WATCH: Hegseth grilled on costs for National Guard deployment to LA

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced questions Tuesday about the cost of sending U.S. Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles to respond to protests against raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., told Hegseth during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the Pentagon’s budget that she viewed the deployment as premature. She pressed him several times on how the department planned to cover these costs and handle training.

She pointed to the 2020 Minnesota protests over the killing of George Floyd, saying that Gov. Tim Walz called up the National Guard on his own and Marines were not called in.

Minnesota’s “state and local law enforcement, along with our National Guard who have worked on crowd control, they were more than enough,” she said. “They were more than capable of handling this situation.”

California has sued the Trump administration for calling up state National Guard troops, saying the president has overstepped his authority. Similar anti-ICE protests have since emerged in other parts of the country since then. The White House has pointed to a part of military code that allows for the federal government to call up these troops in the event of “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.” Experts say this is untested legal territory.

Hegseth testified that President Donald Trump did not want the situation in Los Angeles to get out of hand, as it did in Minneapolis. He said that Walz allowed a Minneapolis police precinct to be abandoned during the George Floyd protests and burned to the ground by demonstrators. The remains of the building are still standing.

“In Los Angeles, we believe that ICE, which is a federal law enforcement agency, has the right to safely conduct operations in any state and any jurisdiction in the country, especially after 21 million illegals have crossed our border under the previous administration,” Hegseth said. “We have deployed National Guard and the Marines to protect them in the execution of their duties because we ought to be able to enforce immigration law in this country, unlike what Governor Waltz did in 2020.”

Hegseth said that “we've got a 13% increase in our defense budget, and we will have the capability to cover down on contingencies,” after McCollum requested specific numbers to know where money was coming from to cover the costs. Hegseth said he would submit numbers at a later time.

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