insurrection

There are few laws President Trump name-checks more frequently than the Insurrection Act.

A 200-year-old constellation of statutes, the act grants emergency powers to thrust active-duty soldiers into civilian police duty, something otherwise barred by federal law.

Trump and his team have threatened to invoke it almost daily for weeks — most recently on Monday, after a reporter pressed the president about his escalating efforts to dispatch federalized troops to Democrat-led cities.

“Insurrection Act — yeah, I mean, I could do that,” Trump said. “Many presidents have.”

Roughly a third of U.S. presidents have called on the statutes at some point — but history also shows the law has been used only in moments of extraordinary crisis and political upheaval.

The Insurrection Act was Abraham Lincoln’s sword against secessionists and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s shield around the Little Rock Nine, the young Black students who were the first to desegregate schools in Arkansas.

Ulysses S. Grant invoked it more than half a dozen times to thwart statehouse coups, stem race massacres and smother the Ku Klux Klan in its South Carolina cradle.

But it has just as often been wielded to crush labor strikes and strangle protest movements. The last time it was invoked, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was in elementary school and most U.S. soldiers had not yet been born.

Now, many fear Trump could call on the law to quell opposition to his agenda.

“The Democrats were fools not to amend the Insurrection Act in 2021,” said Kevin Carroll, former senior counsel in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term. “It gives the president almost untrammeled power.”

It also precludes most judicial review.

“It can’t even be challenged,” Trump boasted Monday. “I don’t have to go there yet, because I’m winning on appeal.”

If that winning streak cools, as legal experts say it soon could, some fear the Insurrection Act would be the administration’s next move.

“The Insurrection Act is very broadly worded, but there is a history of even the executive branch interpreting it narrowly,” said John C. Dehn, an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

The president first floated using the Insurrection Act against protesters in the summer of 2020. But members of his Cabinet and military advisors blocked the move, as they did efforts to use the National Guard for immigration enforcement and the military to patrol the border.

“They have this real fixation on using the military domestically,” Carroll said. “It’s sinister.”

In his second term, Trump has instead relied on an obscure subsection of the U.S. code to surge federalized soldiers into blue cities, claiming it confers many of the same powers as the Insurrection Act.

Federal judges disagreed. Challenges to deployments in Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., and Chicago have since clogged the appellate courts, with three West Coast cases before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and one pending in the 7th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Illinois.

The result is a growing knot of litigation that experts say will fall to the Supreme Court to unwind.

As of Wednesday, troops in Oregon and Illinois are activated but can’t be deployed. The Oregon case is further complicated by precedent from California, where federalized soldiers have patrolled the streets since June with the 9th Circuit’s blessing. That ruling is set to be reheard by the circuit on Oct. 22 and could be reversed.

Meanwhile, what California soldiers are legally allowed to do while they’re federalized is also under review, meaning even if Trump retains the authority to call up troops, he might not be able to use them.

Scholars are split over how the Supreme Court might rule on any of those issues.

“At this point, no court … has expressed any sympathy to these arguments, because they’re so weak,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor at Yale Law School.

Koh listed the high court’s most conservative members, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., as unlikely to push back against the president’s authority to invoke the Insurrection Act, but said even some of Trump’s appointees — Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — might be skeptical, along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

“I don’t think Thomas and Alito are going to stand up to Trump, but I’m not sure that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts can read this statute to give him [those] powers.”

The Insurrection Act sidesteps those fights almost entirely.

It “would change not only the legal state of play, but fundamentally change the facts we have on the ground, because what the military would be authorized to do would be so much broader,” said Christopher Mirasola, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Congress created the Insurrection Act as a fail-safe in response to armed mobs attacking their neighbors and organized militias seeking to overthrow elected officials. But experts caution that the military is not trained to keep law and order, and that the country has a strong tradition against domestic deployments dating to the Revolutionary War.

“The uniformed military leadership in general does not like getting involved in the domestic law enforcement issue at all,” Carroll said. “The only similarities between police and military is that they have uniforms and guns.”

Today, the commander in chief can invoke the law in response to a call for help from state leaders, as George H.W. Bush did to quell the 1992 Rodney King uprising in L.A.

