Unprecedented Occupation: How Trump's Deployment of Federal Forces to Minneapolis Risks Pushing America Toward Its Worst Crisis Since the Civil War
Modern American history has no parallel for the federal occupation now unfolding in Minneapolis. Thousands of unidentified, masked federal officers operating on vague, unconfirmed authority have flooded the region, acting with impunity: they attack protesters and innocent bystanders alike, bypass constitutional protections, surveil childcare centers and schools, detain pedestrians off the streets in unmarked vehicles targeting people based on race or accent, and continuously and recklessly goad civilians into violent clashes—all in open defiance of the repeated, explicit objections of Minnesota’s local and state leaders.
Early Saturday morning, federal agents reportedly assigned to Border Patrol shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti during a chaotic altercation outside a popular Minneapolis donut shop, after agents first confronted and shoved Pretti on the street. This marked the second time in just one month that federal agents used lethal force within seconds of initiating an interaction with a Minneapolis civilian who posed no threat to the agents involved.
This cascade of avoidable violence forces a pressing question: why have elected leaders been unable to do more to halt this incursion? Beyond relying on the courts, does Minnesota’s state government have leverage to push back against the Trump-led occupation—for example, activating the state National Guard to confront federal agents?
The short answer is that, due to the core structure of American federalism, state leaders have almost no ability to unilaterally oust federal forces. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have repeatedly begged President Donald Trump to pull his agents out. On Saturday, the pair again confirmed they had appealed to the federal government to reverse course and withdraw the roughly 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 area.
Walz and Frey have declined to take overt action to actively resist using state and local government resources because U.S. federalism is structured to bar states from opposing federal authority or expel federal law enforcement personnel. This principle was originally built to ensure the federal government could act as a last-resort protector when state and local leaders failed to uphold the rights of everyday citizens. What makes the current moment so alarming and extraordinary is that Trump is twisting this long-standing framework to target political opponents on a personal whim, an act more un-American than any taken by a sitting U.S. president, and one that poses an existential threat to the unity of the American union.
Tensions between federal 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, they have also spoken out repeatedly about off-duty local officers being harassed and even assaulted by federal immigration agents. “Every single one of these off-duty officers stopped by immigration agents is a person of color,” one local police chief told reporters. 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 granting local investigators access. “We are operating completely uncharted waters here,” the head of Minnesota’s state investigation bureau noted.
A governor does control the state’s National Guard, which could theoretically be deployed to push back against ICE operations. After Pretti’s killing, Governor Tim Walz announced he would activate the guard, a move that came amid hours of mounting tension that even led the NBA to postpone an evening game in Minneapolis for public safety. In an understated statement that masked how unprecedented the move was, the governor’s office said the guard was needed because “local law enforcement resources are stretched thin by the disruption to public safety caused by thousands of federal immigration agents operating in our neighborhoods.” So far, it appears Walz intends to use the National Guard, alongside state and local police, as a buffer between federal forces and Minnesota residents, rather than to actively back street-level resistance to the occupation.
Right now, state and local officials—joining other jurisdictions targeted by heavy-handed federal immigration deployments in recent years, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities—are primarily focused on seeking relief through the federal court system. Overnight, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal officials from destroying or altering evidence related to Saturday’s shooting. More broadly, Minnesota already has an ongoing lawsuit seeking to block the entire federal deployment.
This cautious approach is almost certainly meant to avoid further escalation, given that Trump has openly signaled he is eager to declare Minnesota in a state of “insurrection,” a step that would let him deploy active federal troops against state residents. Trump has already launched unprecedented criminal investigations into Walz, Frey, and other state leaders, apparently to build a pretext that would justify invoking the Insurrection Act.
The situation is entirely without precedent, and the Trump administration’s warped political incentives—shaped by social media and the president’s personal obsessions—make it impossible to predict how events will unfold in the coming days and weeks. It remains especially unclear how state and local leaders can improve conditions for their constituents, and thanks to the Trump administration’s disregard for law and order, there are many scenarios where the situation will only deteriorate.
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 state or local authorities. DHS and White House officials have repeatedly labeled protesters exercising their First Amendment rights in Minnesota “domestic terrorists,” and they quickly moved to smear Pretti, the victim of Saturday’s killing. Earlier this month, they shut down the internal investigation into the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good and instead opened a federal investigation into Good and her husband, prompting the FBI agent assigned to the original case to resign. At least six federal prosecutors have also stepped down, refusing to participate in the effort to scapegoat a murder victim for her own killing.
In an especially disturbing development, ICE agents have begun threatening that anyone who simply films them will be added to a national “domestic terrorist” database. “Have fun with that,” an ICE agent in Maine was caught on camera joking to a civilian recording his activities. That this assault on Minneapolis has little to do with actual crime or immigration enforcement was made explicit Saturday, when former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to state officials saying the federal government would withdraw its forces if Minnesota complied with Trump’s demand to turn over the state’s full voter rolls.
While Walz and Frey’s apparent lack of aggressive, open resistance to a full-scale federal attack on their constituents has sparked anger among local activists, their cautious approach may well be the wisest course of action. Ordinary residents are already organizing massive grassroots resistance to the federal presence, and any formal, official act of resistance by state or local leaders would give Trump the excuse he wants to deploy active federal troops, an escalation that would cause far more harm to Minnesota residents, the state, and the country as a whole. Trump has already placed roughly 1,500 federal troops in Alaska on standby to deploy to Minnesota, and all indicators point to him being eager for any pretext to move them in.
