Judge Rejects Trump's "Illegal" Troop Deployment

The Beat with Ari Melber

Ari Melber, MS NOW

Government, Ms Now, Versant, Versant Media, Daily News, Politics, News

4.6 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

President Trump faces a major setback in his autocratic agenda after a federal judge ruled that his deployment of the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles is illegal. MSNBC's Ari Melber reports.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melba. I'm back with you after the holiday weekend. Our top story
0:05.7	tonight right now is about this. These troops in the streets from California to D.C. And as many people
0:13.8	asked across this long summer, how can this be happening in America? How is this legal? And tonight, the answer fresh from the
0:24.3	federal courts is, this is not legal. Donald Trump's deployment of troops to patrol Americans is
0:33.8	illegal, and it smacks of an illicit bid to create Trump's own national police force, a police
0:40.2	state. And that is according to a federal judge. And I'm going to walk you through the ruling.
0:45.2	It's a key setback for Trump's bids to seize unitary powers and wield them against you,
0:51.1	against us, against Americans. A judge ruling, President Trump cannot deploy the
0:56.3	National Guard of Marines the way he did in L.A. That it is illegal. The ruling, of course, follows
1:01.3	longstanding precedent, which many experts cited when Trump first put these troops in the streets.
1:06.6	We reported that at the time. The ban on soldiers patrolling citizens is well known in this country.
1:14.2	Anyone with U.S. military experience or legal experience or any recent interaction with a history
1:20.9	textbook, quite frankly, knows the limit. It's under a 19th century law, posse comitatis,
1:29.2	and the judge ruled Congress has forbidden the president to use the army for the purpose of executing general laws. That's just a
1:34.3	fancy way of saying for law enforcement, except when expressly authorized by the Constitution
1:41.9	or an act of Congress. This ruling against Trump also has some
1:45.9	damning evidence, how the Trump administration's own training materials note the law barred
1:51.6	troops from doing the things Trump wanted them to do. You can see it here. This is a PowerPoint
1:58.3	training slide that was included in this ruling against Trump today.
2:02.9	And I'm not going to read all of it, but it's bad for the Trump administration because it
2:08.3	shows how these very troops under these legal restrictions were warned. The Possecomatitis Act,
2:14.1	PCA, prohibits them from law enforcement functions on Americans like traffic
	...

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