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President Donald Trump and his top aides are using the word “insurrection” more frequently to describe anti-ICE protests in places like Portland.
Trump also told reporters he could potentially invoke the Insurrection Act to send US troops to cities.
“I really think that’s really criminal insurrection,” he said in the White House of protests in Portland, before promising to make the city safe.
His aide Stephen Miller referred to a judge’s order barring, for now, the deployment of National Guard troops in Portland over the objections of local officials as “legal insurrection.”
“There is an effort to delegitimize the core function of the federal government of enforcing our immigration laws and our sovereignty,” Miller said later in an interview with CNN’s Boris Sanchez on Monday.
It’s with that context that a reporter asked Trump if he would invoke the Insurrection Act to get around temporary restraining orders and deploy National Guard troops where governors and mayors don’t want them.
What is the Insurrection Act?
Trump suggested he could invoke the Insurrection Act in order to send US troops to Portland. He has already tried to label far left anti-fascist, or Antifa, protesters, as domestic terrorists.
“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump said Monday. “If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I do that.”
The law allows the deployment of troops in the US in certain limited situations. First passed in 1792, it was last tweaked in 1871.
The Insurrection Act works in tandem with the Posse Comitatus Act, which was passed in 1878 and generally prohibits the use of the military inside the US.
How would the Insurrection Act be invoked?
First, a state’s governor or legislature can request it. That’s what happened in 1992, the last time the Insurrection Act was invoked. Back then, President George H.W. Bush got a request from then-California Gov. Pete Wilson for help addressing riots in Los Angeles.
Officials in Chicago and Portland seem unlikely to request that kind of help. Instead, Trump could theoretically say he needs the military to enforce federal authority.
The pertinent language includes this, which seems to give the president the final say when he or she, “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.”
Has the Insurrection Act been invoked over the objections of a governor?
Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy both invoked the Insurrection Act over the wishes of governors in order to facilitate school integration after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Eisenhower stood down the Arkansas National Guard in order to deploy the 101st Airborne Division in Little Rock.