Welcome to the Beat. I'm Ari Melbourne. We begin now with breaking news.

Americans across the nation now gathering in the streets protesting aspects of the Trump agenda,

these controversial ice raids, and the extraordinary use of federal powers and even the military

to back up those raids. We see signs that these protests, many of them peaceful,

will be intensifying over the course of the evening.

But that is against this backdrop.

United States troops, sometimes armed with machine guns or weapons of war,

in L.A. as part of the ongoing raids with ICE agents. Meanwhile, Donald Trump's DOJ is going forward on these plans

to use immigration powers and other clashes over immigration to try to literally indict and

imprison political opposition. There is a new indictment that continues the prosecution of a

member of Congress, a big development

that came in that New Jersey clash after they dropped the case against the sitting Newark mayor.

Trump's Pentagon chief was asked point blank about whether we are heading towards the kind of

autocratic abusive power that is not allowed to democracy. Would he rule out the use

of the military to arrest American citizens? And at least at a public rhetorical level, he would not.

We will get into that. We actually have a very special guest coming up who was directly involved in that.

But this is one of those times where there's a lot of news. And so before we get into more of the

details of what's happening, we want to get out into the field where NBC's a lot of news. And so before we get into more of the details of what's

happening, we want to get out into the field where NBC's David Noriega is live outside the federal

building in L.A., David? All right. Hi. Yeah, I want to just show you where I am. When I talked to you

yesterday, I was at the end of this block because the equivalent crowd from yesterday had already been dispersed by the LAPD.

As you can see, we are directly in front of the National Guard troops that were deployed here on Sunday

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