Live updates: Trump deploys National Guard to LA in response to immigration clashes

After President Donald Trump used federal authority to call up 2,000 National Guard troops in California to protect federal personnel and property amid protests against immigration raids, the administration’s rules of engagement for those soldiers remain unclear.

Rules of engagement are directives given to military troops by their commanders before any operation outlining what force may be authorized and under what circumstances. CNN crews have observed California National Guard troops staged around the city carrying standard-issued military M4 rifles affixed with magazines, suggesting the firearms are loaded with ammunition.

Asked about the rules of engagement by reporters Sunday, Trump said simply, “We’ll see what happens.”

“If we think there’s a serious insurrection, or less than that, we’re gonna have law and order,” he said.

CNN Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst John Miller said Sunday that “we don’t know what those rules of engagement are.”

“The rules of engagement sometimes are set on parameters, like you can do what they are doing to you,” Miller explained. “So if they are throwing things, you can deploy gas or rubber bullets. If shots are fired at you, you can fire shots back.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said that as she understands, the soldiers’ “mission is to protect federal property, not to be in the streets where protests might be taking place, far from the Federal Building.”

“Their mission is to protect the federal building downtown and the federal building in Westwood,” she told CNN. She added that the Los Angeles Police Department is coordinating with the National Guard.

This is the first time a president has called in the National Guard without state consent or request since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson called in troops to guard civil rights protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the deployment “purposefully inflammatory.”