Donald Trump has said his administration will “liberate” Los Angeles, as he defended the deployment of US Marines to tackle protests against his immigration crackdown in the city, saying “anarchy will not stand”.
The president was speaking a day after his government sent 700 Marines to Los Angeles in a move critics have denounced as presidential over-reach and a clear misuse of executive power.
Speaking to soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina on Tuesday, Trump described the unrest in California’s largest city as a “full-blown assault on peace, on public order and on national sovereignty, carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags”.