Trump considers invoking Insurrection Act to send troops to Portland

U.S. President Donald Trump is considering invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops to Democratic-run cities if judges bar him from activating the National Guard, as he intends to do to provide security on the streets of Chicago and Portland, he said Monday, as tensions escalate over the deployment orders.

Speaking from the Oval Office, Trump compared the situation in Portland, the largest city in the state of Oregon, to an “insurrection.” “Portland is on fire. Portland’s been on fire for years,” he asserted. The president claims that the city is dominated by the anti-fascist movement (Antifa) — which he has declared a terrorist organization — and that night after night for months, violent protests have been taking place around the offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency charged with enforcing his harsh deportation policy. Therefore, he considers it essential to deploy the National Guard there. “And then you have a judge that lost her way that tries to pretend that there’s no problem,” the president added.

Asked by a reporter if he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act and under what conditions, the Republican responded that “if I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to deploy the U.S. Armed Forces on domestic soil or to take control of the National Guard, a reserve force normally under the command of the states, to combat a domestic armed uprising.

Trump also described his administration’s clashes with local Democratic officials and the courts over his ordered deployment of the National Guard to Portland as a “criminal insurrection.”

This isn’t the first time the president, who last week warned about the “enemy within” and ordered the Pentagon to train units to quell riots, has flirted with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act. During the election campaign, he already hinted that he could use it to suppress violent protests.

The Republican’s remarks came as the states of Illinois and Oregon filed lawsuits to block the president’s orders to deploy hundreds of soldiers from the local and Texas National Guard to Chicago, and the California National Guard to Portland. In both cases, as he has done in recent demonstrations in Los Angeles, Washington, and Memphis, he argued that violence — whether crime or street protests against his immigration policy — is out of control on the streets and that such extreme measures are necessary to combat it. Democratic officials counter that crime has been declining in recent years in all of these places and that the protests have been small and not particularly rowdy.

A federal judge in Oregon, Karin Immergut — a Trump appointee — on Saturday provisionally barred the deployment of the National Guard to Portland for at least two weeks. The judge, highly critical of the administration’s action, considered that with his order, Trump may have violated the Tenth Amendment, which limits the power of the federal government, and federal laws that prevent the military from being deployed domestically.

Faced with the judge’s veto, the administration ordered the activation of 200 California National Guard troops for deployment to neighboring Oregon. Almost immediately, in response to a new appeal from Oregon authorities, Immergut issued an order Sunday night prohibiting the deployment of any type of National Guard, regardless of where it came from.

On Monday, Illinois authorities, led by Governor J.B. Pritzker, went to court seeking an urgent judicial decision against Trump’s intention to deploy troops from the local and Texas National Guard to Chicago. In this case, however, the judge in charge of the case, appointed by Biden, has declined to comment, arguing that she needs more time to review the arguments before making a decision.

At the White House, presidential spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Monday described Judge Immergut’s decision as “disconnected from reality and the law.” The judge wrote that the protests in Portland have not significantly disrupted public order. Trump’s representative countered that federal facilities in that city have been “under siege” for months. She also confirmed that the administration will appeal Immergut’s decision.

Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff and domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, was even more hostile toward the judiciary, claiming on Monday that for the past nine months there has been “a legal insurrection” underway in which district court judges have issued rulings that are “blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.”

Trump’s views appear to enjoy enthusiastic support from his most radical supporters in the MAGA movement. These supporters are calling on the administration to ignore court rulings that run counter to their strategy.

The activist Laura Loomer, who has a direct line to the president, told the website Axios that “at some point in time, the Administration is going to have to tell these judges to go pound sand, or else we’re not going to be seeing the [campaign] promises fulfilled.” And Matt Walsh, of the pro-Trump website The Daily Wire, posted on X that “we have long reached the point where Trump needs to openly defy these judges. Some random federal judge has no authority to decide how and if troops are deployed.”

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