20 States Sue Over Federal Effort to Deny Migrants Access to Safety Net

The newly confirmed director, Scott Kupor, told reporters on Monday that he expected staffing to drop to 2,000, by the end of the year.

Mr. Kupor said the agency was cutting its contractors by half as well, going from about 1,200 at the beginning of the year to 600 by the end of December.

The personnel office has been issuing guidance to agencies for months about how to cut staff and consolidate or eliminate programs. Agencies offered incentives for people to resign voluntarily, which has shifted the calculation of how many employees the government would have to lay off to achieve President Trump’s goal of shrinking the size of the federal work force.

Some 788 employees at the personnel office took advantage of the incentives to retire early or resign and get paid through Sept. 30, while 152 others resigned without participating in any of the incentive programs. The agency laid off an additional 129 employees.

The personnel office did not say what other agencies have planned, but the threat of layoffs has been looming since the earliest days of the administration. The Department of Health and Human Services laid off 10,000 employees this spring. And on July 11, the State Department laid off more than 1,000 employees after the Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s block on mass government firings.

Most agencies have not announced layoff plans, and the projected number of reductions has changed with thousands of employees leaving the government voluntarily. The Department of Veterans Affairs recently said it would not have to make layoffs because so many people decided to leave.

Mr. Trump has used tariffs aggressively to shape trade policy. In justifying the tariff on Brazil, he cited factors including what he called an unfair trade relationship and a “witch hunt” trial against Brazil’s former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally.

Johanna Foods’ complaint argues that such factors do not meet the legal threshold for invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives the president broad authority to regulate international economic transactions during a declared national emergency.

“There is no unusual or extraordinary threat,” the company said in the complaint, pointing to the lack of a formal executive order or declaration of national emergency. The complaint also said that the letter to Mr. Lula did not constitute an executive order.

The complaint said the tariffs would increase Johanna Foods’ annual import costs by $68 million and lead to retail price hikes of up to 25 percent. Johanna Beverage Co., a related company based in Washington State, is also listed as a plaintiff.

Orange juice prices are already high. In June, the price of frozen orange juice concentrate was 5.5 percent higher than in June 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of orange juice, supplies well over half of the fresh orange juice consumed in the United States, according to Agriculture Department figures. Brazil is also a major exporter of coffee to the United States.

The threatened tariff comes amid an extraordinary pressure campaign against Brazil as it prosecutes Mr. Bolsonaro on charges of attempting a coup to overturn his loss in the 2022 election.

Mr. Lula said in a recent statement that Brazil would not be “tutored” by anyone and would retaliate against tariffs on Brazilian imports, which will take effect on Aug. 1 unless a trade deal is reached.

A federal appeals court is set to hear arguments later this month on a case challenging Mr. Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs, but has allowed the administration to enforce global tariffs for now.

“We should put everything out there and let the people decide,” Mr. Johnson had said on “The Benny Show” when asked about the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Epstein. “I agree with the sentiment that we need to — we need to put it out there.”

The Rules Committee, a powerful panel controlled by the speaker, had even approved a measure that would bring to the floor a resolution calling for the disclosures, though Republicans gave no timetable for voting on it.

Less than a week later, the speaker reverted to his more familiar posture of deferring to the president.

“We need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing,” Mr. Johnson told reporters at the Capitol on Monday when asked about holding a House vote on releasing the investigative files.

“If further congressional action is necessary or appropriate, then we’ll look at that,” Mr. Johnson said. But he added that there would be no vote on the Epstein files before the House departs on Thursday for a six-week summer break, saying, “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, because we agree with the president.”

Mr. Johnson was able to obtain his gavel and has been able to keep it because of his unshakable loyalty to Mr. Trump. His initial call for the release of the Epstein files when Mr. Trump was asking for the opposite underscored how the case had created an unusual and deep split between the president and his supporters.

But the speaker’s reversal suggests that Mr. Trump’s efforts to quell the unrest in his political base over the matter may be succeeding.

Mr. Johnson implied that his concerns about transparency had been alleviated, for now, by Mr. Trump’s move to authorize Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the public release of grand jury testimony from the prosecution of Mr. Epstein. That is a far cry from the breadth of information the president’s supporters have demanded, yet it appeared to be enough to persuade the speaker.

“There is no daylight between the House Republicans, the House and the president on maximum transparency,” Mr. Johnson said on Monday. “He has asked the attorney general to request the grand jury files of the court; all of that is in process.”

