What is the Insurrection Law? Here’s what Trump said about using it

President Donald Trump has repeatedly indicated that he is open to invoking the Insurrection Act, a law dating back to 1807 that allows the president to deploy the military in the United States.

Earlier this month, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was “allowed” to use it if the courts rejected his efforts to send the National Guard to US cities.

“Everyone agrees you’re allowed to use that, and there’s no more court cases, there’s no more,” Trump said. “We’re trying to do it better, but we can always use the Insurrection Act if we want.”

He watches: Study of the push for Insurrection Act reform

Trump’s attempt to send the National Guard to Portland remains in limbo after a federal appeals court blocked an earlier ruling by a three-judge panel that would have allowed him to deploy troops. A district judge in Chicago indefinitely banned the Guard from deploying to that city unless the Supreme Court intervened. Similar legal battles are taking place over deployments in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Memphis.

Vice President J.D. Vance said Oct. 12 on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “the president is considering all his options” but is not opposed to using the Insurrection Act.

“I think what you’re seeing is the administration building a case before enacting something like the Insurrection Act,” said Lauren Vos, a public service fellow at Lawfare. “I think it’s absolutely on the table.”

Concerns about the Insurrection Act arise from legal uncertainty about how it will be enforced, experts told PBS News.

Read more: What US law says about Trump’s deployment of active duty troops to Los Angeles

“People aren’t quite sure what the limits of this law are, and what circumstances it can be used in when you don’t have formal definitions that everyone agrees on,” Vos said.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., suggested Tuesday that Trump “may use the Insurrection Act as a weapon to expand his reach and turn these cities and states into armed camps and police states.” Blumenthal led an effort to introduce legislation in June aimed at restricting the president’s “broad and ambiguous authority to deploy troops.”

Here’s what to know about the ancient law and how it was used in the past.

What is the Insurrection Law?

The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the President of the United States to deploy the Army or federal National Guard troops to enforce the law, specifically in the face of insurrection or other domestic violence. It was signed by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, and consisted of various laws and amendments from 1792 to 1871.

The president can use the Insurrection Act to override the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars the U.S. military from involvement in domestic law enforcement, and which was created during the post-Reconstruction era on the premise that such military involvement constituted an impediment to democracy and personal liberty.

The president is allowed to use the Insurrection Act based on certain criteria. It can be used in situations where a state governor or legislature requests the deployment of troops.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson advised Alabama Governor George C. Wallace said he would work to unite the Alabama National Guard to protect the voting rights march in Selma if Wallace was “unable or unwilling” to call in the Guard to do that job. Photo by Pittman/Getty Images

It can also be invoked against the wishes of states in some situations. This includes if the president finds that “unlawful obstruction” or insurrection makes it impossible to enforce federal law through ordinary judicial procedures, or if “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” deprives people of their constitutional rights. State authorities must fail, refuse, or be unable to protect the rights of their residents for the law to be enforced.

Keywords such as “insurrection,” “domestic violence,” and “unlawful obstruction” are not explicitly defined in the Insurrection Act, allowing the president flexibility in when to use the law. The 1827 Supreme Court case, Martin v. Mott, affirmed that the president has broad discretion in his interpretation of the statutory language of the law.

“Broad discretion is not absolute power,” said Joseph Nunn, counsel for the Freedom and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The text of the Insurrection Act must be read in light of American civilian tradition, which tells us that the domestic deployment of the military is an instrument of last resort — that it is not something we do in response to routine crimes or routine police needs.”

Nunn also noted that the law had not been “substantially amended since 1874,” and that it was still designed “for a 19th-century state that no longer exists.”

There have been bipartisan efforts to reform the Insurrection Act in the past, including proposals to narrow the scope of circumstances in which a president can use it, require the president to consult with Congress and explain why the law was enacted, and limit domestic deployments of the military to 30 days.

When was the Insurrection Act used?

