On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump suggested — not for the first time — that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing him to deploy active-duty soldiers in order to combat protesters. The president’s musing about the Insurrection Act should not be understood as a reaction to what’s happening right now. It should instead be understood as the next link in a chain of events that Trump set in motion back in his first administration — and dramatically accelerated in his second.
Trump seems to have lingering regrets over not doing some of the things he wanted to do back in 2020, when protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spawned sporadic incidents of unrest across the country and outside the White House.
Since early in his second term, he’s seemed eager to show that, this time around, he won’t waste any time in using an iron fist against dissent.
When Trump was hurried to the bunker at the executive mansion one evening, it projected weakness. Members of his administration pushed back on his ambitions to unleash more forceful protest responses — such as deploying soldiers against protesters. This frustrated the president, contributing to his removal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Trump returned to Washington last year even angrier at the establishment and his opponents, only now he’s well-versed in the levers of power and understands how flimsy the barriers to that power can be. Since early in his second term, he’s seemed eager to show that, this time around, he won’t waste any time in using an iron fist against dissent. And he’s staffed his Cabinet with people who aren’t likely to object.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his allies insisted that immigration laws needed to be tightened and that people living in the country illegally needed to be removed. They often insisted that they would prioritize criminal immigrants, people who — Trump said — were known to law enforcement and could be rolled up quickly.
Once inaugurated, however, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, initiated sweeping dragnets, first in Los Angeles, then in Chicago and now in Minneapolis. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, working with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, also known as Border Patrol, were given free rein to aggressively detain immigrants — and anyone who stood in their way.
Speaking to reporters in May, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan warned Democratic leaders in blue states that they could expect to see federal agents in their cities.
“If we can’t arrest a bad guy in the jail … you’re gonna force him in the community to find him,” Homan told reporters last week. “If we can’t find him in the community, we’re gonna find him at the work site. So we’re going to flood the zone, and sanctuary cities will get exactly what they don’t want.”
Comply or we’ll blanket your streets, Homan warned. And they did.
Notice that Homan framed the threat as being about criminals: If cities wouldn’t work with them by handing over criminals who were in custody, ICE would “flood the zone” everywhere else. DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin repeated this framing in an interview on Fox News this week centered on the current operation in Minnesota.
The killing of Renee Good last week sharpened the divide between ICE and the public.
“If [Gov.] Tim Walz and [Minneapolis] Mayor Frey would let us in their jails, we wouldn’t have to be there at all,” McLaughlin said. “Currently, there are 680 criminal illegal aliens [in the city] … people who, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you would never want these people to be on your streets or your neighbors. That’s the people who we are targeting.”
This is untrue. There are numerous reports of federal agents in the city carrying out door-to-door sweeps and stopping or detaining American citizens, who definitionally aren’t criminal immigrants.
Nor is McLaughlin’s assertion true outside of the context of Minneapolis. Data released by DHS shows that more ICE detainees in ICE custody have no criminal records than have criminal convictions or have pending criminal charges. A new report from the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group, summarizes the shift since Trump returned to office: “The result of … changes in arrest practice has been a 2,450% increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day.”
Those numbers alone give the lie to the idea that ICE is simply doing what it has always done. It isn’t. It’s doing something broader and more aggressive than what has been done in the past — at the direction of DHS leaders and with the approval of President Trump.
The killing of Renee Good last week sharpened the divide between ICE and the public. At no point did the administration offer even passing criticism of the shooter. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller claimed that ICE agents have “federal immunity” for their actions, true only in the sense that a Trump Justice Department isn’t going to press any charges. ICE agents have been emboldened, with multiple examples of agents using Good’s killing as a warning for protesters to back off. The protesters haven’t backed off — in Minneapolis as in Chicago before that and in Los Angeles before that — so federal agents have deployed tear gas, pepper spray and flash-bangs in an effort to disrupt them. There have been scenes of tumult and explosions in Minneapolis that give a sense of unrest and violence, but those explosions and the drifting smoke represent violence from federal agents, not against them. DHS insists that assaults against agents have spiked over the past 12 months, but there’s no evidence that those injuries are being sustained at the hands of protesters, rather than occurring while people are being detained or at detention facilities. This is vitally important context for Trump’s social media announcement Thursday morning that he would “institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.” On Fox News, this declaration was paired with footage of protesters being targeted by federal agents, smoke drifting across the screen and devices exploding on the street. “I’m looking at these pictures out of Minneapolis,” host Steve Doocy said, “and I’m thinking, ‘Man, something is so messed up there!’ and obviously the president [is] looking at the same things.” See how this works? The administration threatens to frustrate blue states by dispatching agents to “flood the zone.” Those agents are allowed to act without constraint, to the extent that the killing of a U.S. citizen is defended as just and necessary even before footage of what occurred becomes public. ICE agents grab any immigrant they can find, spurring communities to work together to alert their neighbors about ICE’s presence and leading to confrontations with officers. Then ICE deploys chemicals and disruptions to resolve the confrontations — leading to scenes of agent-driven turmoil that presents Trump with a pretext for calling in soldiers. Doocy asked his colleague Trey Gowdy to weigh in. Prior to joining Fox News, Gowdy was a member of the U.S. House from South Carolina, one of the members elected in the tea party wave of 2010. Back then, he railed against federal overreach, in keeping with his party’s (and his home state’s) tradition of backing states’ rights over federal authority. Now, though, he stands with Trump. “I actually think we may be beyond this point in Minnesota,” Gowdy said. “You actually have governors and mayors who are openly defying federal law enforcement. … They are openly defying it. So I think he’s got all the justification.” Trump now has both the circumstances and the complacency he needs to do what he’s always wanted.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
