President Trump said on Monday that he was planning to invoke the Insurrection Act – a law of 1807 which grants emergency powers the president to deploy troops on American soil – as a means of “getting around” the recent judicial decisions that blocked his efforts to deploy the National Guard in major American cities.
In an appearance on the right -wired wired network Newsmax on Monday evening, Trump said that he considered the law of insurrection as “a way to get around” opposition to deployments, but that he was not committed to invoking the law. “If we don’t have to use it,” he said, “I wouldn’t use it.”
During an appearance in the afternoon oval office, Trump was requested under what circumstances he would exercise these emergency powers. Mr. Trump replied that “we have an act of insurrection for a reason” and “I would do it if it was necessary, but so far, it was not necessary”. He presented a set of conditions which, according to him, could justify invoking the act, in particular “if people were killed and the courts stood us, or that mayors or governors stood us.”
In the vision of Mr. Trump, at least some of these conditions have already been met. Trump described Portland, Oregon, one of the cities he has targeted for the deployments of the National Guard, as “on fire for years”, adding “I think that is the whole insurrection, a really criminal insurrection”.
Democratic officials resisted the deployments of the National Guard, the most important of Governor JB Pritzker in Illinois. Monday, Mr. Pritzker accused the president of having forced chaos and the confusion of creating a “pretext to invoke the law on insurrection so that he can send the army to our city”.
Mr. Trump’s remarks occurred after two court decisions over the weekend prevented the Trump administration from deploying hundreds of national guard troops outside the state in Oregon. Judge Karin Immergut, appointed by Mr. Trump, initially blocked his deployment of the military forces on Saturday, then expanded his restraint on Sunday after Mr. Trump tried to bypass him, telling the lawyers of the Ministry of Justice that the president had been “rooted” of his order.
Generally, the Insurrection Act gives the President the power to send military forces to the States to suppress widespread public disorders and to support civil organizations responsible for the application of laws. Before invoking it, the president must first call the “insurgents” to disperse, according to a research service report from the congress published in 2006. If stability is not restored, the president can then publish a decree to deploy troops
Trump has raised the idea of deploying the army for the national police since his first mandate. The insurgency law has not been invoked for more than 30 years, and the use by Mr. Trump of emergency powers for the application of routine laws would have profound implications for civil freedoms and for traditional constraints on federal power.
The law generally prohibits the use of soldiers as a domestic police force.
But the insurgency law authorizes the president to use the military to remove an insurrection if a state government requests it. And there is a certain latitude at the discretion of the president, as if the commander-in-chief considers that the disorders obstruct the laws of the United States. Trump and Stephen Miller, a principal assistant to the president, invoked the term “insurrection” in the remarks justifying the deployments of the National Guard.
The last time the act was used was in 1992, when riots in Los Angeles broke out after four white police officers were acquitted in the beats of Rodney King, a black motorist. The armed forces were also used to stifle civilian disorders after natural disasters, as for the widespread looting in Saint-Croix, in the American virgin islands, after Hurgagan Hugo in 1989, according to the Congressal Research Service report.
But the current situation in Chicago, Portland and other cities is far from general anarchy which has precipitated these emergencies. Even if Mr. Trump describes Chicago in an almost apocalyptic language, the murder rate in the city has decreased considerably in 2025, with 319 homicides recorded for the year until the end of September – down almost half compared to the height of the pandemic. Despite this, Trump said on Monday that he was “probably worse than almost all the cities of the world” and that even Afghanistan, ralouned from Taliban, “would marvel at the amount of crime that we have”.