It remains to be seen whether the president will be able to appease his supporters by selectively releasing material. But Mr. Johnson’s quick turnaround indicated that he intends to slow walk, or stymie, a floor vote that could potentially damage Mr. Trump.

Still, Mr. Johnson cannot control all of his members, some of whom are still channeling the angry base and have joined a long-shot bipartisan push to force a vote on the matter within weeks.

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote on social media on Monday. “If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back. Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

The release on Monday, with no prior notice, came at a time when Mr. Trump and White House officials have sought to divert attention from right-wing backlash demanding the release of files related to the death of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump administration officials said the King assassination documents include notes on the leads pursued by investigators, interviews with people who knew his killer, James Earl Ray, and previously unreleased details of interactions with foreign intelligence services during the manhunt for Mr. Ray.

A lone audio file released on Monday includes part of a law enforcement interview with Jerry Ray, one of James Earl Ray’s siblings. In a statement, officials said the published documents had “never been digitized and sat collecting dust in facilities across the federal government for decades.”

Many of the pages have been rendered almost illegible by time and the digitizing process. There were random and wide-ranging accounts of the investigation and manhunt, including hundreds of news clippings, tips from the public, accounts of Mr. Ray’s forays into dance classes and locksmith school, and his fondness for aliases drawn from James Bond novels.

David Garrow, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning King biography as well as a book about the F.B.I.’s spying campaign on him, said his initial review led him to conclude that there was little of public interest in the files, much of which had already been disclosed. “I saw nothing that struck me as new,” he said.

In 2019, Mr. Garrow published an article that recounted claims he had found in F.B.I. documents released in relation to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those claims include accounts of Dr. King witnessing an alleged rape in 1964 in a Washington hotel room where he had been staying.

It is unclear from the documents, which do not appear to be included in the current tranche, who is making those claims. Mr. Garrow was criticized by some historians for elevating incendiary assertions that were part of an F.B.I. smear campaign, without corroborating evidence.

The F.B.I. wiretaps and other surveillance were part of an effort to uncover damaging material on Dr. King, which the agency hoped to leverage in its campaign to derail the civil rights movement. Tapes and transcripts from that surveillance are part of what remains under seal, though summaries and other related material had been released previously. A federal judge last month denied a Justice Department request to unseal the surveillance records two years early.

Dr. King had a well-documented history of extramarital relationships. Still, some experts and Dr. King’s family have expressed doubts about the veracity of some of the contents of those previously released documents, particularly when it comes to the more provocative claims about aspects of Dr. King’s romantic and sexual life.

Those details, they said, could be more reflective of official efforts to undermine the civil rights leader’s reputation than of reality.

“You’ve got to read this carefully and don’t take it at face value,” said Larry J. Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, who was reviewing the new documents on Monday with his own team of researchers.

“I’m skeptical of anything I read from F.B.I. files about M.L.K.,” he said, adding that he suspected that agents inflated or manufactured material to please J. Edgar Hoover, the agency’s longtime director. “He wanted dirt on M.LK. and his movements and his associates.”

Dr. King’s surviving children, Martin III and Bernice, argued in a statement on Monday that their father had been “relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign.” The children beseeched researchers and the general public to view all of the material from the government’s files in the context of their father’s contributions to American society.

“We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint and respect for our family’s continuing grief,” they said. Trump administration officials have been in contact with Dr. King’s family, but it remains unclear if his relatives were given the right to request redactions of the newly released material.

In a news release announcing the document upload, the administration quoted Alveda King, Dr. King’s niece and a high-profile supporter of Mr. Trump, who praised the government for providing transparency. “The declassification and release of these documents are a historic step towards the truth that the American people deserve,” she said.

As a candidate last year, Mr. Trump vowed to release files related to President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, and the 1968 murders of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King. The Kennedy documents, released in March, contained little new information about the assassination itself.

Talya Minsberg and Campbell Robertson contributed reporting. Research was contributed by Mitch Smith, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Eduardo Medina, Audra D. S. Burch, Tim Arango, Kurt Streeter, Pooja Salhotra, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Daniel Victor.

Mr. Trump said that the drawing and letter were fake and put intense pressure on The Journal not to publish the article. The day after its publication, he sued The Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones; its parent company, News Corp; Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp; Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls News Corp; and two Journal reporters.

