Trump replied that “we have an Insurrection Act for a reason”, and “I’d do it if it were necessary, but so far it hasn’t been necessary”.
He laid out a set of conditions that he said could justify invoking the act, including “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or mayors or governors were holding us up”.
In Trump’s worldview, at least some of those conditions have already been met.
Trump has described Portland, Oregon, one of the cities he has targeted for National Guard deployments, as “on fire for years”, adding “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection”.
Democratic officials have resisted the National Guard deployments, most prominently Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois.
Yesterday, Pritzker accused the President of causing chaos and confusion to create a “pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city”.
Trump’s remarks came after two court rulings blocked the Trump Administration from deploying hundreds of out-of-state National Guard troops to Oregon.
Judge Karin Immergut, an appointee of Trump’s, initially blocked his deployment of military forces on Sunday and then broadened her restraining order on Monday after Trump tried to sidestep it, telling Justice Department lawyers that the President had been “in direct contravention” of her order.
Generally, the Insurrection Act gives a president the power to send military forces to states to quell widespread public unrest and to support civilian law enforcement agencies.
Before invoking it, a president must first call for “insurgents” to disperse, according to a Congressional Research Service report published in 2006.
If stability is not restored, a president may then issue an executive order to deploy troops
Trump has raised the idea of deploying the military for domestic law enforcement since his first term.
The Insurrection Act has not been invoked for more than 30 years, and Trump’s use of the emergency powers for routine law enforcement would carry profound implications for civil liberties and for the traditional constraints on federal power.
The law typically forbids the use of the military as a domestic police force.
But the Insurrection Act authorises a president to use the military to suppress an insurrection if a state government requests it.
And there is some leeway in a president’s discretion, such as whether the commander-in-chief considers that the unrest is obstructing laws of the US.
Both Trump and Stephen Miller, a senior aide to the President, have invoked the term “insurrection” in remarks justifying the National Guard deployments.
The last time that the act was used was in 1992, when riots in Los Angeles broke out after four white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, a black motorist.
Armed forces have also been used to quell civil disturbances after natural disasters, as with widespread looting in St Croix, in the US Virgin Islands, after Hurricane Hugo in 1989, according to the Congressional Research Service report.
The current situation in Chicago, Portland, and other cities is a far cry from the general lawlessness that precipitated those emergencies.
Even as Trump describes Chicago in near-apocalyptic language, the murder rate in the city has fallen significantly in 2025, with 319 homicides recorded for the year to the end of September — down by nearly half compared with the height of the Covid pandemic.
Even so, Trump asserted yesterday that it’s “probably worse than almost any city in the world” and that even Taliban-ruled Afghanistan would “marvel at how much crime we have”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Chris Cameron
Photograph by: Jamie Kelter Davis
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
