Unprecedented Federal Incursion in Minneapolis Puts U.S. on Brink of Constitutional Crisis
No moment in modern American history matches the ongoing federal occupation of Minneapolis. Thousands of masked federal agents operating with unclear legal authority are sweeping across the region, attacking both protesters and innocent bystanders, overriding constitutional protections, posting personnel near daycares and public schools, detaining civilians off city streets in unmarked vans while targeting people based on skin tone or accent, and continuously provoking violent clashes with local residents—all in open defiance of the repeated, explicit demands of Minnesota’s local and state leaders to withdraw.
Early Saturday morning, that escalating violence turned deadly: federal agents, reportedly from U.S. Border Patrol, shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti during a chaotic altercation outside a well-known Minneapolis donut shop. The confrontation began when agents approached, harassed, and shoved Pretti on the public street. This killing marks the second time this month that federal agents have used lethal force within seconds of initiating contact with a Minneapolis civilian who posed no threat to the agents involved.
This pointless, avoidable bloodshed has forced one pressing question to the forefront: why haven’t elected officials taken bolder action to end this incursion? Beyond relying on the courts, does Minnesota’s state government have any leverage to push back against the Trump administration’s occupation—including deploying the state National Guard to confront federal agents directly?
The short answer, rooted in the core structure of American federalism, is that state and local leaders have very limited options to act. For weeks, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have publicly and privately called on President Donald Trump to recall his forces. On Saturday, they reiterated that they have repeatedly begged the federal government to reverse course and withdraw the more than 3,000 immigration agents deployed to the region—a force that nearly equals the combined size of the 10 largest local and state police departments in the Minneapolis area.
Walz and Frey have refrained from taking overt, active resistance using state and local government power because a core tenet of U.S. federalism bars states from challenging federal authority or expelling federal law enforcement agents. This principle was originally established to position the federal government as a last-resort protector when state and local officials fail to uphold the rights of everyday citizens. What makes the current moment so remarkable and so alarming is that Trump is twisting this longstanding system to punish political opponents on a personal whim—an act more un-American than any ever taken by a sitting U.S. president, and one that threatens the very foundation of the American union.
Tensions between national Trump administration officials and Minnesota’s state and local elected leaders are already at a breaking point, and animosity between deployed federal forces and local law enforcement is growing rapidly.
Minneapolis police have openly condemned the killings of both Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on January 7. In recent days, department leaders have also spoken out repeatedly about off-duty local officers being harassed and even assaulted by federal immigration agents—every single one of the targeted off-duty officers is a person of color, one local police chief confirmed. After Saturday’s shooting, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents initially barred local police from accessing the crime scene, forcing local authorities to obtain a court order to enter; even then, FBI agents reportedly continued to resist allowing local investigators full access. “We are operating completely outside of any precedent we have ever seen,” the head of Minnesota’s state investigation bureau noted.
A governor does control the state’s National Guard, which could hypothetically be deployed to counter ICE’s operations. In the wake of Saturday’s killing, Governor Tim Walz announced he was activating the Guard, a move that came amid hours of escalating tension that led the NBA to postpone an evening game in Minneapolis for public safety. In an understated statement that masked the historic gravity of the move, the governor’s office said the Guard was needed because “local law enforcement resources are stretched thin because of the disruption to public safety caused by thousands of federal immigration agents in our neighborhoods.” So far, it appears Walz intends to use the National Guard, along with state and local police, as a buffer between federal forces and Minnesota residents, rather than to directly challenge or confront federal agents on the street.
Right now, state and local officials—following the lead of other jurisdictions targeted by heavy-handed federal immigration deployments in the past year, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and others—are primarily relying on federal courts to block the operation. Overnight, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order requiring federal officials to preserve all evidence related to Saturday’s shooting, rather than destroying or altering it. More broadly, Minnesota has an ongoing lawsuit seeking to block the entire federal immigration deployment to the state.
This cautious approach is almost certainly designed to avoid further escalation, given Trump’s open eagerness to declare Minnesota in a state of “insurrection”—a designation that would allow him to deploy active-duty federal troops against state residents. Trump has already launched unprecedented criminal investigations into Walz, Frey, and other state leaders, in an apparent effort to manufacture a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act.
The current situation is entirely without precedent, and the Trump administration’s political incentives—twisted by social media and the president’s own personal obsessions—make it impossible to predict how events will unfold in the coming days and weeks. It remains particularly unclear how state and local leaders can improve conditions for their constituents, and given the Trump administration’s open disregard for the rule of law, the most likely outcomes point to further escalation and worsening violence.