“Thirteen diverse outlets will participate in the press pool to cover the President’s trip to Scotland,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Monday. “Due to The Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the 13 outlets on board.”

A Wall Street Journal spokeswoman declined to comment. Last week, Dow Jones defended its reporting in a statement: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association denounced the barring of The Journal from the press pool, saying in a statement on Monday, “This attempt by the White House to punish a media outlet whose coverage it does not like is deeply troubling, and it defies the First Amendment.”

The press pool is a group of journalists from various outlets who travel with the president and act as the eyes and ears of the broader White House press corps. The Trump administration has exerted considerable pressure on the press pool, including taking over the role of deciding which publications could participate in the pool from the Correspondents’ Association.

The White House had previously barred The Associated Press from the press pool because it did not abide by Mr. Trump’s name change of the Gulf of Mexico.

Mr. Trump even at one point posted a video compilation of 25 wacky and incredible stunts, such as a fake video of a woman catching a cobra midstrike with her bare hand.

“One year ago our Country was DEAD, with almost no hope of revival,” he wrote on his Truth Social site on Sunday, the six month anniversary of his second term. “Today the USA is the ‘hottest’ and most respected Country anywhere in the World. Happy Anniversary!!!”

If the scattered posts, which continued into Monday, were an attempt to distract from the outcry over his administration’s handling of the files, it did not appear to be working. Lawmakers continued to clamor for the release of more information.

“79% of Americans support releasing the Epstein files, but only 16 members of Congress have sponsored the legislation to do so,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, wrote Sunday on X. “After 7 legislative days, I’ll be able to collect signatures to force a vote on my bill to release all the files.”

Mr. Trump was friendly for nearly 15 years with Jeffrey Epstein, the multimillionaire financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Their relationship is now under scrutiny after the Trump administration reversed its promise to release files tied to the sex trafficking investigation into Mr. Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. Ms. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of conspiring with Mr. Epstein to sexually exploit and abuse underage girls.

Mr. Epstein had many connections to rich and powerful people that both the right and the left suspect of being involved in the financier’s criminality. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi released some materials, including flight logs from Mr. Epstein’s private jets, but she held back others, including what officials described as child sexual abuse material.

On Friday, facing increased political pressure, the Justice Department followed a directive from Mr. Trump, asking a federal judge in Manhattan to unseal grand jury testimony from the prosecution of Mr. Epstein.

But judges rarely agree to make such materials public, and the unsealing effort could take months. Even if the testimony becomes public, the materials being sought are most likely only a small part of the evidence collected in the investigation and may not satisfy his critics.

On Monday, Kristi Noem, the U.S. homeland security secretary, said during a news conference in New York that a second person, Cristian Aybar Berroa, had been detained in connection with the attack. Ms. Noem said that both men were undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic, and police officials had said that Mr. Mora Nunez was wanted in connection with other violent crimes.

“When I look at what Mayor Adams has done to New York City, it breaks my heart to see the families that have suffered because of his policies,” Ms. Noem said. She accused Mr. Adams and mayors from other Democratic cities of “protecting criminals who go out and murder, rape, rob.”

Thomas Homan, President Trump’s top border adviser, said that federal officials planned to ramp up immigrant detentions in New York and cities with so-called sanctuary policies, which usually prevent local law enforcement officers from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Mr. Homan had made the threat before, but it has since been buttressed by an infusion of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement efforts as part of Mr. Trump’s recently passed domestic policy law.

“Sanctuary cities are now our priority,” Mr. Homan said, adding that federal agents would “flood the zone.”

During a separate news conference, Mr. Adams, a Democrat who has criticized the city’s sanctuary laws, was asked about Ms. Noem’s comments, and he said that he was “extremely angry” about the shooting. Mr. Adams, who is running for re-election in November, blamed the court system and state bail laws.

Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner, has said there was no indication that the officer, whom the police have not named, had been targeted because he worked for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. He is expected to recover from his injuries.

The city’s sanctuary laws, most of which were passed in 2014 when Bill de Blasio was mayor, strictly limit communications and cooperation between the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and city agencies, including the Police Department and the Department of Corrections.

Federal immigration officials have been especially frustrated by restrictions on whom the city will transfer from city jails to ICE custody. ICE routinely requests that local jails across the country transfer immigrants who are detained for crimes to federal custody so that they can be deported.

