Sending troops into an American city to stifle largely peaceful protests is a “test case” that, depending on how it plays out in Los Angeles, could be a strategy the administration replicates in other cities, said Sarah Mehta, the deputy director of government affairs at the ACLU.

“This isn’t an isolated incident,” she said. “I think what we’re seeing in Los Angeles is this culmination of several weeks of incredibly aggressive immigration policing, the federal government asking the military to get further involved in immigration enforcement, including the transportation of unaccompanied children and attention and riot control, and then on top of that, again, these really targeted attacks against cities and states that are not going along with Trump’s aggressive deportation regime.”

“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again,” Trump vowed, in a speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday.

Since January, Trump’s administration has targeted universities and college students on visas who had participated in pro-Palestinian activism. The crackdown comes as states have advanced a host of anti-protest bills in the last few years to expand criminal punishments for protesting.

On Monday, Trump called for Newsom’s arrest – a move the governor called an “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”.