Trump’s National Guard Troops Are Questioning Their Mission in L.A.

When the California National Guard rolled into Los Angeles to respond to devastating wildfires in January, Southern Californians largely hailed the troops as heroes. Celebrities thanked them for their service in Pacific Palisades. Suburban homeowners competed to chat them up at traffic checkpoints in Altadena.

Seven months later, much of that good will is gone.

Protesters jeer the troops as they guard federal office buildings. Commuters curse the behemoth convoys clogging freeways. Family members grill members with questions about whether they really have to obey federal orders.

The level of public and private scorn appears to have taken a toll on the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles that President Trump announced last month, citing protests over immigration raids. Interviews with nearly two dozen people — including soldiers and officers as well as officials and civilians who have worked closely with the troops — show that many members of the Guard are questioning the mission. The deployment’s initial orders to quell scattered protests have given way to legally disputed assignments backing up federal immigration agents.

“They gave Disneyland tickets to the people who worked in the wildfires,” one soldier said. “Nobody’s handing out Disneyland tickets now.”

Six members of the Guard — including infantrymen, officers and two officials in leadership roles — spoke of low morale and deep concern that the deployment may hurt recruitment for the state-based military force for years to come. Those who were interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity, because military orders bar Guard personnel from publicly discussing the federal deployment and they feared retribution for talking to the media.

All but one of the six expressed reservations about the deployment. Several said they had raised objections themselves or knew someone who objected, either because they did not want to be involved in immigration crackdowns or felt the Trump administration had put them on the streets for what they described as a “fake mission.”

The Justice Department’s civil rights chief has asked a federal judge to sentence a Louisville police officer convicted in the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor to one day in jail, a stunning reversal of Biden-era efforts to address racial disparities in local law enforcement.

Last year, a federal jury in Kentucky convicted Brett Hankison, the officer, of one count of violating Ms. Taylor’s civil rights by discharging several shots through Ms. Taylor’s window during a drug raid that went awry.

He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced next week.

On Wednesday, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked the judge in the case to sentence Mr. Hankison to time he had already served, in addition to one day in prison and three years of supervised release.

In the filing, Ms. Dhillon suggested the prosecution was excessive, arguing that the Biden Justice Department had secured a conviction against Mr. Hankison after he had been acquitted on state charges and his first federal trial ended in mistrial.

“In this case, two federal trials were ultimately necessary to obtain a unanimous verdict of guilt,” Ms. Dhillon wrote — adding that Mr. Hankison, a felon who was fired from his job five years ago, had already paid a substantial penalty for his actions.

“The jury’s verdict will almost certainly ensure that Defendant Hankison never serves as a law enforcement officer again and will also likely ensure that he never legally possesses a firearm again,” she wrote.

Such requests are typically filed by career prosecutors who worked on the case. Wednesday’s filing was signed by Ms. Dillon, a political appointee who is a veteran Republican Party activist with close ties to President Trump, and one of her deputies.

The Trump administration is pushing to conduct an on-site inspection of the Federal Reserve as President Trump and his top aides continue to pressure Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, to lower interest rates or resign.

Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, told reporters on Thursday that administration officials wanted to visit the Fed to observe the renovations at its Washington headquarters. The administration has asserted that Mr. Powell has mismanaged the project, resulting in a cost overrun, and it has demanded that he provide answers about the project to the Office of Management and Budget.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he is scrutinizing Mr. Powell because of the Fed’s approach to interest rates. The central bank has left borrowing costs unchanged for months as it looks to ensure that the president’s policies, particularly his steep and expanding global tariffs, do not cause inflation to worsen.

Hoping to pressure Mr. Powell into reducing rates, Mr. Trump has privately discussed firing him before his term expires in May 2026. On Tuesday night, Mr. Trump showed House Republicans a draft of a letter firing Mr. Powell and asked lawmakers if he should send it.

But the president may face significant legal obstacles if he proceeds. The Fed is independent of the White House, and a recent Supreme Court decision underscored the limited ability of the president to fire the Fed chair.

The primary grounds on which Mr. Trump could legally remove Mr. Powell would be if the chair engaged in some sort of egregious behavior, a standard that many experts say the White House has not met.

For weeks, Israel and Syria have engaged in secret back-channel talks, searching for a diplomatic resolution to decades of tensions, mainly over territory captured by Israel from Syria during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

The Israeli news media has been awash with optimistic predictions of a limited nonaggression pact, or even a landmark peace deal between the Jewish state and the former jihadists who seized control of Damascus last December.

Israel’s brazen strikes this week on Syrian government forces and infrastructure, including in the capital, Damascus, have highlighted the premature nature of such expectations in such a fluid geopolitical context. It has also exemplified how Israel, still traumatized by Hamas’s surprise attack in October 2023 but buoyed by its more recent successes against Hezbollah and Iran, is now more likely to use force to pre-emptively address perceived threats — even if it derails diplomatic efforts to achieve the same goal.

“It seems very discordant,” said Itamar Rabinovich, an Israeli historian of Syria who led Israel’s negotiations with Syria during the 1990s. “It runs against the effort to negotiate.”

The strikes reflect Israel’s post-2023 military doctrine, which combines, Mr. Rabinovich said, “a very strange mixture of paranoia following Oct. 7 and a sense of power following the success in Lebanon and in Iran. And the result is this preference for using force rather than diplomacy.”

Israel’s intervention in Syria, just as talks between the two were gaining momentum, prompted some exasperation in Washington, according to one senior U.S. official. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments, said that Damascus had been trying de-escalate tensions but that Israel seemed intent on striking regardless. Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, described the Syria-Israel tensions as a “misunderstanding” and said that the United States had helped broker an agreement between all parties involved in the clashes.