efforts to deploy the Guard in Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Ore. But he suggested that the administration may deploy them again the future.

“We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again — Only a question of time,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.

There’s the patented Trump bravado — something that runs on a clean blend of bigotry and ignorance. Because this loss came at the hands of SCOTUS, administration officials are unable to deploy their usual “activist judge” bitching since the activist judges in the Supreme Court are mostly MAGA-cooked.

And they can’t claim this is the “liberal” Ninth Circuit going rogue, since its ruling is based entirely on the precedent set by the nation’s top court. All that’s left to do is the sort of social media sour grapes shit Trump is known for. At least until the administration decides to break every pane of glass in the Overton Window and just start turning every “Democrat” city into the Kent State campus.

But until that happens, the threats of bringing “liberal” states to heel by commandeering their National Guard are as empty as the heads of the administration’s most powerful members.