Press Releases

Ranking Member Raskin’s Statement on Concerns Regarding Possible Invocation of Insurrection Act

Washington, April 18, 2025

Washington, D.C. (April 18, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, issued the following statement addressing concerns that President Donald Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act as part of his administration’s escalating campaign against immigrants and U.S. citizens alike:

“I am being flooded with messages asking me to address rumors that Donald Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and deploy the National Guard to conduct arrests at the border or elsewhere on U.S. soil on April 20, 2025. We have no specific information indicating that this will happen. The anxiety arises from the fact that April 20 is the due date for a report from Trump’s cabinet on the state of the southern border called for in a presidential Executive Order which specifically mentions the Insurrection Act. But the Insurrection Act was designed for only the most extraordinary and dire circumstances, specifically when unlawful rebellion ‘make[s] it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings’, and invoking it now would be an arbitrary, outlandish and unjustified exercise of power. It cannot be the case that this is ‘the most secure border in history’ and simultaneously that we need to invoke the Insurrection Act to address the crisis there.

“There is no factual predicate for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act at the southern border or anywhere else in the United States. The courts are open and perfectly functional (much to Trump's dismay), state and local police continue to enforce the laws, and the Trump Administration routinely celebrates the safety and calm at the border.

“Trump might want to call out the troops because they look ‘tough’. That seems to have been his rationale for using military planes as props to fly immigrants to Guantanamo Bay and El Salvador’s brutal mega-prison. This is plainly no justification for triggering the Act and Trump would also essentially be admitting extreme policy failure. This can be the most secure border in history, or it can be an insurrection requiring the extraordinary use of the American military in our own society. But it certainly cannot be both.

“I urge the President to make the report public and to commit himself to protecting the civil rights and civil liberties of the people of the United States by keeping the military out of civilian law enforcement matters. We must stop playing cheap political games with immigration and we must restore the rule of law in America.”