The prospect of the National Guard, active-duty Army troops and military police all converging on Minneapolis sparked fear this week from residents already reeling from a wave of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the fatal shooting of Renee Good.
Whether those deployments would actually happen, however, always seemed unlikely, according to retired military and law enforcement officials who spoke to The Marshall Project on Thursday as news of possible military deployments unfolded.
Reports first surfaced earlier in the week that the Pentagon alerted an Army infantry battalion based in Alaska to prepare to deploy to Minnesota. And on Thursday, several news outlets cited a Department of Defense official claiming that dozens of military police officers from Fort Bragg in North Carolina had been ordered to prepare to go there as well. Separately, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over the weekend had mobilized the Minnesota National Guard to be ready to help Minnesota State Police to protect protesters in the event of violent encounters with ICE.
The news came a week after President Donald Trump warned that he would invoke the Insurrection Act if protests against immigration enforcement tactics didn’t stop. Although Trump and others in his administration started to walk back those statements by late Thursday, former top military leaders said a military deployment would have been an expensive logistical nightmare.
While the National Guard often provides support to state and local law enforcement agencies during disasters and times of unrest, a maze of laws, policies and legal precedents make it highly unlikely that active military forces would be able to play a meaningful role, if any at all, in handling the ongoing anti-immigration enforcement protests.
Retired Army Major Gen. Randy Manner said on Thursday that he couldn’t imagine a scenario where the Trump administration would send 1,500 troops from the 11th Airborne Division from Alaska to Minnesota. Manner, who was once acting vice chief of the National Guard, said the division contains the Army’s only soldiers specially trained and equipped to fight in the Arctic. Their weapons, tools and even their engine oil have been specially formulated for Arctic combat, Manner said.
“I would say I’m 99% certain they’re not going to Minneapolis,” Manner said. “Why would you deploy a very scarce resource like that to go there? Because someone said it’s cold? It would be absolutely insane to use American troops this way.”
There’s a much better chance that the military police from Fort Bragg could be deployed, according to Manner. But based on laws restricting active military from domestic law enforcement, there’s very little they would be able to do.
Manner believes that all they could possibly do, under the law, is station themselves at an ICE facility to protect it against a potential threat.
Roy Taylor, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who is now the chief of the Capitol Special Police, a private security agency in North Carolina, said he thinks the role of military police ought to be even more low profile than that. Citing the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of the military for civilian law enforcement, Taylor and others said that the only safe way for the military police to be deployed would be as support staff: answering phones and writing reports — but certainly not any role that would bring them face-to-face with protesters.
The National Guard is usually deployed in a U.S. state at the direction of the governor. There have been some historical exceptions to this, such as in Alabama and Arkansas during the Civil Rights Movement, when presidents deployed the National Guard against the wishes of a governor. More recently, Trump mobilized the guard in Los Angeles and tried to do the same in Chicago last year, in spite of opposition from the governors of California and Illinois. Federal judges have also barred the Trump administration from deploying the guard in Portland.
If the National Guard troops that Walz readied are deployed in Minnesota, experts said and recent examples show, their role would be largely auxiliary, working on things like traffic control, logistics, transportation and security.
In order for the government to add a force like the military police to any National Guard presence in Minneapolis, Taylor said, they would have to in turn play an even more ancillary role. In this instance, where Walz's goal for the National Guard would be to protect residents, military support could work contrary to the Trump administration's goal to empower ICE to continue immigration raids.
The Army’s military police are trained for two primary objectives, Manner and Taylor said. The first is to guard, transport and protect prisoners of war in combat. A secondary role is to serve as law enforcement officers for the enlisted personnel and to police U.S. soldiers.
Military police are not trained heavily in constitutional law. Taylor said the training he received when he joined the Air Force on Constitutional law, which protects people from unlawful searches and uses of force, was less than a quarter of what he got as a police academy cadet.
Even in a limited role, Taylor said, sending military police to civilian communities should be a move the government makes only in the most extreme of circumstances.
“In my personal opinion, the situation in Minneapolis hasn’t risen to the level that would require active-duty military involvement, and I don’t think it’ll get to that point,” Taylor said.
By Thursday afternoon, after Vice President JD Vance attended a roundtable discussion in Minneapolis with community leaders, the threat of military involvement seemed to already be waning. Vance said local police needed to work with federal law enforcement to “lower the chaos,” according to CBS News.
Daniel Brown, a police policy and procedure expert, said on Thursday it would be hard to say what effect the presence of any military force would have on an already tense atmosphere in Minnesota. The former police chief, who also served in the Marines and as a National Guardsman, said he hopes Minneapolis residents will never have to find out.
“Without knowing what their roles would be and what the objectives are, it is really a loaded question,” Brown said, adding that local and state law enforcement agencies already operate through a network of agreements that allow them to call in other officers from nearby cities and states to help them if necessary. “Unless the roles are clearly defined, there will be challenges.”
