Tuesday, October 7, 2025 - US President Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric by threatening to invoke the centuries-old Insurrection Act to use emergency powers against domestic rebellion, which would allow him to deploy more troops into Democratic-led US cities. This threat intensified as his attempts to mobilize the military face multiple legal challenges.
The Republican leader openly contemplated using the
Insurrection Act after facing setbacks and advances in court. A federal judge
in Oregon temporarily blocked a planned National Guard deployment to Portland.
District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, wrote that the president’s
determination that the city was “war-ravaged” was “simply untethered to the
facts,” stressing that the US is “a nation of Constitutional law, not martial
law.”
The White House is appealing the ruling. Meanwhile, a judge
in Illinois temporarily allowed a similar deployment in Chicago to proceed for
now. State officials had filed suit to block the move, but Judge April Perry,
an appointee of the former Democratic president, declined to issue an immediate
temporary restraining order and scheduled a full hearing for Thursday.
Both Portland and Chicago have already seen surges of federal
agents as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation drive, which has
prompted protests.
The political opposition was spearheaded by Democratic
Governor JB Pritzker, who was further angered by the revelation that
Republican-led Texas was planning to send 200 of its federalized National Guard
troops to Illinois. Pritzker accused the Trump administration of creating a
pre-meditated “escalation of violence” to create a pretext for invoking the
Insurrection Act.
He claimed the administration was “following a playbook:
cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters
are a mob... To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he
can send the military to our city.” Pritzker strongly demanded,
“They should stay the hell out of Illinois,” and accused
federal immigration agents in Chicago of “thuggery,” using “excessive force,”
and illegally detaining US citizens.
President Trump defended his consideration of the emergency
powers, telling reporters, “We have an Insurrection Act for a reason. If I had
to enact it I would do that.” He specified that he would act “If people were
being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding
us up.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has supported the
Chicago deployment, referring to the city as “a war zone.”
However, Illinois Attorney General Kwame
Raoul and counsel for Chicago argued in their lawsuit that the use of US troops
was an attempt to “punish his political enemies” and that American citizens
“should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military.”
This controversy is not isolated, as
California previously filed a legal challenge earlier this year after Trump
sent troops to Los Angeles. A CBS poll released Sunday indicated that 58
percent of Americans oppose deploying the National Guard to US cities.
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