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President Donald Trump said he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy federal troops in U.S. cities after a federal judge blocked his administration from sending National Guard units to Portland.
“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 told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
The 1807 law has not been invoked since the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
“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 that people aren’t killed. We have to make sure that our cities are safe,” he added.
The order allows the president to deploy the military to suppress rebellions and enforce federal laws. If invoked, it would grant Trump the authority to federalize the Guard and deploy active duty forces to restore order. It would temporarily override the Posse Comitatus Act, which normally restricts the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
“If we don’t have to use it, I wouldn’t use it,” Trump later said on Newsmax, before adding, “If you take a look at what’s been going on in Portland, it’s been going on for a long time, and that’s insurrection. I mean, that’s pure insurrection.”
The comments came after a federal judge on Sunday blocked the Trump administration from deploying California and Texas National Guard troops to Portland’s streets amid protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The same court earlier had denied Trump from deploying Oregon’s own Guard to the city.
“Portland’s been on fire for years — and not so much saving it,” Trump told reporters Monday. “We have to save something else, because I think that’s all insurrection. I really think that’s really criminal insurrection.”
But Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, said there was no evidence recent protests against ICE made the federalized Guard troops necessary.
About 100 National Guard troops had already arrived in Portland to handle increasingly contentious protests outside an ICE facility, and that deployment had been expected to double by the end of the day before the judge issued her order.
California and Oregon had sued over the deployment.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller tore into the judge’s ruling, calling it “one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen.”
“There is no legal distinction between a state volunteering guardsmen to guard the border and volunteering guardsmen to guard a federal immigration facility,” Miller said. “Either we have a federal government, a supremacy clause, and a nation, or we don’t.”
Trump has also ordered Guard troops from other states to deploy to Chicago and Memphis.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker suggested Trump was trying to sow unrest so he could deploy the Insurrection Act at a news conference Monday.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” Pritzker said. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city.”
During Trump’s first administration, the White House floated the possibility of invoking the act in response to George Floyd protests, but ultimately did not.
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