For ICE, the transfers are an easy way to apprehend undocumented immigrants the agency deems dangerous. But Democratic leaders in sanctuary cities such as New York have argued that the transfers lead to the deportation of people who have been accused but not convicted of crimes, and that localities should not be in the business of enforcing federal immigration laws.

In 2014, New York’s Democrat-led City Council passed laws to bar ICE from the city’s largest jail complex, on Rikers Island, and to sharply limit how jails and the police comply with transfer requests from ICE, which are known as detainer requests. Under the laws, a city agency will honor an ICE detainer request only if it is accompanied by a warrant signed by a judge and involves someone convicted of one of about 170 serious crimes, including rape and murder.

The laws led city agencies to stop honoring most ICE detainer requests, largely ending the practice of transferring undocumented immigrants to ICE custody in New York City, except in certain cases.

The Department of Homeland Security said that Mr. Aybar Berroa, the second man who was arrested in connection with Saturday’s shooting, entered the country illegally in June 2022 and was ordered deported by an immigration judge in January 2023. The agency said that Mr. Aybar Berroa had previously been arrested in New York on charges of reckless endangerment and larceny and that an ICE detainer for him had been ignored by the Adams administration.

City Hall did not immediately respond to questions about whether a detainer request had been issued for Mr. Aybar Berroa. But city officials reiterated on Monday that the city would transfer people to ICE only if the agency provided a judicial warrant, adding that holding people in jail beyond their release date to allow ICE to pick them up was unconstitutional and could put the city at risk of litigation.

Last year, as crimes committed by migrants received intense news coverage, Mr. Adams became one of the few Democrats in New York to speak out against the sanctuary laws. He argued that the city’s inability to work with ICE threatened public safety, and he proposed changing the laws, but was resoundingly rejected by the City Council.

Mr. Adams began establishing a close relationship with top Trump officials, including Mr. Homan, to find areas of collaboration on immigration issues as he hoped that the Trump administration would drop federal corruption charges against him.

Unable to change the sanctuary laws without the City Council’s buy-in, the Adams administration issued an executive order to allow ICE back onto Rikers Island, a priority of Mr. Homan’s. But the order was temporarily blocked by a state judge after the City Council sued, frustrating the mayor and Mr. Homan.

On Monday, Mr. Homan said that ICE would deploy more agents across the city — exactly the approach that sanctuary cities don’t want, he said — because the agency could not access Rikers.

“We’ll have more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy,” Mr. Homan said, adding, “If we can’t arrest that bad guy safely and securely in the county jail, we’ll arrest him in the community.”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

The states said the changes had already caused significant disruption and that providers could struggle to verify the citizenship status of all recipients. They also said the administration’s actions could result in the “collapse of some of the nation’s most vital public programs” and cause some citizens to be denied benefits if they lack government-issued identification.

“These programs work because they are open, accessible and grounded in compassion,” Ms. James said in a statement. “Now, the federal government is pulling that foundation out from under us overnight, jeopardizing cancer screenings, early childhood education, primary care and so much more.”

White House officials said that many Americans rely on government assistance to get back on their feet.

“When illegal aliens exploit these resources, it is at the expense of Americans in desperate need of them,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “President Trump was elected based on his promise to put Americans first, and that’s exactly what this administration is committed to doing.”

The Trump administration moved this month to expand the number of programs that qualify as federal public benefits, effectively limiting unauthorized immigrants’ access to those programs.

The Department of Health and Human Services said it would no longer allow undocumented immigrants to benefit from community behavioral health clinics or programs that provide support for mental health and substance abuse. The Education Department said it would end subsidies for undocumented immigrants enrolled in career, technical and adult education programs. And the Labor Department said it would restrict unauthorized immigrants from receiving work force development grants.

Unauthorized immigrants generally do not qualify for federal benefits. They are not eligible for Social Security or food stamps, for instance. Hospitals, though, are required to provide emergency care regardless of a patient’s immigration status, for which they can receive reimbursements through Medicaid. Some states have also set up their own programs to provide certain benefits to undocumented immigrants.

In New York, community health centers and family planning clinics could close if they struggle to verify patients’ immigration status and lose federal funding as a result, state officials said. They also said that Head Start providers have already warned that they might not be able to screen people’s immigration status.

The attorneys general argued that the administration acted unlawfully by issuing the changes without following the required rule-making process. They also contend that the administration failed to consider the “devastating impacts” the new mandates would have on states.

