Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sparred with Democratic lawmakers Tuesday over the Trump administration's deployment^[1] of thousands of National Guardsmen^[2] and hundreds of Marines to Los Angeles against state and local officials' wishes to respond to anti-immigration enforcement protests.

Amid the back-and-forth between Hegseth and Democrats at a House Appropriations Committee defense subpanel hearing, the Pentagon's acting comptroller also told lawmakers that the LA deployments are expected to cost at least $134 million.

At the hearing, Hegseth fiercely defended the unprecedented deployments as necessary to allow immigration officials to do their jobs, while Democrats maintained that there was no reason to circumvent state and local officials.

Read Next: Military Spouses Fight Back Against Pentagon Book Bans^[3]

"This looks nothing like the George Floyd protests or the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992," Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee, said, referencing two instances in which the National Guard helped quell violent protests. "Mr. Secretary, this is a deeply unfair position to put our Marines in. Their service should be honored. It should not be exploited."

Hegseth shot back that Immigration and Customs Enforcement "has the right to safely conduct operations in any state and any jurisdiction in the country" and that the troops were deployed to protect those officers.

The troops will be deployed for at least 60 days, Hegseth added later, because "we want to ensure that those rioters, looters and thugs on the other side assaulting our police officers know that we're not going anywhere."

President Donald Trump announced Saturday he was deploying 2,000 Guardsmen to the Los Angeles area and putting Marines on standby after protests against immigration raids on Friday and Saturday despite California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell and others saying the troops were unnecessary.

On Monday, Trump doubled the number of Guardsmen deployed and ordered the deployment of about 700 Marines^[4] from Twentynine Palms^[5] in southeast California. As of Tuesday, the Marines had moved to a base closer to Los Angeles but had not yet deployed.

Contrary to the Trump administration's depictions of the city under siege, the protests have been isolated to a few blocks in downtown LA, and incidents of violence, including protesters throwing rocks and burning Waymo driverless cars, have been intense but scattered, according to the Los Angeles Times^[6]. On Tuesday, the areas where protests had been concentrated were largely quiet, according to The Associated Press^[7].

There have also been some protests in other cities within LA County, including Saturday's protest in the suburb of Paramount, where violence picked up after law enforcement officials threw flash grenades and tear gas to disperse protesters so immigration agents could drive through, according to the Times.

Trump's moves marked the first time troops have been deployed over the objections of a governor since the Civil Rights era in the 1960s and the first time it's been done in the modern era for something other than enforcing civil rights law.

At Tuesday's hearing, McCollum specifically asked Hegseth how much the deployments were expected to cost and what training the deployed troops would have.

Hegseth briefly asserted that "all of the units on the ground have been fully trained," but repeatedly refused to answer McCollum's question about the costs, instead defending the Trump administration's decision to deploy troops.

Toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., who represents part of San Bernardino County east of Los Angeles, reiterated McCollum's question about costs.

In response to Aguilar, Hegseth deferred to acting Pentagon comptroller Bryn MacDonnell, who was testifying alongside Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine.

The $134 million figure cited by MacDonnell covers travel, food and lodging for the troops, she said. The funding will come from the operations and maintenance accounts for the National Guard and Marines, she added. Operations and maintenance funds typically cover a broad range of activities, from training to equipment repairs to barracks renovations.

While Aguilar got an answer about the costs, Hegseth grew angry with him over a question about the troops not having adequate living conditions in Los Angeles. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday that the Guardsmen^[8] were sleeping on the floors of basements and loading docks in federal buildings and did not have enough food, water, bathrooms and trash dumps.

"We are ensuring they're housed, fed, water, capabilities in real time from my office because I care that much about the California Guard and the Marines and the men and women who are supporting our ICE agents on the ground," Hegseth said.

"That wasn't true as of yesterday," Aguilar replied.

"It's true every day," Hegseth shot back. "I'm not going to take the fact that we don't care about the troops. Nobody cares more about the troops at the top than this secretary and the chairman in our department."

Hegseth also took exception to Aguilar asking whether the funding for the deployments would come from barracks maintenance, despite the fact that the Defense Department has already raided barracks funding to pay^[9] for deployments on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Related: Trump Deploys Hundreds of Marines to LA in Growing Military Response to Immigration Raid Protests^[10]

A group of military and veterans’ spouses^[1] is joining forces to advocate against book bans at Defense Department schools, service academies and elsewhere within the military.

While starting small -- the group has six core members -- the organization they've dubbed Military Families for Free Expression has plans for virtual events and "activations" in communities around military bases with the goal of educating other military families about the book bans and empowering them to speak out.

"I can't believe the irony is lost on anyone that our service members who protect and defend, serve the Constitution, which houses our free speech right and our access to these books and these publications, they might have that same right limited for themselves and their families," said Kelly Wilson, one of the founding members of Military Families for Free Expression and the wife of a Navy^[2] veteran.

