WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s move to federalize the California National Guard and deploy military troops on U.S. soil risks losing public support for his immigration policies, which polls have shown a majority of Americans support.

Trump returned to the White House on Monday and was asked by a reporter if he agreed with his administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, that California Gov. Gavin Newsom should be arrested for defying federal officials.

“I would do it if I were Tom. I think it’s great. … Gavin loves the publicity. He’s done a terrible job,” the president said, calling the Democrat “grossly incompetent.”

Pressed later by another journalist to name a crime he believes the governor has committed, however, Trump replied, “His primary crime is running for governor because he’s done such a bad job — what he’s done to that state is like what (former President Joe) Biden did to this country.”

Trump continued to inject politics into the situation later Monday, telling reporters at an investment roundtable, “Democrats lost an election in a landslide because they’re on the wrong side of the issues.”

Congressional and California Democrats have accused Trump of inciting the violent protests in Los Angeles for his political benefit as the nation’s second-largest city has turned into a tinderbox. Trump spent the overnight hours into Monday providing real-time commentary as television outlets showed chaotic scenes of protesters clashing with local and federal law enforcement, burning cars, throwing rocks and blocking traffic.

The violence was spurred by protests over raids last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who rounded up around 100 individuals the agency contends were in the country illegally. Newsom, a possible 2028 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he did not request National Guard help and told Trump administration officials he opposed a deployment.

Trump followed up Monday by ordering hundreds of U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to back up the National Guard troops already in the city to help quell the unrest.

California officials had said earlier that they planned to sue over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard despite Newsom’s objections. In a press appearance Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the lawsuit would argue that the deployment violated federal law and the Constitution.

Trump’s spat with Newsom — with whom the president has clashed before, despite some warm in-person interactions — has again allowed Trump to focus on an issue that helped him win a second term, illegal immigration. It has also rekindled a fight with a prominent California Democrat — elected officials from the Golden State have long been among Trump’s top foils.

He spent much of his first term in a public back-and-forth with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California senator and state attorney general, in November’s general election.

Now, it’s once again the turn of Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

“Governor Gavin Newscum and ‘Mayor’ Bass should apologize to the people of Los Angeles for the absolutely horrible job that they have done, and this now includes the ongoing L.A. riots. These are not protesters, they are troublemakers and insurrectionists,” Trump wrote Sunday evening on social media, using a derisive nickname for the governor.

In another Sunday post, the president used verbiage typically reserved for occupied conflict zones to describe the City of Angels.

“A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,” Trump wrote, a contention rejected by Newsom and Bass, a former congresswoman.

“Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations — But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve,” Trump said, adding that he had directed his national security team to “take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.”

In a television interview Sunday night, Newsom said Trump was “creating the conditions that you claim you’re solving.”

The California governor said he and Trump spoke by telephone as the protests were starting on Friday night — but a National Guard deployment was not a topic of conversation.

“We talked for almost 20 minutes and he barely, this issue never came up,” Newsom told MSNBC. “I tried to talk about L.A. He wanted to talk about all these other issues. We had a very decent conversation.”

“He never once brought up the National Guard. He’s a stone-cold liar. … He said he did. Stone. Cold. Liar. Never did,” Newsom added. “There’s no working with the president. There’s only working for him, and I will never work for Donald Trump.”

‘Heavily armed’

Other California Democrats have also criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the volatile situation that saw dozens of protesters arrested over the weekend.

“Los Angeles — violence is never the answer. Assaulting law enforcement is never ok. Indeed, doing so plays directly into the hands of those who seek to antagonize and weaponize the situation for their own gain,” Sen. Adam B. Schiff, who has clashed with Trump for almost a decade, wrote on social media. “Don’t let them succeed.”

Rep. Maxine Waters, whose district lies within Los Angeles, was caught on video having a door closed on her by a federal law enforcement officials as she sought more information about the missions of federal entities’ and National Guard troops deployed there.

“I pled with the National Guard, which was heavily armed, not to use their weapons against peaceful demonstrators who were simply exercising their rights to freedom of speech and protest. All people deserve to be treated with dignity and due process under the law,” she wrote on social media. “Peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations are critical to protecting our constitutional rights!”

The scenes of burning vehicles, including police cruisers, officers employing pepper spray and other violent episodes have created a political tightrope for Trump.

While he has used the protests to attempt to cast himself as bailing out a blue-state governor and mayor, continued unrest could erode support for his mass deportation and other immigration programs.

A June 4-6 CBS News/YouGov poll found 54 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s mass deportation program, with 46% opposing it.

A Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year found just over half (51%) of U.S. adults saying that least some of the people in the country illegally should be deported, while 32% said all individuals here illegally should be deported. (Another 16% said none should be removed from the country.)

Maintaining that level of public support will be key for the president and his team. White House officials on Monday tried to cast the violence and need for federal intervention in California as a direct product of a “mass migration” crisis that Trump repeatedly spoke of on the campaign trail last year.

“Los Angeles is all the proof you need that mass migration unravels societies,” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, wrote on social media. “You can have all the other plans and budgets you want. If you don’t fix migration, then nothing else can be fixed — or saved.”

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(Michael Macagnone contributed to this report.)

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