In many ways, President Trump and his Department of Homeland Security appear to be actively trying to provoke a direct confrontation between federal forces and local or state authorities. DHS and White House officials have repeatedly labeled peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights in Minnesota “domestic terrorists,” and were quick to launch a smear campaign against Pretti, Saturday’s victim. Earlier this month, after an ICE agent killed Good, administration officials shut down the investigation into the agent’s conduct and instead opened a federal investigation into Good and her husband—a move that prompted the lead FBI agent on the case to resign in protest. At least six federal prosecutors have also resigned, refusing to participate in the administration’s effort to scapegoat a murder victim for her own death.
In one deeply disturbing new development, ICE agents have begun adding anyone who merely records their activities to a national “domestic terrorist” database. “Have fun with that,” an ICE agent in Maine was caught on camera joking to a civilian who was filming his work. That this assault on Minneapolis has nothing to do with reducing violent crime or even enforcing immigration law was made explicit on Saturday, when former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to state officials offering to withdraw federal forces if Minnesota complied with Trump’s demand to turn over the state’s full voter rolls.
While Walz and Frey’s relatively passive response to a full-scale federal attack on their constituents has sparked anger among local activists, there is a strong argument that caution and restraint is the wisest course right now. Local residents have already organized massive grassroots resistance to the federal presence, and any overt official resistance from state or local leaders could give Trump the excuse he is seeking to deploy active-duty federal troops to Minnesota—an escalation that would harm residents, the state, and the entire country far more than the current deployment already has. Trump has already placed roughly 1,500 active-duty federal troops in Alaska on standby to deploy to Minnesota, and all public indications are that he is eager for any pretext to move them in.
Any declaration of insurrection or deployment of active-duty federal troops to subdue state and local authorities would bring the United States closer to a domestic civil conflict than it has been since the Civil War itself.
A Brief History of Domestic Military Deployment in the U.S.
Under normal circumstances, the use of federal military forces for domestic operations is strictly limited by two key legal frameworks: the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the use of the U.S. military in civilian law enforcement, and the Insurrection Act, a set of laws first passed in 1792 that defines the narrow circumstances under which a president can deploy troops to put down rebellions or stop large-scale domestic violence.
Despite the critical principle it protects, the Insurrection Act is badly out of date, a fact that has driven recent reform efforts. As national security legal scholar Scott Anderson wrote in 2024: “Few principles of American government are more foundational than the idea that the U.S. military should never be used against American citizens except in the most extreme, dire circumstances. But even fewer foundational principles are so loosely defined in law … The fact that past presidents have rarely invoked this power stems far more from long-standing political norms than from binding legal limits.”
While state National Guard units and federal troops are regularly deployed to respond to natural disasters at the request and in coordination with state and local leaders, since the Reconstruction era presidents have only deployed federal agents or troops against the explicit will of state governments in rare, narrow cases. Almost all of those cases involved defending civil rights when state officials refused to uphold the rights of their residents. (Typically, National Guard units report to their state governor, but a president can federalize them to place them under direct White House control—meaning Trump could easily bypass Walz’s activation of the Minnesota Guard by federalizing the force himself.)
Throughout the 20th century, governors and presidents frequently deployed National Guard troops—often violently—to break labor strikes, but it was not until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s that federal troops became a more regular presence in responding to domestic civil unrest. In 1957, when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the state’s National Guard to block the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, President Dwight Eisenhower responded by federalizing all 10,000 members of the Arkansas National Guard and deploying troops from the 101st Airborne Division to force the school’s integration and protect the nine Black students attempting to enroll. This mission became a critical turning point for military domestic doctrine: when the Army’s manual on responding to civil disturbances was republished in 1958, it had doubled in size and added a full new section on riot control.
During his abbreviated presidency, John F. Kennedy deployed federal marshals or troops against the wishes of state officials every year as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. In 1961, roughly 400 federal marshals were sent to Alabama to protect Freedom Riders testing desegregation of interstate bus terminals. In 1962, when James Meredith attempted to enroll as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, Kennedy sent federal marshals, who were met with extreme violence from white segregationist protesters. With marshals under attack, Kennedy first deployed the Mississippi National Guard, then thousands of active-duty federal troops to secure the campus. That operation, codenamed RAPID ROAD, marked the only time during the Cold War that the military activated contingency plans originally designed to quell civil unrest after a nuclear attack. In 1963, Kennedy again called on the National Guard to enforce the integration of the University of Alabama, and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson deployed marshals and the National Guard to protect civil rights marchers in Selma after Alabama state troopers attacked peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what became known as Bloody Sunday.