The suit was also brought by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

President Trump has repeatedly said that federal benefits should be reserved for American citizens, rather than “illegal aliens.” This month, Mr. Trump signed a sweeping domestic policy bill that included measures restricting federal benefits for certain immigrants. Immigrants who are legally authorized to live in the United States, but are not green card holders or citizens, will generally no longer qualify for Medicare, food stamps or subsidized health insurance on marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act.

Some of the changes would also affect U.S. citizens whose parents are undocumented. The law would prevent citizen children from benefiting from the child tax credit if neither parent has a Social Security number. Previously, citizen children were eligible for the benefit, even if their parents did not have Social Security numbers.

The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, framed the pullout as the natural closure of a successful military response that was needed to quell civil unrest in the nation’s second-largest city. A Defense Department official said the Marines were expected to complete their withdrawal by as soon as Tuesday.

“With stability returning to Los Angeles, the secretary has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: Lawlessness will not be tolerated,” Mr. Parnell said Monday in a statement, referring to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law. We’re deeply grateful for their service, and for the strength and professionalism they brought to this mission.”

Democratic leaders in California have accused the Trump administration of provoking the protests by sending masked federal agents to carwashes and other sites to detain immigrants, and then using the subsequent public outrage over the raids as a pretext for military action. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles has compared the deployment to an “armed occupation,” and Gov. Gavin Newsom has condemned it as “a solution right now in search of a problem.” Both have called for the removal of all the deployed troops.

On Monday, Mayor Bass called the withdrawal “another sign of progress" in a unified and sustained push by Southern Californians.

The Marines “had nothing to do here,” she said. “They’ve just been standing in front of federal buildings when there are no protests and nothing is going on. It’s an inappropriate use of our men and women who choose to serve.”

Governor Newsom called the deployment “a joke from Day 1,” and demanded that President Trump and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who has led the administration’s crackdown on immigration, “end their dangerous militarization — and bring every soldier home for good.”

Since June, the troops have stood guard outside federal office buildings and have accompanied agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol and other agencies during immigration raids. Pentagon officials estimated that the cost of deploying the Marines and National Guard soldiers would run to about $134 million.

California officials say the deployment violates federal law prohibiting the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement, but an early attempt to halt the deployment through a court order was blocked by a federal appeals court. That appellate court ruled in June that the president had broad, though not “unreviewable,” authority to send the U.S. military into American cities.

A federal trial to determine whether the National Guard and Marines were used illegally in California is scheduled for next month.

Federal authorities have called the deployment a response to the so-called sanctuary law in California, enacted during the first Trump administration. The law limits the role of local sheriffs’ deputies and police officers in immigration enforcement, so that fear of deportation would not deter immigrants from reporting crimes.

The law includes extensive exceptions that allow local law enforcement authorities to turn over noncitizens who have committed serious crimes to be deported by federal authorities. But the Trump administration has contended that California still places too many limits on cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities. The U.S. Department of Justice recently asked sheriffs across California to provide it with lists of inmates in state jails who are not U.S. citizens; doing so could potentially be a violation of the state’s sanctuary law.

At a congressional hearing last month, Democratic lawmakers grilled Secretary Hegseth about the troop deployment, calling it unlawful and excessive.

“The president’s decision to call the National Guard troops to Los Angeles was premature, and the decision to deploy active-duty Marines as well is downright escalatory,” Representative Betty McCollum, Democrat of Minnesota, told Mr. Hegseth.

Mr. Hegseth defended the deployment, telling lawmakers, “We ought to be able to enforce immigration law in this country.”

Those debates have loomed large over the military presence in Los Angeles. Critics of the deployment have noted, among other things, that the Marines and the National Guard — who are trained to shoot to kill on the battlefield — do not receive the extensive training in de-escalation techniques, crowd control and use of force that are core parts of local law enforcement training. Within the U.S. military, concerns about the optics of armed troops rolling into American cities have also limited what the deployment could accomplish.

As a result, the use of the troops in the Los Angeles area has been heavily scrutinized and fraught with potential constitutional constraints. National Guard contingents were seen earlier this month facing protesters in a field outside a cannabis farm in Ventura County as gunfire erupted. And they were observed sitting in trucks in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Los Angeles while immigration agents marched through an all-but-vacated MacArthur Park, to prove that they could do so.

