California national guards troops and marines deployed to Los Angeles to help restore order after days of protest against the Trump administration have told friends and family members they are deeply unhappy about the assignment and worry their only meaningful role will be as pawns in a political battle they do not want to join.

Three different advocacy organisations representing military families said they had heard from dozens of affected service members who expressed discomfort about being drawn into a domestic policing operation outside their normal field of operations. The groups said they have heard no countervailing opinions.

“The sentiment across the board right now is that deploying military force against our own communities isn’t the kind of national security we signed up for,” said Sarah Streyder of the Secure Families Initiative, which represents the interests of military spouses, children and veterans.

“Families are scared not just for their loved ones’ safety, although that’s a big concern, but also for what their service is being used to justify.”

Chris Purdy of the Chamberlain Network, whose stated mission is to “mobilize and empower veterans to protect democracy”, said he had heard similar things from half a dozen national guard members. “Morale is not great, is the quote I keep hearing,” he said.

The marines and the California national guard did not respond to invitations to comment.

Trump has taken the unusual step of ordering 4,000 national guard members to Los Angeles without the consent of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, saying that the city risked being “obliterated” by violent protesters without them. Earlier this week, he also activated 700 marines from the Twentynine Palms base two hours’ drive to the east, describing Los Angeles as a “trash heap” that was in danger of burning to the ground.

In reality, the anti-Trump protests – called first in response to aggressive federal roundups of undocumented immigrants, then in anger at the national guard deployment – have been largely peaceful and restricted to just a few blocks around downtown federal buildings. The Los Angeles police has made hundreds of arrests in response to acts of violence and vandalism around the protests, and the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, has instituted a night-time curfew – all with minimal input from the federal authorities.

At the largest demonstration since Trump first intervened, last Sunday, the national guard was hemmed into a staging area by Los Angeles police cruisers and played almost no role in crowd control. Since then, its service members have been deployed to guard buildings and federal law enforcement convoys conducting immigration sweeps. The marines, who arrived on Wednesday, are expected to play a similar function, with no powers of arrest.

Newsom has described the deployment as “a provocation, not just an escalation” and accused the White House of mistreating the service members it was activating. A widely circulated photograph, later confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon, showed national guard members sleeping on a concrete loading dock floor without bedding, and the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the troops arrived with no lodging, insufficient portable toilets and no funds for food or water.

A pair of YouGov polls published on Tuesday show public disapproval of both the national guard and marines deployments, as well as disapproval of Trump’s immigrant deportation policies. A Washington Post poll published on Wednesday came up with similar findings, but with slightly narrower margins.

Active service members are prohibited by law from speaking publicly about their work. But Streyder, of the Secure Families Initiative, said she had heard dozens of complaints indirectly through their families. She had also seen a written comment passed along to her organization from a national guard member who described the assignment as “shitty” – particularly compared with early secondments to help with wildfire relief or, during the Covid pandemic, vaccination outreach.

“Both of those experiences were uncomplicatedly positive, a contribution back to the community,” Streyder described the message as saying. “This is quite the opposite.”

According to Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran who runs the Vet Voice Foundation, the feeling was similar among some of the troops being sent from Twentynine Palms.

“Among all that I spoke with, the feeling was that the marines are being used as political pawns, and it strains the perception that marines are apolitical,” Goldbeck said. “Some were concerned that the Marines were being set up for failure. The overall perception was that the situation was nowhere at the level where marines were necessary.”

The advocates said it was important to draw a distinction between the personal political preferences of service members, many if not most of whom voted for Trump last November, and the higher principle that military personnel should not get involved in politics or politically motivated missions that blur lines of responsibility with civilian agencies.

“We tend to be uniquely apolitical, as an institution and with each other,” Streyder said. “The military is a tool that should be used as a last resort, not a first response… It does not feel that the tool is being calibrated accurately to the situation.”

The discontent may not be limited to California. In Texas, where the governor, Greg Abbott, called out the national guard on Wednesday in San Antonio, Austin and other cities expecting anti-Trump protests, guardsmen have a history of feeling poorly treated in the workplace if not outright misused, Purdy of the Chamberlain Network said.

After Abbott requisitioned the guard in 2021 to help police the Mexican border – a controversial policy codenamed Operation Lone Star – there were bitter complaints among guard members about the length and nature of an assignment that largely duplicated the work of the federal Border Patrol. Several guardsmen took their own lives.

The LA operations are also sparking safety concerns because of complications inherent in pairing military and domestic police officers, advocates say, since they are trained very differently and use different vocabulary to handle emergency situations. In one infamous episode during the 1992 Los Angeles riots – the last time the military were called out to restore order in southern California – a police officer on patrol turned to his marines counterparts and said “cover me”, meaning be ready with your weapon to make sure I stay safe.

To the marines, though, “cover me” meant open fire immediately, which they did, unloading more than 200 M16 rounds into a house where the police had a tip about a possible domestic abuser. By sheer luck, nobody was hurt.

CJ Chivers, a New York Times reporter who was with the marines in Los Angeles in 1992 and witnessed the tail-end of this near-calamity, wrote years later of his mixed feelings about the assignment: “The Marines’ presence in greater Los Angeles… felt unnecessary,” he said. “I’d like to say we understood the context of the role we were given … But domestic crowd control had never been our specialty.”

Streyder and the other advocates concurred. “Domestic law enforcement and the military are entirely separate functions, manned by separate people who have been given separate training, who come from different cultures,” Streyder said. “As military families, we rely implicitly on that separation being honored and remaining clear.”