The statute can also be used to make an end-run around elected officials who refuse to enforce the law, or mobs who make it impossible — something Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy Jr. did in defense of school integration.

Still, modern presidents have generally shied from using the Insurrection Act even in circumstances with strong legal justification. George W. Bush weighed invoking the law after Hurricane Katrina created chaos in New Orleans but ultimately declined over fears it would intensify the already bitter power struggle between the state and federal government.

“There are any number of Justice Department internal opinions where attorneys general like Robert Kennedy or Nicholas Katzenbach said, ‘We cannot invoke the Insurrection Act because the courts are open,’” Koh said.

Despite its extraordinary power, Koh and other experts said the law has guardrails that may make it more difficult for the president to invoke it in the face of naked bicyclists or protesters in inflatable frog suits, whom federal forces have faced down recently in Portland.

“There are still statutory requirements that have to be met,” said Dehn, the Loyola professor. “The problem the Trump administration would have in invoking [the law] is that very practically, they are able to arrest people who break the law and prosecute people who break the law.”

That may be why Trump and his administration have yet to invoke the act.

“It reminds me of the run-up to Jan. 6,” Carroll said. “It’s a similar feeling that people have, a sense that an illegal or immoral and unwise order is about to be given.”

He and others say an invocation of the Insurrection Act would shift widespread concern about military policing of American streets into existential territory.

“If there’s a bad faith invocation of the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to go beat up anti-ICE protesters, there should be a general strike in the United States,” Carroll said. “It’s a real break-the-glass moment.”

At that point, the best defense may come from the military.

“If a really unwise and immoral order comes out … 17-year generals need to say no,” Carroll said. “They have to have the guts to put their stars on the table.”

Oct. 6 (UPI) — President Donald Trump told reporters Monday he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act to send National Guard troops into Portland, one day after a federal judge blocked the administration’s mobilization for a second time.

Trump planned to send 200 National Guard troops from California to Oregon to prevent protesters from confronting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the Oregon city, where he claimed there was a “criminal insurrection.”

“You look at what’s happening with Portland over the years, it’s a burning hell hole,” Trump told reporters, who had gathered in the Oval Office at the White House. “And then you have a judge that lost her way that tries to pretend that there’s no problem.”

“I’d do it if it was necessary. So far, it hasn’t been necessary. But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump said. “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’d do that. I mean, I want to make sure people aren’t killed.”

The Insurrection Act is a federal law, enacted in 1807, that allows the president to deploy the U.S. military to stop what the president considers to be a “criminal insurrection” against the United States.

On Sunday night, U.S. Judge Karin Immergut issued an order to block the administration from sending any National Guard troops to Portland, accusing the feds of circumventing her previous order.

Immergut wrote that the protests outside of Portland’s ICE facility did not pose a risk of rebellion, which made the deployment of federal troops illegal.

“This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Immergut wrote. The U.S. Justice Department has appealed the judge’s earlier ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the Trump administration has been dealing with a “legal insurrection against the laws and Constitution of the United States.”

“We need to have district courts in this country that see themselves as being under the laws and Constitution and not being able to take for themselves powers that are reserved solely for the president,” Miller added.

Trump has used the National Guard to address what he deems to be uncontrolled crime in other cities, including in Washington, D.C., where a deployment in August reduced violent crime by 49% and carjackings by 83%, according to data from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.

The White House is also targeting Chicago for troop deployment. The city and the state of Illinois sued the administration Monday, claiming deployment of the National Guard would “infringe on Illinois’ sovereignty and right to self-governance.”

American history has the receipts. As we approach the 250th anniversary of this nation’s birth, it ought to be common knowledge that putting the National Guard into the center of turmoil is not to be taken at all lightly. Federalizing the California Guard to quell a supposed insurrection on the streets of greater Los Angeles is a bold move of presidential showmanship and look-tough opportunism. It is also risky on many fronts.

We have been here before, and we would be wise to heed history’s caution. In the spring of 1894, a nationwide railroad strike, spreading out from the outskirts of Chicago, paralyzed freight and passenger rail traffic up and down California. Strikers took to the streets, occupied railroad depots, often with their families, waved signs, and erected tents and hastily constructed shanties. In Oakland, strikers who had “killed” a locomotive covered it in black crepe.

