America has never seen a moment in modern history as the federal occupation of Minneapolis. Thousands of masked federal agents with uncertain authority are ransacking the area, attack demonstrators and innocent people, abuse constitutional guaranteesmarking daycares and schools, take people off the street in unmarked vans based on the color of their skin or accent, and recklessly and relentlessly provoking violent clashes with civilians – all against the noise, expressed repeatedly wishes of local and state officials.
On Saturday morning, federal agents—apparently from the Border Patrol—shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Prettiin the middle of a chaotic fight outside a well-known Minneapolis donut shop after officers began harassing and shoving him in the street. It was the second time this month that federal agents used deadly force just seconds after beginning an encounter with a Minneapolis civilian who had never posed a threat to the agents.
All this unnecessary violence begs the question: Why can’t elected officials do more to stop this? Besides the courts, doesn’t the Minnesota government have cards to play in the battle against the Trump-led occupation, like calling in the National Guard to confront federal agents?
The answer, in its shortest form, is generally no, due to the fundamental underpinnings of American federalism. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have repeatedly called on President Donald Trump to recall your operation. On Saturday, they again told the public that they had begged the federal government to reconsider and remove more than 3,000 immigration agents, who together they are almost more numerous the region’s 10 largest state and local police departments combined.
But Walz and Frey did not take explicit steps to use state and local governments to actively resist, because a key element of federalism in the United States is that a state cannot truly resist federal authority or expel federal law enforcement officials. This principle exists primarily because the federal government is supposed to be the “protector” of last resort if local and state officials fail to uphold the rights of ordinary citizens. What is remarkable, and worrying, is that Trump is now using this arrangement to punish his political opponents according to his own whims, an action as un-American as any president has ever taken and which threatens the very union of the United States.
In Minnesota, tension between national officials and state and local elected officials is already running high, and animosity is also rising between federal and local law enforcement.
Minneapolis police rushed to condemn the shootings of Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, who were shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on January 7. vocal in recent days about how their own officers have been harassed and even assaulted by immigration officers outside of service. (“Each of [the off-duty officers stopped by immigration agents] is a person of color,” police chief said complained.) DHS agents attempted to deny local police access to the scene of the shooting on Saturday, forcing them to return with a court order, and this time again, FBI agents apparently resisted allowing access. “We are in uncharted territory here,” said the head of the state investigative bureau.
A governor also has the state’s National Guard, which could hypothetically be deployed to counter ICE’s actions. Yesterday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced that he activated them after the shooting, amid a series of tense hours that saw the NBA postpone its evening game in Minneapolis for security reasons. In a statement whose banality and simplicity understate how staggering the situation is, the governor’s office said the guard was needed because “local law enforcement resources are strained due to the disruption to public safety caused by thousands of federal immigration agents in our neighborhoods.” So far, it appears Walz’s intention is to use the National Guard and local and state police as a buffer between federal forces and Minnesotans, rather than as a complement to street resistance efforts.
For now, state and local officials — like those that also suffered from harsh immigration rollouts last year, such as in Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere — are primarily focused on going to federal courts for relief. Overnight, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to ensure federal officials do not destroy or alter evidence related to Saturday’s shooting. More broadly, Minnesota has a ongoing trial aimed at completely blocking immigration deployments.
This restraint is almost certainly aimed at preventing further escalation, driven by President Trump’s policies. apparent eagerness declare Minnesota in a state of “insurrection” which would allow it to activate and deploy federal troops against its residents. Trump has already launched unprecedented criminal investigations against Walz and Frey, and others, with the apparent aim of creating pretexts that would facilitate the use of the Insurrection Act.
The situation is so unprecedented — and the Trump administration’s political incentives so skewed by social media and the president’s own foibles — that it is impossible to understand or predict how the coming days and weeks might unfold. It’s especially difficult to know how elected state or local leaders could make things better for their constituents and neighbors — and, because of the lawlessness of the Trump administration, things may get worse on many occasions.
