President Donald Trump could announce as early as Monday night that he’s invoking a 213-year-old federal law that would allow him to deploy active-duty U.S. troops to respond to protests in cities across the country, according to four people familiar with the decision.
The military police forces would come from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and possibly Fort Belvoir in Virginia and could arrive in Washington within hours, these people said, NBC News reports.
Trump’s decision to invoke the Insurrection Act, adopted in 1807, to deploy troops comes as his frustrations mount over the protests that have followed the death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed in police custody last week in Minneapolis. The people familiar with his decision said he was angry Sunday night at the destruction protestors caused in Washington, particularly the vandalization of national monuments.
Some of the president’s aides have been encouraging him for days to invoke the act, as he weighs options for exercising executive powers to address the crisis. The act was last invoked during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
