President Trump on Thursday morning threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy federal troops to Minnesota in response to protests against his immigration crackdown there.
The president’s threat comes a day after a man was shot and wounded by an immigration agent. The shooting has further heightened tensions across Minneapolis, which exploded after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in the head last week.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the rarely used federal law to deploy US military or federalize the National Guard over the protests of his administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement actions.
His statements come amid ongoing fear and anger over his administration’s deployment of federal troops to Democrat-led cities in what he says is an effort to clamp down on crime. Critics say the moves are part of an authoritarian posture aimed at crushing dissent.
What is the Insurrection Act? Here’s a quick primer.
What does the law say?
The act, first passed in the young nation in 1792, allows the president to deploy the military “to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations,” according to NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice.
Among the key provisions is one vague excerpt that reads, “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion,” according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.
When have presidents invoked it?
Multiple times, according to the Brennan Center.
“Presidents George Washington and John Adams used it in response to early rebellions against federal authority,” the center says. “President Abraham Lincoln invoked it at the start of the Civil War, and President Ulysses Grant used it to crush the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s.”
It has also historically been a convenient tool for breaking strikes.
“Several other presidents, including Andrew Jackson, Rutherford Hayes, and Grover Cleveland, have deployed troops under the Insurrection Act to intervene in labor disputes, invariably on the side of employers,” the center says.
The act was used for more affirming reasons during the Civil Rights era.
“Most famously, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson all invoked the Insurrection Act during the civil rights movement to enforce federal court orders desegregating schools and other institutions in the South," the center says.
Have any presidents invoked the act more recently?
The act was last invoked in 1992, according to the Brennan Center.
“The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992, when the governor of California requested military aid from President George H.W. Bush in response to civil unrest in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of four white police officers charged with beating Black motorist Rodney King‚” the center says, calling the ensuing period the longest the “United States has ever gone without an invocation of the Insurrection Act.”
What are experts saying about Trump’s idea?
Many legal scholars have strong objections.
“Unconstitutional. Illegal,“ Richard W. Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who served in George W. Bush’s administration, wrote on X. ”Congress must impeach him if he invokes the Insurrection Act. There is no insurrection."
Unconstitutional.
— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) October 6, 2025
Illegal.
Congress must impeach him if he invokes the Insurrection Act. There is no insurrection. https://t.co/UU6Lf4lVJ9
Joyce Alene, a US Attorney in Alabama during the Obama administration, wrote on her Substack page that Trump’s musings about the Insurrection Act do not pass constitutional muster.
Attempts to deploy federalized National Guardsmen to Oregon, California, & Illinois, also, signs that Trump, or at least someone around him, is starting to think seriously about the Insurrection Act. https://t.co/W41ZTIsFzK
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) October 7, 2025
“The Insurrection Act is reserved for extreme situations like rebellions or invasions,” Alene wrote. “Trump is fully capable of spinning a narrative that would claim one of those preconditions, even while having no resemblance to the truth.”
She said local police departments around the country “are more than capable of handling local crime problems. They don’t need help in the form of military boots on the ground from the feds ... They don’t need National Guardsmen who aren’t trained in community policing and don’t know state law to be dropped in, under federal control, supposedly, to help.”
Material from prior Globe stories and from Globe wire services was used in this report.
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