On Sept. 30, 1962, a mob of about 2,000 white supremacists descended on the University of Mississippi campus, many of them armed with shotguns and pistols. Their rioting over the admission of James Meredith, a Black student, led to two deaths and multiple injuries overnight before President John F. Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act to mobilize 30,000 federal troops to quell the violence.
The Insurrection Act — which empowers the president to deputize the military to perform civilian law enforcement duties during extraordinary circumstances — has been used by U.S. presidents about 30 times over the last 200 years to uphold civil rights and stop violent uprisings. President Abraham Lincoln used the act at the start of the Civil War. It was last invoked in 1992 to quash the Los Angeles race riots after four police officers were acquitted of criminal charges in the beating of Rodney King.
Decades later, President Donald Trump has threatened to send troops to Minnesota for a far different reason.
After a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, 37, in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, Trump accused Minnesota officials of inciting an insurrection and raised the prospect of invoking the Insurrection Act. He had issued a similar threat days earlier, following protests over the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renée Good by an ICE agent.
“The Mayor and the Governor are inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric!” the president posted to Truth Social hours after Pretti was killed. But on Monday, Trump said he had a “very good call” with Gov. Tim Walz, and that they plan to work together.
Trump and administration officials have repeatedly referred to protesters as insurrectionists or domestic terrorists. Critics have said that Trump is laying the groundwork to suppress protests against the immigration crackdown in Minnesota, and perhaps elsewhere, using the Insurrection Act.
Even as tensions seem to have calmed in Minnesota, one fact remains clear: Trump, and any future president, has the power to send troops into local communities in an instant, and without consulting Congress. A court may be asked to rule if such an action is legal.
If Trump uses military power today, it would be apples and oranges compared to 1962, John Meredith, James Meredith’s eldest son, told The Marshall Project - Jackson. ICE is “harassing everybody. To me, it’s totally different.”
James Meredith is 92 and lives in Jackson, Mississippi. His son John is a city council member in Huntsville, Alabama. “What it boiled down to was the federal government against the state of Mississippi,” John said.
The vast number of participants at “Ole Miss,” as the University of Mississippi is known, in 1962 made it one of the largest insurrection attempts in a century. The Mississippi riot was “a hallucinatory flashback to the Civil War,” said William Doyle, co-author of James Meredith’s memoir, “A Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America.”
If Trump sends federal troops to Minneapolis or elsewhere to support immigration enforcement actions, critics say the president’s action would be an abuse of an executive power typically reserved to protect people from lawlessness — not to protect government officials from protesters.
“Protests do not justify invoking the Insurrection Act. Even rowdy protests do not justify invoking the Insurrection Act,” said Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank focused on law and policy. “What justifies invoking the Insurrection Act is an emergency of such a scale that civilian authorities, meaning the police, federal law enforcement, are completely unable to handle it without federal military assistance. It’s an extraordinarily high threshold.”
The Battle of Oxford, 1962
Protected on the University of Mississippi campus by U.S. Marshals on the night before he was to be enrolled, a battle raged around James Meredith in the early morning hours of Oct. 1, 1962.
By dawn, two people would be dead and countless others injured in a hurricane of tear gas, flying bricks, buckshot, broken glass bottles, Molotov cocktails and a hijacked fire truck.
Paul Guihard, a French journalist, and Ray Gunter, a local jukebox repairman and expectant father, were both shot and killed in the melee. Several U.S. Marshals took beatings and buckshot from armed protesters, who came to the university in droves. They burned crosses on the campus. Many traveled in caravans from other states. News vans followed a 12-car convoy with “Alabama volunteers” painted on the back windshields.
Meredith, a 29-year-old Air Force veteran, was escorted through the university’s bloodstained hallways that morning to make history as the first Black student to enroll there.
As a state resident, Meredith was entitled to enroll in the public university system his tax dollars helped to fund. He sought to exercise his rights as a first-class citizen, John Meredith said. James Meredith relied on the federal government to enforce that right when the state wanted to deny them.
Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett — a self-declared Mississippi segregationist who Time Magazine called “as bitter a racist as inhabits the nation” — had repeatedly defied a U.S. Supreme Court order to allow Meredith to enroll in classes. Barnett and state police physically blocked Meredith from the university in the days leading up to the Sept. 30 riot.
In a televised speech on Sept. 13, Barnett declared that the state must stand up to the federal government, which he said was denying Mississippi “the right of self-determination in the conduct of the affairs of our Sovereign State.”
“The day of reckoning has been delayed as long as possible,” Barnett said in the speech. “It is now upon us.”
His defiance appealed to white supremacists across the country. The FBI received tips about groups planning to come from as far as California to fight in Mississippi.
After failed negotiations between Barnett and the Kennedy administration, multiple attempts to escort Meredith onto the campus, and all-out mayhem, Kennedy mobilized the military, Border Patrol officers and federal prison guards, and also took control of the Mississippi National Guard to put down the riot.
“We’ve had riots, we’ve had civil disturbances, but never before or since the American Civil War was the American Constitution put to such a mortal test as at the University of Mississippi,” said Doyle, the author, who also wrote “An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962.”
‘Founding Fathers Nightmare’
President Trump’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act came after the Department of Homeland Security sent around 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minnesota in “Operation Metro Surge.” Department officials called it the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history.
“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will 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,” the president wrote on Jan. 15 on his Truth Social account.
An ICE agent also shot and wounded Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg on Jan. 14 in Minneapolis. In another instance, an agent dragged a woman, who was reportedly pregnant, by her arm down an icy road. Citizens and noncitizens alike have been taken from their homes and cars. Minnesotans, including off-duty police officers, say they have been racially profiled by ICE agents, local law enforcement officials said.
The state has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and several officials to stop the surge of immigration enforcement activity and stop what it said were the violent tactics used during the operation.
Protesters have been “overwhelmingly peaceful,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said.
“There’s no evidence that ordinary law and order has broken down in Minnesota,” University of Minnesota law professor Jill Hasday said.
Instead, documented violence in the media largely shows the actions of Homeland Security agents.
“We’ve never seen in 250 years, anything like this, where the federal government is behaving in this way and escalating the situation,” Nunn said. “The federal government cannot go into an American city and orchestrate a crisis there, and then turn around and use that as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act.”
Multiple factors could justifiably allow a president to invoke the Insurrection Act: an imminent and substantial loss of life, requests from a state’s governor when local law enforcement is overwhelmed, defiance of federal court orders, and a local government’s denial of residents’ civil rights.
None of those factors is present in Minnesota, Nunn and Hasday said.
“This administration seems to want the United States Armed Forces to spend a lot more time pointing their weapons at Americans, rather than using them in defense of Americans,” Nunn said. “I think looking at the past year, I would say that we are living in the Founding Fathers’ nightmare.”
If Trump invokes the act in Minnesota or elsewhere to suppress anti-ICE protests, Nunn and Hasday said immediate legal challenges will likely follow.
“The insurrection Act is a statute like any other,” Hasday said. “The Supreme Court can interpret it and decide whether, in fact, the statute applies, just as it does in any other case.”