President Trump and his Department of Homeland Security appear, in many ways, to be trying to provoke a real confrontation between federal forces and local or state authorities. DHS and White House officials have repeatedly called protesters exercising their First Amendment rights in Minnesota “domestic terrorists,” and they have been quick to coat the victim of Saturday’s shooting; They ended an investigation into the ICE officer who killed Renée Nicole Good earlier this month and ordered a federal investigation into Good and her spouse, leading to the resignation the FBI agent assigned to the case; at least six federal prosecutors also resignedrefusing to participate in the attempt to scapegoat a victim.
In a deeply disturbing development, ICE agents have begun reporting that people who simply register them are entered into a national database as “domestic terrorists.” ‘Have fun with it,’ ICE officer in Maine was captured joking to a civilian who was filming him. (The fact that the assault on Minneapolis had little to do with violent crime or immigration issues was highlighted Saturday when Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to state officials saying they would withdraw federal forces if Minnesota complied with a request from Trump to turn over its voter rolls.)
Although Walz and Frey’s apparent passivity in the face of a widespread federal attack on their constituents angers activists, this may be a case where caution and restraint prevail when it comes to courage. Citizens are already generating massive resistance to the federal presence in Minnesota, and any additional “official” resistance from local or state officials could tip the scales in Trump’s favor and bring federal troops into the picture, an escalation that would surely be worse for residents, the state, and the nation as a whole. Trump has already put 1,500 federal soldiers on standby in Alaska to deploy to Minnesota, and everything indicates that he is looking for an excuse to do so.
Such a declaration of “insurrection” or deployment of federal troops to further subjugate local and state authorities would bring the country closer to the closest it has come to civil war since…the Civil War.
A brief history of being sent to the troops
Under normal circumstances, the use of federal military forces in domestic situations is strongly proscribed and limited by two sets of laws, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the military for the enforcement of civil laws, and the Insurrection Acta series of laws dating from 1792 specifying when a president can call in troops to quell rebellions and domestic violence.
Given the critical importance of a principle it protects, the Insurrection Act is very outdated, as recent reform efforts showed. As national security lawyer, Scott Anderson wrote in 2024, “Few principles of American government are more fundamental than the idea that the United States military should not be used against Americans except in the most dire circumstances. But even fewer fundamental principles are so loosely anchored in law…The fact that previous presidents have done so relatively rarely is more the product of long-standing political norms than of strict legal limits.”
While state National Guard units and federal troops are routinely used to help respond to natural disasters at the request of and in coordination with local and state officials, since Reconstruction presidents only reluctantly sent federal agents or troops against the wishes of state governments. Even then, it happens in very limited circumstances, such as defending civil rights and liberties when state officials refuse to do so. (National Guard units generally report to state governors, although they can be federalized by presidential order to report to the commander in chief, meaning Trump could still bypass Walz by activating them by placing them under direct control of the Pentagon anyway.)
In fact, while National Guard troops were used repeatedly in the 20th century by governors and presidents to break strikes – often brutally – it was not until the civil rights movement and the 1960s that federal troops began to play a more regular role in response to civil unrest.
In 1957, when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the state’s National Guard to block int egregation of Little Rock Central High School, President Dwight Eisenhower responded by federalizing the 10,000 Arkansas National Guardsmen and deploying troops from the 101st Airborne Division to force the integration of the school and protect the nine black students who attempted to enroll there. The mission was a key learning opportunity intended for the army, and when the army manual on “civil unrest” was reissued in 1958, it had doubled in size and now contained a new section on riot control.
Each year of his short presidency, President John F. Kennedy deployed federal marshals or troops against the wishes of state officials as the civil rights movement gained momentum. In 1961, some 400 federal marshals were sent to Alabama to protect the Freedom Riders, and when James Meredith attempted to enroll as the first black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962, Kennedy sent federal marshals who then confronted incredibly violent white protesters.
With the marshals under attack, Kennedy deployed first the Mississippi National Guard, then thousands of federal troops. (This military operation, codenamed RAPID ROAD, was actually the first and only time during the Cold War that the military activated and used plans it had developed to quell civil unrest following a nuclear attack.)