In interviews with The New York Times, members of the California National Guard said that morale has been low during the deployment, re-enlistment rates were plummeting and more than 100 troops had sought counseling in a period of a few weeks. Six soldiers spoke on condition of anonymity because their federal orders forbade them from talking to the news media.

In the tent city that was built to house the Guard troops on a small base in Los Alamitos, a suburb, soldiers said that several troops had been reassigned because they raised objections to the mission, and that few of the troops there had been sent off the base on assignments.

National Guard officials said that only about 400 of the 3,882 deployed Guard members had actually been sent on assignments away from the base. The military’s Northern Command said earlier this month that the troops overall had participated in slightly more than 200 operations in support of federal law enforcement agencies.

“We wake up to go to sleep,” one Guard member told The Times.

The Marines, who have been based at a separate military facility nearby, have been used sparingly as well.

Early in the deployment, on June 13, Marines briefly detained an Army veteran who was running an errand and was trying to enter a Veterans Affairs office at a federal building in Los Angeles. The veteran said the detention was brief and he was not bothered by it. Federal troops are rarely seen detaining U.S. civilians on American soil, even temporarily.

Mayor Bass has compared the deployment to an “armed occupation,” and Gov. Gavin Newsom has condemned it as “a solution right now in search of a problem.” Both have called for the removal of all the deployed troops.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Sunday. “Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” he claimed, without offering evidence. (Surveys have shown that many Native Americans objected to the old names, especially Washington’s.) Mr. Trump also suggested that he might intervene in a stadium deal for Washington if it did not change its name back.

This is how we got here.

1914: Cleveland Needs a New Name

The baseball team in Cleveland had been known as the Naps, after their star player Nap Lajoie. But Mr. Lajoie was traded in 1914, and a new nickname was needed. Baseball writers were surveyed, and the team selected “Indians.” The exact impetus for the choice remains murky.

Cleveland once had a talented player named Louis Sockalexis, a Native American who died two years before the name change, and over the years it has been suggested that the new name was to honor him. But there is little hard evidence for this explanation.

Names based on Indian tribes or imagery were common in the 20th century; the Boston Braves were the 1914 World Series winners.

1933: A New Team in Boston

The Washington football team used a slur for Native Americans for decades, actually predating the team’s time there.

When a new team joined the National Football League in Boston in 1932, it initially was known as the Boston Braves. After a year, the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, changed the name, probably to avoid confusion with the baseball team of the same name.

The new nickname he chose was “Redskins.” For a game against the Bears, Mr. Marshall told his players to apply face paint. The name moved with the team to Washington in 1937.

Mr. Marshall was also known for being the last N.F.L. owner to integrate his team, doing so only in 1962.

Protests Begin

As far back as the 1960s, movements were afoot to push to change uncomfortable and offensive nicknames alluding to Native Americans that had been given to school teams. One of the first to act was Dartmouth College, which dropped its “Indians” nickname in 1974.

Native Americans were at the forefront of the protests, although the movement received outside support, too.

Despite the protests, the Cleveland and Washington teams did not move to change their nicknames and instead defended them. Washington noted in a statement in 2013 that scores of high schools across the country often used the same nickname with pride. Many, but not all, home team fans vigorously defended the nicknames of the teams they had cheered on for years.

Other professional teams, such as the Atlanta Braves and Kansas City Chiefs, faced scrutiny both for their nicknames and for their use of pseudo-Native American imagery like a “tomahawk chop” chant among fans.

Change Comes

In 2018, Cleveland announced that it would drop its logo, a cartoonish caricature of a Native American known as Chief Wahoo. The team name stayed.

New scrutiny came to the nicknames in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

In July 2020, Washington announced it was dropping its nickname. (It also removed references to Mr. Marshall from its stadium.) After two seasons playing as the generically named Washington Football Team, it adopted the Commanders nickname in 2022.

In December 2020, Cleveland announced it would play one more season as the Indians, then change its name. The new name, Guardians, refers to the giant statues, known as the Guardians of Traffic, on the Hope Memorial Bridge in Cleveland.

Mr. Trump objected then, too. “Oh no!” he wrote on social media at the time. “What is going on? This is not good news, even for ‘Indians.’ Cancel culture at work!”

And now in 2025 he has renewed his objections, claiming that “Times are different now than they were three or four years ago.”

Both teams have said the new names are here to stay.