Defense Secretary Hegseth told Senate he would follow appellate court but defy district court order blocking Los Angeles military deployment

On June 18, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and explicitly stated that he would comply with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling allowing the Los Angeles National Guard deployment to continue, but would not comply with U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer's temporary restraining order that had blocked it. Hegseth also told senators that deployed troops could "temporarily detain" protesters and hand them to ICE for immigration processing—asserting a domestic law enforcement role for the military—and declined to state whether he had been ordered to develop options for military strikes in the Middle East.

The testimony gave public form to a doctrine of selective judicial compliance. The 9th Circuit ruling and Judge Breyer's TRO addressed the same underlying action—the deployment of federal military forces to Los Angeles—but reached opposite legal conclusions. Under the constitutional order of judicial review, executive branch officials are obligated to comply with lawful orders from any federal court; the appellate process exists to resolve conflicts between courts, not to permit the executive to choose which court's authority it will recognize. Hegseth's statement conditioned his compliance on whether the court had ruled in the administration's favor, treating the judiciary's authority as contingent on its conclusions.

Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Hegseth until he committed to following Supreme Court orders. That commitment's specificity—Supreme Court only—underscored what he was declining to affirm: that he would follow the orders of district courts. The administration had deployed California National Guard troops to Los Angeles over the objections of both the city's mayor and the state's governor, using military forces in an urban domestic enforcement role in support of ICE immigration operations following protests against those operations.