Trump threatens to use the Insurrection Act if Minnesota doesn’t stop ‘attacking ICE agents’

President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota if state lawmakers fail to stop protesters “from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E.”

The president posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, Thursday morning that protesters — who he referred to as “professional agitators and insurrectionists” — were attacking agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and demanded “corrupt politicians” stop the attacks.

“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., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State,” Trump wrote.

Anti-ICE protests have taken place in Minneapolis and other large cities across the U.S. in the days after an ICE agent fatally shot 37-year-old mother Renee Good. Trump administration officials have said the shooting was justified because Good allegedly “weaponized” her vehicle by making contact with the officer as she attempted to drive away from a group of agents who were swarming around her.

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The protests escalated late Wednesday after another ICE officer in Minneapolis shot a migrant in the leg after what the administration says was an altercation where the officer was attacked while attempting to make an arrest.

The Trump administration has deployed thousands of ICE and Border Patrol officers to Minneapolis, the North Star State’s most populous city, as part of his effort to combat fraud by Somali immigrants and arrest “the worst of the worst” so they can be deported. The massive contingent of federal immigration enforcement personnel have spent the last few weeks roaming the city’s streets in unmarked vehicles and aggressively confronting people who they believe may be in the U.S. illegally — a practice critics say is little more than racial profiling — while simultaneously surveilling and often arresting protesters.

State and local officials have denounced the massive federal presence as an “occupation” and have accused the president of deliberately seeking to escalate and inflame the situation and use any resulting unrest as a pretext for a violent crackdown.

The deployment of immigration officers to Minneapolis the latest example of Trump’s push to use federal resources to make a show of force against Democratic-led cities and states in hopes of provoking a response that will give him cause to crack down further by sending in active-duty troops under the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows the president to utilize active duty military or federalize National Guard troops in order to suppress uncontrollable protests or other civil disturbance situations in states.

While Trump claimed in his Truth Social post that “many” past presidents had invoked the law, it has been used only on a few select occasions in the last century. The last time it was invoked was more than three decades ago, when then-president George H.W. Bush sent the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division into Los Angeles to quell riots that erupted after a group of police officers were acquitted of charges stemming from the videotaped beating of a Black man, Rodney King, following a car chase.

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Bush invoked the act via an executive order on the third day of the riots at the request of then-California governor Pete Wilson and subsequently sent thousands of active duty soldiers to back up the many thousands of National Guard troops already deployed there.

It was the second time Bush invoked the act; the first was in 1989, to help put a stop to rioting in the US Virgin Islands after Hurricane Hugo.

President Lyndon Johnson also invoked the law in 1967 to send thousands of paratroopers from the army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions into Detroit after then-governor George Romney asked for help because state and local forces were overwhelmed by rioting that ultimately left more than 40 dead. Johnson’s two immediate predecessors, presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, also used the law without the consent of state governors to protect students integrating colleges and high schools in Mississippi and Arkansas.

While his predecessors only used the centuries-old law reluctantly or at the request of state officials, Trump has openly sought an opportunity to use active-duty forces — who are ordinarily forbidden from being deployed in the United States to enforce domestic laws — to occupy and pacify cities led by Democrats and inhabited largely by people who did not vote for him.

His preoccupations with Minnesota’s largest city — and the Insurrection Act — dates to his first term, when the videotaped murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a Minneapolis police officer touched off racial justice protests across the U.S. that occasionally degenerated into limited civil unrest.

When the protests reached Washington, Trump openly mused to aides about having soldiers violently put the protestors down.

In his 2021 book Frankly, We Did Win This Election, journalist Michael Bender reported that Trump told aides he wanted troops and police to “beat the f–k out” out of the protesters and “crack skulls.”

He also told top military and law enforcement officials that National Guard soldiers who’d been deployed to Washington should “just shoot” the protesters.

When then-Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley and then-Attorney General William Barr pushed back on the suggestion, Trump reportedly moderated his request.

“Well, shoot them in the leg—or maybe the foot,” Trump said. “But be hard on them!”

Since returning to office, he has repeatedly threatened to use the Insurrection Act to send troops into other Democratic-led cities, including Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago.