President Trump has called in the National Guard to address the anti-ICE protestors who continue to wreak havoc in Los Angeles.
Democrats have pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement receiving this support in what Governor Ron DeSantis says is a backwards situation.
"It's odd that you will have people who are in violation of our laws being in this country illegally, and they are protesting and even taking it beyond that," he recently told Fox News.
"The federal government's actually just trying to enforce the law, and they're even burning American flags, which is the country they supposedly want to stay in – yet they're waving flags of foreign countries, which is the countries they refuse to return to," DeSantis summarized. "This is really just an upside-down world."
He suggested places like California, a sanctuary state, have developed "a sense of entitlement to just ignore federal immigration laws."
"They put illegal aliens on healthcare programs, give them a driver's license," the governor noted. "They basically have welcomed people to come into California illegally over many, many years, and that was all in violation of federal law."
He said President Trump and Tom Homan are doing what they were elected to do, which is enforce the laws of the land.
"I think that they're right to be able to have National Guard protect these federal law enforcement personnel who are coming under attack, protect the installations that are coming under attack," he argued. "There is a point where the mayor of Los Angeles fails, the governor fails, so the president not only has a right, he has a duty to protect the American people when the state and local officials won't do that."
Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has accused Trump of trying to "manufacture a crisis" in his state. Other state Democrats have criticized the administration's response to the protests as "inflammatory," "reckless," and escalatory, and Kamala Harris, a former senator from California and state attorney general, has said the deployment is meant to "provoke chaos."
She accused the Trump administration of aiming to "spread panic and division" through its large-scale immigration raids.
"This administration's actions are not about public safety — they're about stoking fear," Harris, a Los Angeles resident, wrote in a statement.