Political leaders and railroad officials insisted that the strikers were insurrectionists ripping at the fabric of the republic. But the public did not necessarily see things the same way. Strikers who were hunkered down in Northern California depots took in provisions from farmers loyal to their cause. A U.S. marshal sent to Sacramento to clear them out and get the trains moving was beaten up and insisted later that the local police force was sympathetic to the strikers.

Judging the Sacramento situation as an insurrection, Gov. H.H. Markham of Pasadena called up the National Guard, which mustered first in San Francisco on July 3. Some elderly Civil War veterans volunteered for duty but were politely turned away. Instead, young California guardsmen, each given 20 rounds of ammunition, marched to the Bay amid a jeering crowd, took a ferry to Oakland and tried to get to Sacramento by train.

But all train service had been interrupted by the strike, and skilled rail operators did not want to cross the picket lines. After nine hours, the exhausted guardsmen arrived in Sacramento early on the morning of July 4 — having taken a train through a circuitous route to avoid trouble. They marched to the city armory, then on to the occupied depot, where they were met by Sacramento members of the National Guard who were already deployed. Guardsmen — about 1,000 weekend warriors — stood in the hot sun, rifles at the ready alongside the Gatling gun they brought, facing the railroad strikers camped out in the depot with their wives and children. One Guardsman’s gun went off accidentally, killing a bystander. Officers ordered their men to fix their bayonets and, if ordered to shoot, to “aim to kill.”

One Sacramento unit reported that its men would not fire on their friends and relatives. Other Guardsmen wore their sympathies on their sleeves and lapels: pro-striker buttons. The strikers and their families began to mingle with the phalanx of guardsmen. “Frank, if you kill me you make your sister a widow,” one striker informed her brother-in-law in the Guard. Some guardsmen removed the ammunition from their weapons; others lowered them and just wandered away — toward the lemonade and ice that the protesters themselves provided. The strikers stayed in the depot for weeks. The whole thing was a chaotic farce.

Matters were hardly any less tense in Southern California. People lined the streets of downtown Los Angeles, chanting and cheering for the strikers, many of whom wore American flag lapels. Photographs of goings on in Sacramento and the Bay Area got passed from one Angeleno to another in the crowd. Guardsmen in L.A. expressed the same kind of trepidation about bringing militarized force to bear on the strikers. “If we had to fight Indians or some common enemy,” one guardsman offered in a revelatory admission, “we might have some fun and excitement. But this idea of shooting down American citizens simply because they are on strike for what they consider their rights is a horse of another color. All of the boys are against it from first to last, and many are in sympathy with the strikers.”

In hindsight, the federal and state response to the rail strike of 1894 appears to have lacked some consideration of unintended consequences. Calling in the Guard only created chaos, emboldened the strikers and, for a time at least, sustained much of the public’s support. The federal government, with some seeing 1894 as “the greatest crisis in our history,” allied with the rail corporations in a set of legal maneuverings that led to the deployment of federal troops across the country. As the strike dissipated, each side tried to take the high ground of intention and behavior: The crisis was lawlessness or it was unwarranted government overreach.

Though it is too soon to know how things will play out here in L.A. this time, nothing looks good from the rough scenes in downtown and the adjacent freeway exits and entrances.

Mark Twain said that “history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” Here we have that rhyme written in the latest Los Angeles verse of our tense world. The administration’s move to federalize the Guard in the name of quelling a domestic insurrection has poured more gasoline onto the tinder of our times here in the Southland.

Deverell is a professor of history at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences.

To hear our national leaders tell it, Los Angeles is in chaos and our governor and mayor are out to lunch with the police, blissfully ignoring reality as the city burns.

“These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED,” President Trump wrote on social media, shortly after ordering the National Guard onto our streets.

“To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” he wrote in a memo Saturday, authorizing 2,000 National Guard troops to be deployed in L.A. for at least 60 days.

Put down your matcha lattes and trade in your Birkenstocks for boots, folks. We are the revolution, apparently, so dangerous only a seasoned military can stop us. The only problem, of course, is that Los Angeles is not in chaos on this particular sunny Sunday and the vast majority of Angelenos are just trying to enjoy the weekend without becoming a federal prisoner.

