In June 2025, as protests flared in Los Angeles following U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the city, two images (archived) circulated online claiming to show the sleeping conditions of the soldiers U.S. President Donald Trump had sent to protect federal personnel and buildings.
(X user @GavinNewsom)
The images showed groups of soldiers sleeping on the floor of a building.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom shared the images on X on June 9, writing: "You sent your troops here without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep. Here they are — being forced to sleep on the floor, piled on top of one another. If anyone is treating our troops disrespectfully, it is you @realDonaldTrump."
A simmering conflict between Newsom and Trump bubbled over after ICE raids sparked protests in LA on June 6-9. On June 9, Trump told reporters that border czar Tom Homan should include Newsom in people arrested for obstructing federal immigration enforcement measures. Newsom later sued Trump, claiming that the president illegally federalized the California National Guard in response to protests.
The images also circulated on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), Reddit (archived) and TikTok (archived). Snopes readers also wrote in asking if the pictures were authentic.
A Department of Defense spokesperson from U.S. Northern Command (Northcom), the unified command tasked with deploying soldiers to Los Angeles, told Snopes via email that the images "appear to be authentic."
The DoD spokesperson said:
The situation is pretty fluid right now. The soldiers you saw in the photo were resting as they were not currently on mission and due to the fluid security situation, it was deemed too dangerous for them to travel to better accommodations. The Soldiers have ready access to food and water as needed.
The images first appeared in a report by the San Francisco Chronicle, which attributed them to an anonymous source. Snopes does not rely on anonymous sources. We could not independently confirm the date or location of the images, nor whether they showed federalized California National Guard soldiers in LA. However, given the statement from Northcom, we rate this claim true.
We also reached out to Matthias Gafni, the author of the San Francisco Chronicle article, to ask for any further context about the images and their source and await a reply.
According to the Chronicle, the California National Guard soldiers deployed to Los Angeles arrived without federal funding for necessities including food, fuel and lodging. An anonymous source told the Chronicle that the lack of provisions for the soldiers seen in the photos was a "failure of the federal government," placing the blame on Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Though we could not independently confirm the details reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, reverse image searches found that the images first appeared online on June 9 — the same date the Chronicle published Gafni's report. Hence, we found no evidence of claims by some social (archived) media (archived) users that the images showed U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2021.
By June 9, there were 1,700 California National Guard soldiers in LA, according to Northcom. Additionally, 700 Marines would join the existing force in the city, Northcom said.