‘The View’: Sunny Hostin Calls Trump’s L.A. Troop Deployment a ‘Test Run’ for Other Cities

Amanda Bell June 10, 2025, 11:56 am

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On Tuesday’s (June 10) new episode of The View, the cohosts once again started out the show by talking about Donald Trump‘s decision to deploy U.S. troops — this time, 700 marines, adding to the thousands of national guardsmen he already activated — to quash anti-deportation raids in Los Angeles.

Whoopi Goldberg introduced the issue as the first “Hot Topic” discussion of the day, noting that her entire family lives in the city and reported, “People are mad. It’s been peaceful for days, and then suddenly these guys showed up and flipped everybody out… That’s what my family is saying.”

Sunny Hostin had a similar experience, saying, “I spoke to about five people that live in L.A., that work in L.A., and they said that these protests were very, very orderly. They weren’t violent, and they occurred in about a four-block radius — and we all know how large L.A. is. And so in my view, there is no crisis in Los Angeles that ICE did not cause.”

She then pointed the finger at Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, for causing the chaos — “We now know that Stephen Miller ordered… that ICE arrests 3,000 people a day [and] led to this,” she explained — before suggesting there’s a larger plan in play for Trump and his administration.

“California is the largest economy in the United States… it’s the largest state, and it has a GDP that’s larger than many countries. And so I think we have to look at what’s happening from a bird’s eye perspective and look at why Trump is militarizing that state as a test run to make sure that he can do it in places like New York, that he can do it in other sanctuary cities,” she said. “And so there is a plan to this, in my view. And I really think that there’s no question that the LAPD that has 9000 police officers could have handled this quite well.”

Joy Behar agreed with her theory, saying, “I think that’s very astute, what you’re saying.” However, she had her own hypothesis about the matter as well, saying, “I also think that he’s using it as a distraction because his ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ is tanking right now. His tariffs are tanking the economy … And then we know that he had a fight with his best friend, Elon Musk, who dragged out the Epstein file thing… What’s more of a distraction than watching people acting the way they are in Los Angeles?” She then warned that the consequences of military clashes with American civilians can be deadly. “I’ve seen this in my lifetime. And sometimes kids get killed when this happens. In my day, it was Kent State, and they killed four kids, American students, and nine were injured, very severely. in those days. And I think that they’ve got to be very careful what they’re doing because that is the next thing that will happen.”

Alyssa Farah Griffin then spoke to condemn the troop deployment but also issued a challenge to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who’s been sharply critical of the move and even filed a federal lawsuit against the administration over it. “I put a little bit of onus on Governor Newson, show that you have the police force to stop the unrest and that it is completely unnecessary to have the National Guard there, to have U.S. troops there, because you can’t deny the imagery that you’re seeing. There are cars being lit on fire, there are police officers being attacked. There are guards.”

“Part of the problem is that Taco didn’t wait,” Goldberg noted, invoking her newest nickname for Trump.

Then, Sara Haines joined in on the discussion and laid some blame for the conflict on California’s immigration policies. “It dates back even to when California became a sanctuary place, that when there are sanctuary cities, it forces ICE and a lot of the law enforcement to go into the community, so it almost puts the communities at unrest,” she said, citing an expert. However, she also criticized Trump’s decision as hypocritical, since he pardoned the rioters of January 6th. “We’re doing one or the other because it should be consistent across the board,” she demanded.

Goldberg, as usual, got the last word and decided to — after a little technical difficulty on the producers’ part — play side-by-side video of the anti-ICE riots in L.A. and the destructive celebrations in Philadephia after the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

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“Philadelphia loves to burn itself,” Griffin laughed, before the others pointed out that the National Guard was not deployed in response.

“The difference is, there’s an agenda,” Goldberg said. “If Taco … did not go in the way that [he did]… If you had stuck to the thing where you said, ‘We’re going to only get the people who are the bad guys’ … If you had done that, you would not be seeing this, because it would be done in a way where we all say, ‘Yes, we got to make sure that ]happens].’ But you’re going and taking four-year-olds. You snatching kids from high school … It’s more empathy, man. I mean, I understand you’re upset. You want to get this done, and people want it to happen. But I don’t think anybody… is happy with the way it’s going down.”

The View, weekdays, 11 a.m. ET, ABC