Then, in 1963, Kennedy again relied on the National Guard to help integrate the University of Alabama, and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, used marshals and the National Guard to protect civil rights protesters in Selma after Alabama state troopers infamously attacked them at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an incident known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Presidents began using military troops, particularly the national army. Guard, more commonly in American cities in the 1960s. During the summer riots that followed police brutality in Detroit in 1967, President Johnson ordered elements of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions into the city, and Michigan Governor George Romney called in the Michigan National Guard; more than 40 people were killed, more than half of them by Detroit police. National Guard troops killed 11 people, including a 4-year-old girl, Tanya Blanding, who died when a Michigan guard opened fire with a tank-mounted .50-caliber machine gun on her apartment after mistakenly believing a sniper was inside.
While the troops were used again during the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the disadvantages and risks of such deployments were made clear two years later at Kent State University when National Guard troops opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four people and wounding nine.
Over the years, the domestic use of federal troops (the 1992 Los Angeles riots being an exception) and presidents and attorneys general has been incredibly limited, until the Trump administration has generally gone out of its way to coordinate federal law enforcement reinforcements in cities or states.
Even at the height of marshal and troop deployments in the South, in the midst of the civil rights movement, presidents acted only after state officials refused to quell violence aimed at Americans exercising their constitutional rights or, in the case of Alabama state troopers, were the cause of violence against peaceful citizens themselves. Often, a president acted only after showing defiance based on a lawful court order – ensuring that there was a second branch of government acting as a check and balance and trigger for such federal action.
While Trump said immigration enforcement efforts in Minneapolis, like previous efforts in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Charlotte, Portland and, more recently, Maine– is intended to enforce “law and order,” there is no apparent rhyme, reason, or necessity to deployments beyond political terror.
Trump is now attempting something unprecedented that contravenes every historical tradition in the United States: the brutal application of federal forces against a state and region for no apparent reason other than the fact that they are led by members of the political opposition.
By deploying DHS immigration and border security agents, rather than deputy U.S. marshals from the Justice Department — as presidents have done in the past — Trump is also changing the nature and tenor of his federal force. Marshals, whose work and training involve constitutional rights and protections, have historically been used to protect civil rights and valid court orders and are endowed with powerful federal law enforcement powers and authorities. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE officers are different. They are not trained in normal federal law enforcement standards of dealing with the public and are expected to operate with very limited authority to enforce immigration matters, not general federal laws. CBP officers in particular are less a regular law enforcement agency, based on due process, than a paramilitary force intended to operate in border regions. They were never planned have regular contact with American citizens and civilians.
Trump has also attempted to use troops in similar crackdowns over the past year and has been blocked by federal courts, which, among other things, have previously blocked his federalization of the California National Guard.
Invoking the Insurrection Act could give Trump cover to circumvent these restrictions.
Today, the Insurrection Act has three potential triggers: one in cooperation with state officials and two against the wishes of state officials. Trump, DHS, and the Justice Department appear to be attempting to artificially engineer a combination of actions that would allow them to declare Minnesota as representing “obstruction, unlawful combination, or assembly, or rebellion” or in the throes of “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “so impedes law enforcement” that federal military reinforcements are required.
If Walz, Frey and other state officials seem reluctant to do anything other than use words to oppose Trump, it’s surely because they are wary of the unrest and conflict that might arise if they gave Trump an excuse to declare an “insurrection” — and of the precedent that any court battle over the vague terms of the insurrection law might end up setting.
As part of a recent reform effort concluded“Under the Insurrection Act, a president’s authority to deploy U.S. troops depends on terms—including illegal “combinations,” “obstructions,” and “assemblages”—that have no established contemporary meaning. »
In the meantime, even as ICE and CBP violence continues, Minneapolis residents may find themselves alone facing the brunt of Trump’s masked secret police. But growing resistance to the Trump administration shows that Minnesota protesters are not alone nationally. Their courage in the face of the federal assault is contagious. Hours after Saturday’s shooting in Minneapolis, at a vigil and protest rally in Boston, a crowd gathered in freezing temperatures ahead of a historic weekend storm and chanted“We are not cold, we are not afraid, Minny taught us be brave!
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