The Insurrection Act: repeated threats, never invoked, extending into 2026

Editor's note: his own posts show him threatening to send troops against Minnesota over protests, but no court or official finding establishes the threat as unlawful or retaliatory.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a rarely used 1807 law that, unlike the Title 10/32 authorities used in the deployments documented in MIL-01 through MIL-06, would allow troops to directly perform law-enforcement functions like arrests and searches, each time framed as a response to a specific city or state's alleged disorder. In October 2025, amid the Chicago deployment fight, he told reporters he believed he was 'allowed' to use it regardless of court rulings: 'Everybody agrees you're allowed to use that and there is no more court cases, there is no more anything... we can always use the Insurrection Act if we want', a direct claim that ongoing litigation was irrelevant to his authority, which legal scholars quoted in the same reporting called 'a direct threat to the... central pillars of American civilization' if taken as a governing legal theory.

After ending the LA/Portland/Chicago deployments on December 31, 2025 following the string of legal defeats documented in MIL-01 through MIL-06, Trump threatened the Act again on January 15, 2026, this time over protests in Minnesota following the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, by an ICE agent, and a second shooting the following night. On Truth Social, he wrote: 'If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don't obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E... I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty.'

The pattern across both threats is consistent: each follows an ICE enforcement action that provoked local protest, each characterizes the resulting protest activity itself (not an independent uprising) as the 'insurrection' or 'rebellion' the Act legally requires, and each has been directly disputed by the relevant state's governor. Legal experts, including Syracuse law professor emeritus William Banks, note the Act's broad textual discretion could genuinely let Trump 'work around a governor,' even as ACLU analysis maintains any invocation on the current record would be 'unprecedented and dangerous,' since Insurrection Act deployments still remain bound by First Amendment protections against using troops to suppress lawful protest.