Trump’s memo will go into the history books as a moment when presidential power expanded to put under his control a military force aimed at U.S. civilians. Although not unprecedented, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, said it was “stunning.”

All the more so because the deployment is based on a lie. Yes, there has been some violence in the last few days as federal immigration authorities round up criminals and regular folks alike in deportation sweeps. If you keep the camera angle tight on those protests, as many media outlets have done, it does look dire.

Rocks being thrown, even Molotov cocktails. Masked protesters hammering at concrete pillars outside a downtown federal building. Cars on fire.

All of this is terrible and those responsible should be arrested — by our local police and sheriffs, who are more than up to the job of handling a few hundred protesters.

But 99% of this city is business as usual, with brunches and beach walks and church and yoga classes. And even in those few pockets where the protests are happening, such as a march downtown Sunday, this is Los Angeles — I’ve seen more chaos after a Lakers game.

Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School, told my colleague Seema Mehta that although it’s extremely unusual for a president to take federal control of troops, it’s not unprecedented and maybe not illegal. It happened in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict.

“One of the exceptions is when there is violence and the inability of the federal government to enforce federal laws,” Levinson said. “And that is exactly what the president is arguing is happening.”

My intrepid colleagues at this paper have been on the ground since the first protests began, and, as their reporting shows, the majority of what is happening is peaceful and isolated.

Even the cops agree. And seriously, when the cops are agreeing there’s no riot — there is no riot.

“Demonstrations across the City of Los Angeles remained peaceful and we commend all those who exercised their First Amendment rights responsibly,” the LAPD wrote in a statement Saturday night.

Still, by Sunday morning, those troops, in full military gear with guns in hand (presumably with less lethal ammo, I hope), were arriving. The U.S. Northern Command tweeted that the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team has some members on the ground in Los Angeles, with more to come.

“These operations are essential to halting and reversing the invasion of illegal criminals into the United States. In the wake of this violence, California’s feckless Democrat leaders have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, further explained before they arrived.

Also, as you plan your week, there is now a dress code — at least for civilians, not the authorities intent on hiding their identities.

“(F)rom now on, MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests. What do these people have to hide, and why???” Trump wrote.

All this, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, is “not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis.”

He’s right — Los Angeles has landed a starring role in Trump’s war on brown people. It makes sense. We are a city of immigrants, of all colors, and a Democratic — and democratic — one at that. What’s not to hate?

Mayor Karen Bass told my colleague Rachel Uranga that her office had tried to talk to the White House to tell them “there was absolutely no need to have troops on the ground,” but got nowhere.

“This is posturing,” Bass said.

“They want violence,” Newsom added in a Sunday email. “Don’t give them the spectacle they want.”

I’m not sure that’s possible. There will always be the bad actors, the violent ones, at any protest. And again — they should be arrested.

But Trump is going to laser-focus on those few to make an example of this city, and to increase his own power.

Because although this “insurrection” is a fantasy, his dream of more power seems all too real.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that he is firing Kim Sajet, the longtime director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, for being “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.”

The announcement, made on Truth Social, comes as Trump pushes to remake some of the highest profile national arts institutions so they align with his political agenda. In February, he dismissed much of the Kennedy Center board in order to have himself appointed chairman. In March, he targeted the Smithsonian Institution by issuing an executive order demanding an end to federal funding for exhibitions and programs based on racial themes that “divide Americans.”

The National Portrait Gallery did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. It is unclear, as with many of Trump’s social media decrees, if the organization was expecting the latest action.

Sajet was appointed director in 2013 by Wayne Clough, then the secretary of the Smithsonian. Sajet, the first woman to serve in the role, had come from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where she was president and chief executive. Sajet, a Dutch national, was born in Nigeria and raised in Australia.

In his Truth Social post, Trump said he was terminating Sajet “upon the request and recommendation of many people.” He said her support of diversity and inclusion was “totally inappropriate for her position.” He promised to name her replacement soon.

The National Portrait Gallery was founded by Congress in 1962 and houses more than 26,000 objects, including portraits of all the nation’s presidents. It shares a building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and attracts about 1 million visitors a year.

The gallery contains a photo portrait of Trump taken in 2017 by Matt McClain, with a caption that reads, in part, “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.”