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

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

Earlier this month, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he is “allowed” to use it if courts deny his efforts to send the National Guard to U.S. cities.

“Everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that and there is no more court cases, there is no more anything,” Trump said. “We’re trying to do it in a nicer manner, but we can always use the Insurrection Act if we want.”

WATCH: Examining the push to reform the Insurrection Act

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

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

“I think what you are seeing is the administration building a case before invoking something like the Insurrection Act,” said Loren Voss, Lawfare public service fellow. “I think it is absolutely on the table.”

Experts told PBS News that worries about the Insurrection Act arise from legal uncertainty about how it can be applied.

READ MORE: What U.S. law says about Trump’s deployment of active duty troops to Los Angeles

“People aren’t exactly sure what are the limitations of this law, and what circumstances could it be used when you don’t have official definitions that everyone agrees on,” Voss said.

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

Here’s what to know about the centuries-old law and how it’s been used in the past.

What is the Insurrection Act?

The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the U.S. president to deploy the military or federalize National Guard troops to enforce the law, specifically in the face of rebellion or other domestic instances of violence. Signed by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, it’s made up of different statutes and amendments from between the years of 1792 and 1871.

The president can use the Insurrection Act to override the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which stops the U.S. military from getting involved in domestic law enforcement and was created during the post-Reconstruction era with the premise that such military intervention is a hindrance 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’s governor or legislature requests the deployment of troops.

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

It can also be invoked against states’ wishes in some situations. That includes if the president deems that “unlawful obstruction” or rebellions make it impossible to enforce federal law through ordinary judicial proceedings, or if “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” deprive people of their constitutional rights. State authorities must either fail, refuse or be unable to protect the rights of its inhabitants for the act to apply.

Key words like “insurrection,” “domestic violence” and “unlawful obstruction” are not explicitly defined in the Insurrection Act, allowing a president flexibility in when to use the law. The 1827 Supreme Court case Martin v. Mott affirmed that the president has broad discretion in their interpretation of the act’s statutory language.

“Broad discretion is not infinite discretion,” said Joseph Nunn, counsel in the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The text of the Insurrection Act has to be read in light of American civic traditions, which tell us that domestic deployment of the military is a tool of last resort — that it’s not something we do in response to routine crime or routine policing needs.”

Nunn also noted that the law has not been “substantively amended since 1874,” and that it is still designed “for a 19th-century country that doesn’t exist anymore.”

There have been bipartisan efforts to reform the Insurrection Act in the past, including proposals to narrow the scope of circumstances under which the president can use it, requiring the president to consult with Congress and explain why they are invoking the act, and limiting domestic deployments of the military to 30 days.

When has the Insurrection Act been used?

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

A long line of civil rights marchers is watched over by a National Guard helicopter, which kept the column under continual surveillance on March 21, 1965. An estimated 5,000 marchers left Selma on a five-day trek to Montgomery. Photo by Bettmann/ Getty images

Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson all invoked the act against Southern states’ wishes at various times during the civil rights era of the 1950s and ‘60s. In multiple instances, local law enforcement or a state’s National Guard were attempting to prevent racial integration at schools and universities, and the act was used to force them to stand down or to quell riots.

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

Thirty-three years have gone by since the Insurrection Act was last invoked – the longest stretch of time since the act was instituted that it has not been used.

A member of the National Guard 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 Butow/ Corbis via Getty Images

In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson requested that President George H.W. Bush deploy federal troops to help quell civil unrest following the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers over the beating of Rodney King.

What has Trump said about using the Insurrection Act?

Trump has talked about invoking the Insurrection Act in both of his terms as president. Back in 2020, he warned he might deploy troops to put down 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.

WATCH: How Trump sees a 2nd term as a chance to promote loyalists and punish critics

At a 2022 conservative conference in Dallas, Trump suggested that “the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order” in places like “the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago,” including by “sending in the National Guard or the troops.”

Using a tough-on-crime message in his 2024 reelection campaign, Trump emphasized 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, keep a protestor back from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Portland, Oregon, on Oct. 6, 2025. President Donald Trump has openly mulled use of the Insurrection Act to deploy more troops into Democratic-led cities. Photo by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/AFP via Getty Images

“The next time, I am not waiting,” Trump said on the election trail in Iowa in March 2023, claiming cities such as New York and Chicago had become crime dens.

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

Asked by a reporter this month under which conditions or terms he would invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump said he would enact it “if people were being killed and courts were holding this up or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

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

“Congress might change the law, but the president is bound by the decisions of the federal courts as to the scope of his authority,” Nunn said. “And I think saying anything to the contrary is a direct threat to the sort of central pillars of American civilization.”

However, since the law gives the president broad discretion, utilizing the Insurrection Act “would allow him to sort of work around a governor, even a governor who’s opposed to a deployment in their state,” said William C. Banks, professor of law emeritus at Syracuse University. Banks said it would allow Trump to send National Guard troops to places such as Chicago.

Some Democratic lawmakers have voiced concern lately about Trump’s potential use of the Insurrection Act.

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

Voss said the concern people have about Trump’s use of the Insurrection Act is based on nervousness about having the military on U.S. streets.

“When you have federal forces on the ground, arresting even American citizens, tackling people, using more force than is necessary, I think you’ll expect protests,” Voss said.