Welcome to the beat. I'm Ari Melbert, and we are covering the late breaking news out of Los Angeles.

Late today, the latest development in a clash that seems escalated by the federal government under the Trump administration includes now a small number of U.S. Marines formally mobilized to respond to this ongoing clash and the protests. Today's protests, and you can see some

of the footage, and we've been tracking this, are overwhelmingly peaceful across the city there.

The escalation, though, has little precedent in modern times to see the guard deployed as it was

over the weekend without a governor's cooperation. The Marines now will

support reportedly what are still hundreds of National Guard troops that are on the ground in L.A.,

under the Trump order, and during the objection of the California governor, Gavin Newsom,

he's now filed a lawsuit on that front as well, and we're going to run through all of that with you

tonight.

But a little historical context, this is the first time a United States president has had to clash with or ignore a governor in the deployment of the National Guard all the way back to 1965. The circumstance is then quite different after years of back and forth and cases and lawsuits and new

federal legislation, President Johnson ultimately made what was then still a very big move to send troops

to Alabama without a governor's collaboration in order to protect the civil rights under law

that had been established by both federal legislation and years of case law.

The point being, whatever one thinks about the immigration issues in our country today,

there is no recent precedent whatsoever for a president bringing out the guard the way Donald Trump did quite quickly this weekend.

Now, critics say the goal here, what we continue to see,

is not actually about immigration, but about an effort documented and sometimes admitted by President

Trump in the second term to expand his authority, to test his legal powers, and at times to exert a kind of autocratic

intimidation campaign. That includes arresting critics, threatening people who disagree,

trampling on First Amendment and free speech rights, and saying, as he did today,

that the opposition can be arrested for little to no reason at all. That is both the criticism

and at times the confession from the Trump administration. Having reported that, this is also

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