WASHINGTON (TNND) — Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass criticized President Donald Trump and said he was “creating lawfare within” major cities.
Earlier this week, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke to hundreds of senior officials in Quantico, Virginia, where they discussed future plans of the military.
“I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon,” Trump said during his speech.
The Trump administration has been sending the National Guard to major cities to help crack down on crime, as well as to guard Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities.
The cities Trump has sent the National Guard to include Memphis, Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon.
In June, the administration sent the National Guard to Los Angeles during immigration raids.
During a CNN interview, Bass criticized Trump’s remarks at Quantico.
“The statements that were made to the military yesterday, acknowledging that we are going to experiment with our cities and use our cities as training grounds for warfare, what that is saying is that the president of the United States wants to turn the U.S. military against the American people,” Bass said.
“You are talking about creating warfare within cities, and again, I will point out, there’s something these cities have in common,” she later added.
Three months after Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles, a federal judge ruled the action was unlawful.
“The White House tried to invade the second largest city in the country,” Bass said in a statement after the ruling. “That was illegal. Los Angeles will not buckle and we will not break. We will not be divided and we will not be defeated.”