Trump has floated invoking the Insurrection Act. It's only been done a handful of times in modern history.

Yahoo

11-06-2025

President Donald Trump has said he may invoke the Insurrection Act, a law that grants the president the authority to deploy the U.S. military on American soil, as protests and unrest continue in Los Angeles over raids and deportations of immigrants.
Though the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act broadly limits the military from participating in civilian law enforcement, the 218-year-old Insurrection Act, signed by President Thomas Jefferson, allows the president to deploy the military to suppress an "insurrection," "domestic violence" or other public disturbances that obstruct the execution of federal laws or deprive people of constitutional rights.
The law states that a president may send the military — either in consultation with state officials or when 'the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States' — against American citizens.
Trump, who has not invoked the act, has relied on other executive authorities to deploy 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles, along with 700 active-duty Marines, to the anger of both state and national Democrats. The Marines are forbidden from participating in law enforcement activities unless Trump officially invokes the Insurrection Act.
But Trump has said he is considering doing so.
"If there's an insurrection I would certainly invoke it,' Trump said from the Oval Office on Tuesday. 'We'll see … If we didn't get involved right now Los Angeles would be burning."
In the nearly 250 years of the nation's history, the Insurrection Act or its predecessors has only been invoked 30 times, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal law and policy organization. Several of those times were during the civil rights movement, when both presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson invoked the act, including in the wake of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Here are four times presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act.
The most recent declaration under the Insurrection Act was in 1992 — and also in Los Angeles.
In the late afternoon of April 29, 1992, three white police officers were acquitted of brutally beating Rodney King, who was Black. The beating, which was caught on camera, lasted some 15 minutes and left King with skull fractures, broken bones and permanent brain damage.
Fires were set and stores looted. Dozens were killed, thousands were injured, and even more arrested.
By the third day of rioting, President George H. W. Bush had had enough. Though state-controlled guard troops had already quelled some of the violence by then, Bush invoked the Insurrection Act on May 1, 1992.
Bush appeared to have the support of California Gov. Pete Wilson, a fellow Republican who had already ordered 4,000 troops into the streets. But the troops were unprepared, according to TIME magazine, and were short of ammunition and lacked basics like flak jackets, batons and riot shields.
'What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights,' Bush said at the time. 'It's not about the great cause of equality that all Americans must uphold. It's not a message of protest. It's been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple. And let me assure you: I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order. What is going on in L.A. must and will stop. As your President I guarantee you this violence will end.'
It wasn't Bush's first time invoking the act.
In September 1989, Bush dispatched more than 1,000 military police to the Virgin Islands after two days of looting and violence on St. Croix, the result of devastation caused by Hurricane Hugo.
In the wake of the storm, 90 percent of the island's buildings were damaged, according to reports from The Washington Post at the time, while communications and transportation were also knocked out. As looting unfolded, people were reportedly carrying guns around the streets.
'Units and members of the Armed Forces of the United States will be used to suppress the violence described in the proclamation and to restore law and order in and about the Virgin Islands,' Bush wrote in his order.
The federal government received some requests for aid from the territorial government, the nonpartisan law and policy journal Just Security found, but to what degree has been disputed. The order did receive some pushback from then-Democratic Gov. Alexander Farrelly, who told the Associated Press that he had not yet asked for federal troops. Farrelly also denied claims that there was 'anarchy' in the Islands.
'There is some looting, no doubt about that,' Farrelly said, according to The New York Times. "But there is no near state of anarchy. And I should know. I'm in the streets every day and I'm the governor of this territory."
In 1987, Cuban inmates facing deportation staged a riot at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta. The prisoners seized dozens of hostages and set fire to the prison. At least one person was killed and others were shot, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In response, then-President Ronald Reagan invoked the Insurrection Act.
'I have been informed that certain persons, in unlawful combination and conspiracy, have engaged in the violent criminal seizure and detention of persons and property in the vicinity of Atlanta, Georgia,' Reagan said in his proclamation. 'Their actions have made it impracticable to enforce certain laws of the United States there by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.'
Despite his proclamation, troops were never deployed to the prison. Instead, federal law enforcement officers, who were advised by several U.S. Army special forces soldiers, managed to quell the riot.
The prison takeover lasted 11 days before the incarcerated men gave up control of the penitentiary and released the remaining hostages.
In the aftermath of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on. April 4, 1968, a wave of civil unrest swept the nation.
For 10 days after King's murder, nearly 200 cities saw looting, arson and thousands of instances of property damage. Washington saw the most damage — more than 1,200 fires and $24 million in insured property damage, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Johnson appeared to emphasize with many protesters, including those within the Black community.
'If I were a kid in Harlem, I know what I'd be thinking right now. I'd be thinking that 'the whites have declared open season on my people, and they're going to pick us off one by one unless I get a gun and pick them off first,'' Johnson said.
But as rioting continued, Johnson on April 5, 1968, called in the guard and the armed forces to help end violence and assist in the 'restoration of law and order.'
Two days later, Johnson invoked the act twice more to deploy troops to Chicago and Baltimore, where rioting was also still underway.