Throughout American history, the Insurrection Act has been used for a variety of reasons, from its invocation by President Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of the Civil War, to President Grover Cleveland’s response to violent labor disputes.

A long line of civil rights demonstrators was monitored by a National Guard helicopter, which kept the line under constant surveillance on March 21, 1965. An estimated 5,000 demonstrators left Selma for a five-day trip to Montgomery. Photo by Pittman/Getty Images

Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson brought this law against the wishes of Southern states at various times during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. In multiple cases, local law enforcement or the state National Guard were trying to prevent racial integration in schools and universities, and this law was used to force them to stand down or quell riots.

After the violence of Bloody Sunday in 1965, when Alabama state troopers attacked protesters at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Johnson used the Insurrection Act to protect activists on their third protest march from Selma to Montgomery. This was the last time troops were deployed by the president without the governor’s approval.

It has been thirty-three years since the Insurrection Act was last enacted – the longest period of time since the law was passed and not used.

A National Guard member stands near a burning building during the Los Angeles riots in April 1992, after a jury acquitted the police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King. Photo by David Buteau/Corbis via Getty Images

In 1992, California Governor Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to deploy federal troops to help quell civil unrest after the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating death of Rodney King.

What did Trump say about using the Insurrection Act?

Trump has talked about invoking the Insurrection Act during his two terms as president. In 2020, he warned that he might deploy troops to quell the George Floyd protests.

When Trump lost the 2020 election, some of his supporters called on him to use it to prevent President-elect Joe Biden from assuming the presidency.

He watches: How Trump sees a second term as an opportunity to strengthen loyalists and punish critics

At the 2022 Dallas Conservative Convention, Trump suggested that “the next president should use all the powers at his disposal to restore order” in places like “Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods,” including by “sending in the National Guard or troops.”

Using a tough-on-crime message in his 2024 re-election campaign, Trump asserted that if he returned to the White House, he would deploy troops without being asked by local authorities.

Federal agents, including members of the Department of Homeland Security, block a protester from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Portland, Oregon, on October 6, 2025. President Donald Trump has publicly considered using the Insurrection Act to deploy more troops in Democratic-led cities. Photography by Mathieu-Louis Rolland/AFP via Getty Images

“Next time, I won’t wait,” Trump said during the campaign in Iowa in March 2023, claiming that cities like New York and Chicago had become dens of crime.

On the first day of his second term, Trump suggested in an executive order that the Insurrection Act could be used to control the southern border, but he has not invoked the law so far for any reason.

When asked by a reporter this month what terms or conditions under he would invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump said he would enact it “if people are being killed and the courts are obstructing it or governors or mayors are obstructing us.”

“The most troubling part of that statement” is what Trump suggested if “the courts get in our way,” Nunn said. Noun believes that the justification constitutes a “direct threat to the rule of law.”

“Congress may change the law, but the president is bound by the decisions of the federal courts regarding the scope of his authority,” Nunn said. “And I think saying anything to the contrary is a direct threat to this kind of cornerstone of American civilization.”

However, since the law gives the president broad discretion, using the Insurrection Act “would allow him to get around a governor, even a governor who opposes the deployment of troops in his state,” said William C. Banks, a law professor emeritus at Syracuse University. Banks said she would allow Trump to send National Guard troops to places like Chicago.

Some Democratic lawmakers have recently expressed concern about Trump potentially using the Insurrection Act.

Read more: In Chicago, the massive show of force signals a sharp escalation in Trump’s anti-immigration campaign

“In the hands of a man who wants to be king, and who almost every day undermines the checks and balances of the Constitution, the Insurrection Act as currently drafted would serve as yet another tool for dangerous executive overreach,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said last week.

Vos said people’s concern about Trump’s use of the Insurrection Act is based on tensions about the military’s presence on the streets of the United States.

“When you have federal forces on the ground, even arresting American citizens, manhandling people, using more force than necessary, I think you expect protests,” Vos said.