By the late 1960s, presidents began deploying troops including the National Guard more routinely in American cities amid civil unrest. During the 1967 summer riots in Detroit, sparked by police brutality, President Johnson ordered elements of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions into the city, while Michigan Governor George Romney activated the Michigan National Guard. More than 40 people were killed during the unrest, over half of them by Detroit police. National Guard troops killed 11 civilians, including 4-year-old Tanya Blanding, who died after a Michigan guardsman fired a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a tank into her apartment, incorrectly claiming a sniper was hiding inside.
Troops were deployed again during the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but the severe risks of domestic military deployment were made devastatingly clear two years later at Kent State University, where Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on anti-Vietnam War protesters, killing four and wounding nine.
In the decades since, domestic deployment of federal troops has been extremely rare—the 1992 Los Angeles riots being one major exception—and before the Trump administration, presidents and attorneys general almost always coordinated any surge of federal law enforcement to cities or states with local leaders. Even at the height of federal troop and marshal deployments to the South during the Civil Rights Movement, presidents only acted after state officials either refused to stop violence against people exercising their constitutional rights, or (as with Alabama state troopers in Selma) were the perpetrators of that violence against peaceful citizens. Most often, presidential action only came after state officials defied a valid court order, ensuring that a separate branch of government served as a check and balance before federal force was used.
While Trump claims the immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis—like prior operations in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, Charlotte, Portland, and most recently Maine—is meant to enforce “law and order,” there is no logical justification or public safety need for these deployments beyond raw political intimidation. Trump is attempting something completely unprecedented that breaks with every historical norm in American history: the brutal use of federal force against a U.S. state and region for no reason other than the fact that it is led by members of the opposing political party.
By deploying immigration and border security agents from DHS, rather than U.S. Marshals from the Department of Justice (the group used by presidents for this kind of work in the past), Trump is also changing the very character of the federal force deployed to Minneapolis. U.S. Marshals receive extensive training on constitutional rights and protections, have historically been used to defend civil rights and enforce valid court orders, and operate with well-defined federal law enforcement authority. Agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE are a very different group. They are not trained to meet the standard constitutional due process requirements for general federal law enforcement engagement with the public, and their legal authority is narrowly limited to enforcing immigration law, not general federal criminal law. CBP in particular is less a traditional law enforcement agency rooted in due process, and more a paramilitary force designed to operate along the U.S. border. It was never intended to have regular, routine contact with U.S. civilians inside American cities.
Over the past year, Trump has already attempted to use active-duty troops in similar crackdowns, only to be blocked by federal courts, which among other actions preliminarily blocked his attempt to federalize the California National Guard. Invoking the Insurrection Act would give Trump legal cover to bypass those kinds of court restrictions.
Today, the Insurrection Act has three potential scenarios for deployment: one that requires cooperation from state officials, and two that allow deployment against a state’s wishes. Trump, DHS, and the Department of Justice appear to be actively working to manufacture a set of conditions that would allow them to declare Minnesota facing “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” or beset by “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “so hinders the execution of the laws” that federal military deployment is necessary.
If Walz, Frey, and other state leaders seem reluctant to do more than speak out publicly against Trump’s actions, it is almost certainly because they fear that any open confrontation would give Trump the excuse he needs to declare an insurrection, and that court battles over the Insurrection Act’s vague language could set a dangerous precedent for future presidents. As one recent reform effort concluded: “Under the Insurrection Act, a president’s authority to deploy U.S. troops turns on terms—including unlawful ‘combinations,’ ‘obstructions,’ and ‘assemblages’—that lack any clear, settled meaning in modern law.”
In the meantime, even as ICE and CBP continue to leave a trail of violence across Minnesota, Minneapolis residents may find they are largely on their own facing the full force of Trump’s unidentified masked force. But growing, spreading grassroots resistance across the country shows Minnesota’s protesters are far from alone. Their courage in the face of a federal assault has inspired people nationwide. Hours after Saturday’s shooting in Minneapolis, hundreds gathered for a vigil and protest rally in Boston, assembling in frigid temperatures ahead of a major winter storm to chant: “We’re not cold, we’re not afraid, Minny taught us to be brave!”
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