Read Next: White House Asked Joint Chiefs Chairman for Candidates to Lead NASA, Worrying Experts^[3]

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has been cracking down on anything it deems to have an undue emphasis on diversity.

At the Department of Defense Education Activity schools that serve military children and service academies that are preparing the next generation of military officers, that crackdown has largely played out by officials pulling from library shelves books that focus on minorities, women and LGBTQ+ people.

In May, the Pentagon expanded the book banning effort with a memo directing all military branches^[4] to scrub their libraries of materials "promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology."

The memo also created an "Academic Libraries Committee" to review the books that are pulled from the libraries to make a final decision on what to do with the books. And it listed search words to use to find books to pull, including "affirmative action," "discrimination," "gender identity" and "white privilege."

The May memo, in particular, spurred conversations among a network of military spouses that resulted in the formation of Military Families for Free Expression, or MFFE, said Kellie Artis, another of the group's founding members.

"We started calling ourselves the anti-committee committee because the initial impetus was the May 9 memo that came out standing up the Academic Libraries Committee," Artis said. "This shouldn't be a thing, first of all. Second of all, we don't agree with this. We want to put some pressure on that."

The group publicly launched late last month with a post on the blogging website^[5] Substack.

The Substack page has generated some interest from other military families who want to get involved with MFFE, but the group is expecting its bigger public launch to be a webinar it is tentatively planning for later this month, Artis said.

"Just informing people. What are we even upset about? Why is this bad?" Artis said of what the webinar will be about. "And then what people can do on a local level, whether it's with their own lawmakers or whether it's on base. Is there a structure on base where they can lodge complaints or ask questions about processes? ... Little things that you can do to inject yourself in the process, be a bit more civically engaged in that way."

After the webinar, the group is eyeing in-person events, likely near but not on military bases. Artis pointed to a Naval Academy^[6] graduate who raised money to buy and distribute^[7] copies of books that had been removed from academy libraries as inspiration for the type of activities MFFE could do.

Wilson, a lawyer whose professional experience includes high-profile issues such as being part of former Navy SEAL^[8] Eddie Gallagher's legal team and helping draft an early version of the military family housing tenant's bill of rights, said opposing the book bans should not be a partisan issue.

"The short term is to educate people on why this is important and to get more information from people in positions of leadership that are involved in this process, because right now there's no transparency," Wilson said. "Long term would be ... to help people understand that these rights are integral to our country and who we are, and we cannot cherry-pick them in their application."

"We have to protect these rights no matter what," she said. "And I really think that we can help people understand that, regardless of what side of the political aisle you find yourself, we need to protect these rights."

MFFE is the latest way military families are pushing back on the book bans.

Students at DODEA schools have staged several walkouts in protest of the book bans^[9] and other anti-diversity efforts, and a handful of families protested^[10] during Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's visit to a base in Germany in February.

Six military families represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union also filed a lawsuit^[11] against the DODEA and the Pentagon over a range of anti-diversity actions, including the book bans.

In court filings last month in response to the lawsuit, DODEA officials acknowledged that 555 books have been pulled from shelves for "further review," along with 41 classroom materials. The filing downplayed the removals, noting that they represent 0.1% of DODEA's library books and 0.01% of classroom materials.

"As ample case law shows, curating a library collection or developing a teaching curriculum is an act of government speech," Justice Department lawyers wrote in a filing last month. "It is therefore not subject to rigorous scrutiny under the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause. Even if that were not the case, plaintiffs cannot establish that DODEA schools' reviews were motivated by any impermissible reason other than a pedagogical concern for its schoolchildren."

At a hearing in the lawsuit last week, a federal judge ordered the government to produce a full list of all the materials removed from DODEA schools, according to an order posted to the court docket^[12]. The deadline to submit the list is this week.

Meanwhile, at the Naval Academy, all but about 20 of the nearly 400 books that were removed earlier this year have been returned to shelves, officials said last month^[13].

MFFE is keeping an eye on the ACLU lawsuit but does not want to do anything to get in the way of it, Artis said.

For its effort, MFFE has sought advice from some larger free speech and anti-book ban groups, including American Booksellers for Free Expression and National Coalition Against Censorship.

"I've just tried to give them some sense of what the national landscape is like in terms of book bans, so that can mean what's happening in school districts, but also what's happening legislatively," said Philomena Polefrone, associate director of American Bookseller for Free Expression. "I think this group can do some really important work in raising awareness and just getting back to common sense curation practices in libraries."

Lee Rowland, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, similarly commended MFFE for "upholding the best of American traditions" and "the full essence of the Constitution."

"Book bans are pernicious wherever they happen, but there is a particularly insidious aspect to banning words and ideas in an institution that is designed to defend American values," Rowland said. "Because at the core of those values is the Constitution, the First Amendment and a commitment against censorship and for liberty. And book bans undermine all of those values. And while they're always bad, it does feel particularly pernicious and dangerous in a military context."

Related: Pentagon Committee Created to Direct Book Banning in Service Branches^[14]