Employing federal troops to suppress domestic protests and deport immigrants from U.S. soil en masse would be illegal, but Donald Trump has been pushing to do so since his first administration. The recent Supreme Court decision granting presidents nearly absolute immunity for official acts has created a situation with far fewer guardrails to prevent Trump from abusing his authority in his second presidential term.
Trump and his allies have reportedly drafted plans for him to deploy the military against civil demonstrators on his first day in office, according to a Washington Post report from November 2023. And Trump, who promised to carry out the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, has also indicated that he will use the military to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
When Fox News asked Trump whether he thought “outside agitators” might have an effect on Election Day, Trump responded by saying, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within.” He added, “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
During his campaign, Trump also said that if re-elected, he would use the military at the southern border and to enforce the law in cities like Chicago and New York, which he dubbed “crime dens.”
Trump’s prior time in office shows that his willingness to raise such threats goes beyond campaign rhetoric. After massive demonstrations erupted around the country in protest against the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, then-President Trump told his Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley that he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act — which allows the president to deploy the military domestically and use it for civilian law enforcement — and order “ten thousand troops in Washington to get control of the streets.”
On June 1, 2020, Trump said, “If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” Esper and Milley objected, saying the turmoil was best handled by civil law enforcement and the D.C. National Guard. Trump was furious. He called his top military leaders “losers” and repeated his wish to send active-duty troops into Minneapolis. “Can’t you just shoot them?” he asked Milley. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Trump also proposed sending federal troops into Chicago, Seattle and Portland in response to Black Lives Matter protests and once again, Esper and Milley, joined by then-Attorney General William Barr, talked him out of it.
A former senior Defense Department official who served in the first Trump administration said that federal forces could be sent to U.S. cities to assist with Trump’s mass deportation plan once he is inaugurated.
During his second term, Trump will not likely be deterred from using the military against protesters and immigrants, even though employing federal troops to enforce domestic law in this manner would be illegal.
“Soldiers have not only a right, but a duty, to refuse illegal orders; yet the legality of those orders would be determined by courts-martial of refusers.”
The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878 to end the use of federal troops in overseeing elections in the post–Civil War South, bars the use of the military to enforce domestic laws, including immigration law. The Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the willful use of “any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus [power of the county] or otherwise to execute the laws.” The only exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibition are “in cases and under........