President Donald Trump could use the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer’s shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy troops to Democratic cities ahead of the November 2026 midterms, experts said.
Good, 37, a U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by an ICE officer, later identified as Jonathan Ross, after agents asked her to exit her vehicle. The Trump administration defended the agent, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claiming Good had “attempted to run a law enforcement officer over” before she was shot. But critics have condemned the killing, with the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, calling it “reckless.”
In the wake of the shooting, the Trump administration said it would send more federal officers to the city to deal with protests and backlash.
While the administration said this was necessary to help Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials do their jobs safely, experts told Newsweek that Trump could escalate the use of troops to target Democratic-run areas and “create an atmosphere of fear” ahead of the midterm elections. Trump has not said he would do so.
The White House referred Newsweek to an X post by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that said: “President Trump stands fully behind the heroic men and women of ICE. Radical left-wing agitators should be ashamed of themselves for protesting ICE’s removal of criminal illegal alien killers, rapists, gangbangers, and pedophiles from American communities.”
“ICE is doing a very important job to remove illegal criminal aliens from our communities,” she added in comments made to the press.
Al Tillery, a professor of political science at Northwestern University in Illinois, said that Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to send troops to different areas in America ahead of the elections.
The 19th-century statute, a combination of different laws enacted by Congress between 1792 and 1871, would allow the use of active-duty military personnel to perform law-enforcement duties within the United States. Trump has, in the last few months, not ruled out using the act amid legal challenges to his deployment of troops to cities including Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; and Washington, D.C. Trump has said deploying troops to these cities was necessary to deal with crime.
“Such a mission would need to be handled by the National Guard in a role similar to the deployments in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Portland,” Tillery told Newsweek. “With the State of Illinois’ recent federal court victory against deployments in Chicago, Trump would likely need to invoke the Insurrection Act, which is the principal legal mechanism that allows a president to federalize or deploy forces domestically to suppress unrest when state authorities are deemed unwilling or unable to do so.
“There is not a doubt in my mind that Trump wants to use ICE and the National Guard to create an atmosphere of fear in Democratic cities in advance of the midterms. Whether or not Trump will get to even test the limits in this regard will depend on the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which at times has demonstrated that they are fully supportive of Trump’s norm-busting behavior.”
Thomas Whalen, an associate professor who teaches U.S. politics at Boston University, told Newsweek that the possibility of Trump sending troops into cities ahead of the midterms should be taken “seriously.”
“Trump is usually at his worst when he thinks he’s going to lose. And it looks like he or at least his party is going to lose big time at the midterms,” he said.
The Republican Party has a slim majority in both chambers of Congress, and the party not in office tends to perform better in midterm elections. Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House during the 2018 midterms during Trump’s first term in office. Losing the House would affect the GOP’s ability to pass key legislation and advance Republican policies.
Trump has expressed concerns that the GOP may perform poorly in the midterms and the party is implementing various strategies to put the party on good footing, including putting Trump on the campaign trail and trying to redistrict states to favor Republican candidates.
Whalen said: “He’s been talking a long time about invoking the Insurrection Act and you can imagine the chaos that would cause if implemented on Election Day with a generous gallop of federal troops and ICE personnel flooding the streets in major Democratic cities like Chicago.”
However, Calvin Jillson, a politics professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas, told Newsweek that this scenario was unlikely.
“This is largely a fever dream on the left as the federal courts have limited President Trump’s ability to deploy National Guard troops into cities, especially against the wishes of state and local officials,” he said, “so he would have only federal law enforcement officers, marshals, ICE, Border Patrol, etc., in numbers insufficient to the task.
“The main flaw in such a plan, however, clear from watching Minneapolis this week, is that a Trump administration show of force around the elections would be much more likely to bring Democrat voters into the streets and to the polls that it would be to intimidate them.”
The midterm elections will take place on November 3.
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