President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy federal military forces to Minnesota, seeking to suppress protests in Minneapolis that arose after federal immigration agents shot and killed a U.S. citizen, Renee Good. Constitutional and military law experts said the move would be an abuse of the 19th-century statute unlike any in American history.
The Insurrection Act has been invoked more than 20 times since 1792, but rarely since the civil rights era. Prior deployments shared a common thread — widespread violence that local authorities could not control, a state request for federal help, or a federal duty to protect citizens from state-sanctioned harm. Experts said none of those conditions apply to Minneapolis, where federal agents are accused of initiating the escalating confrontations now cited as justification for military deployment.
Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program — a nonprofit affiliated with New York University’s law school — told the Associated Press that Trump’s threatened invocation would be a flagrant abuse of the statute unlike anything previously seen in American history, and that none of the legal criteria for its use had been met.
Between 2,000 and 3,000 federal law enforcement officers are currently deployed in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, according to the AP — compared with fewer than 600 officers in the Minneapolis Police Department. Videos taken by protesters and bystanders showed federal agents initiating violence in confrontations that grew more frequent after Good was shot three times and killed.
Trump has argued that Minnesota officials and residents are obstructing federal law enforcement by protesting the presence of agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Courts have blocked some of his efforts to deploy the National Guard to the state, but Trump has argued that the Insurrection Act would allow him to send troops without state permission.
A statute built for the republic’s survival, not its administration
George Washington signed the first version of the Insurrection Act in 1792, authorizing mobilization of state militias when “the laws of the United States are opposed or obstructed in their execution.” Washington and John Adams used the authority to suppress citizen revolts against taxes — levies considered essential to the young republic’s survival. Congress expanded the law in 1807. Nunn told the AP that the early statutes reflected a deep Anglo-American tradition against military intervention in civilian affairs, except as a last resort.
The law has been invoked in three broad categories, according to the AP’s review: when widespread local violence prompted state authorities to request federal assistance; when the federal government moved without a state’s request to protect individuals whose rights were being violated or ignored by state actors; and in cases of open armed insurrection, as during the Civil War.
President Abraham Lincoln relied on the statute as a legal foundation for the Union’s military campaign after concluding that Confederate states could not lawfully secede. Congress granted Lincoln express authority to deploy federal soldiers in those states without asking their permission. President Ulysses S. Grant used a civil-rights provision added after the Civil War to send soldiers against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups that defied the 14th and 15th Amendments and federal civil rights law.
During the industrial era, labor violence and anti-immigrant attacks also prompted governors to seek federal help. President Rutherford B. Hayes responded to state requests during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. President Grover Cleveland authorized assistance to a Washington governor seeking to protect Chinese residents attacked by white mobs. President Woodrow Wilson sent soldiers to Colorado during a deadly coal miners’ strike in 1914.
Presidents of the mid-20th century similarly used the law’s civil-rights provisions to counter state-sanctioned resistance to integration. President Franklin Roosevelt sent 6,000 soldiers to Detroit — more than twice the current federal deployment in Minneapolis — after state authorities requested help during race riots in which local white police had joined violence against Black residents. Dozens died, including 17 Black residents killed by local police.
Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson each sent federal forces to Southern states without requesting permission from local governments, because those governments were themselves defying federal civil rights law and inciting violence. Eisenhower enforced integration at Little Rock’s Central High School. Kennedy sent troops to the University of Mississippi during riots over the enrollment of James Meredith, and deployed forces preemptively to prevent violence during Alabama Governor George Wallace’s protest against university integration. Johnson protected the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march after Wallace’s forces attacked peaceful marchers on their first attempt.
The last invocation of the Insurrection Act came in 1992. Riots broke out in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four white police officers despite video recording of them beating Rodney King, a Black man. California Governor Pete Wilson requested federal assistance. President George H.W. Bush authorized roughly 4,000 troops, publicly expressed disagreement with the jury’s verdict, and directed the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation. Two of the officers were subsequently convicted in federal court.
Experts say the Minneapolis situation fits none of those precedents
Nunn told the AP that while ICE has the legal authority to enforce federal immigration laws, the agency’s conduct in Minneapolis has constituted a form of violent and illegal behavior that exceeds its lawful function and has escalated the very confrontations Trump now seeks to suppress. A president cannot intentionally generate a crisis and then invoke emergency powers to put it down, Nunn said. The constitutional requirement that a president faithfully execute the laws obligates Trump to exercise both his immigration authority and any Insurrection Act powers in good faith, Nunn added.
The analysis comes as the AP noted that federal forces already vastly outnumber local police in the area where the protests are occurring — the reverse of the historical pattern in which federal intervention was a supplement to, not a substitution for, inadequate local capacity.