If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and deploys federal troops to further subdue state and local authorities, it will bring the United States closer to internal armed conflict than it has been since the Civil War itself.
A Brief History of Domestic Troop Deployments
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 military from participating in civilian law enforcement, and the Insurrection Act, a set of laws first enacted in 1792 that outlines the narrow circumstances under which a president can deploy troops to suppress rebellions and domestic violence.
Despite the foundational principle it protects, the Insurrection Act is deeply outdated, a reality highlighted by 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 emergency. But even fewer foundational principles are so poorly defined in U.S. law … The fact that past presidents have rarely invoked this power is a product of long-held political norms, not binding legal limits.”
While state National Guard units and federal troops are regularly deployed to assist with natural disaster response at the request and in coordination with local and state leaders, since the Reconstruction era, presidents have only very rarely deployed federal agents or troops against the explicit will of state governments, and even then only in extremely limited circumstances—usually to protect civil rights when state officials refused to uphold them. It is important to note that while National Guard units normally answer to state governors, a president can federalize them, shifting command directly to the U.S. commander-in-chief. That means Trump could bypass Walz’s control of the Minnesota National Guard at any time by placing it under direct Pentagon authority.
Throughout the 20th century, governors and presidents repeatedly deployed National Guard troops—often violently—to break labor strikes, but it was not until the Civil Rights Movement of the 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 National Guard to block the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, President Dwight Eisenhower responded by federalizing all 10,000 Arkansas National Guard members and deploying troops from the 101st Airborne Division to force the school’s integration and protect the nine Black students attempting to enroll. The mission became a critical turning point for military domestic training: when the Army’s Civil Disturbances manual was republished in 1958, it had doubled in length, adding an entirely new section on riot control.
During every year of his abbreviated presidency, John F. Kennedy deployed federal marshals or troops against the wishes of segregationist state leaders as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. In 1961, roughly 400 federal marshals were sent to Alabama to protect Freedom Riders. When James Meredith attempted to enroll as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962, Kennedy sent federal marshals who were met with deadly violence from white segregationist protesters.
As the marshals came under attack, Kennedy first federalized the Mississippi National Guard, then deployed thousands of active federal troops to the campus. That operation, codenamed RAPID ROAD, was the only time during the Cold War that the military activated plans it had developed to quell domestic unrest after a nuclear attack.
In 1963, Kennedy again called on the National Guard to enforce the integration of the University of Alabama. 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 regularly to American cities amid widespread 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 by Detroit police. National Guard troops killed 11 people, including 4-year-old Tanya Blanding, who died when a guardsman opened fire on her apartment building with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a tank, after incorrectly claiming a sniper was hiding inside.
Troops were deployed again during the 1968 unrest that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but the severe risks of domestic military deployment were made horrifyingly clear two years later at Kent State University, when Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on anti-Vietnam War protesters, killing four and wounding nine.
In the decades since, domestic deployments of active federal troops have been extremely rare—the 1992 Los Angeles riots being one notable exception. Until the Trump administration, presidents and attorneys general almost always prioritized coordination with local and state leaders when increasing federal law enforcement presence in a jurisdiction.
Even at the height of troop and marshal deployments to the South during the Civil Rights Movement, presidents only acted after state officials either refused to stop violence against Americans exercising their constitutional rights, or, as in the case of Alabama state troopers, were the perpetrators of violence against peaceful civilians. Most often, a president only acted after state leaders defied a binding court order, ensuring that a second branch of government provided a check and trigger for federal intervention.
While Trump has framed the immigration enforcement deployment in Minneapolis—along with prior deployments to Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, Charlotte, Portland, and most recently Maine—as an effort to enforce “law and order,” there is no logical or practical justification for the deployments beyond 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 state and its people, for no reason other than that the state is led by members of the opposing political party.
By deploying DHS agents from ICE and CBP rather than U.S. Marshals from the Department of Justice—the standard for past presidents’ domestic federal deployments—Trump has also deliberately changed the character of the force occupying 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. CBP and ICE agents are an entirely different group. They are not trained to meet the standard constitutional due process requirements for regular federal law enforcement interactions with the public, and their authority is narrowly limited to immigration enforcement, not general federal law enforcement. CBP in particular is less a traditional law enforcement agency rooted in due process, and more a paramilitary force designed to operate along the nation’s borders. It was never intended to interact regularly with U.S. civilians living far from the border.
Over the past year, Trump has already attempted to use troops for similar crackdowns and been blocked by federal courts, which for example preliminarily blocked his attempt to federalize the California National Guard. Invoking the Insurrection Act would give Trump a path around these legal restrictions.
The Insurrection Act currently has three potential triggers 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 trying to manufacture conditions that would let them 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 are reluctant to do more than speak out publicly against Trump, it is almost certainly because they fear that any open conflict would give Trump the pretext he needs to declare an insurrection, and that any court battle 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 have no clear, agreed-upon meaning in modern law.”
In the meantime, as ICE and CBP continue to leave a trail of deadly violence, Minneapolis residents may find themselves forced to face the full force of Trump’s unidentified, unaccountable secret police largely on their own. But the growing, national movement opposing the Trump administration’s actions makes clear that Minnesota’s protesters are far from alone. Their courage in the face of federal assault is spreading across the country. Just hours after Saturday’s shooting in Minneapolis, at a vigil and protest rally in Boston, a crowd gathered 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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