Soon after being sworn into his second term as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring an emergency at the U.S. southern border and directed administration officials to evaluate whether or not to recommend the invocation of the rarely used Insurrection Act of 1807. The Insurrection Act permits a president to deploy the military inside the U.S. to enforce the law or put down a rebellion. Although there are reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will not be recommending invocation of the Insurrection Act at this time, due to the reduced number of migrant border crossings, their report to the president has not yet been made public.
To place the current debate in context, Trump’s first-term Defense Secretary Mark Esper recounted in his memoir that Trump was enraged when he, Esper publicly opposed invoking the Insurrection Act in June 2020. As Black Lives Matter protesters gathered in Washington, D.C. after the death of George Floyd, Trump reportedly asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley in a June 2020 White House meeting, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor, an organizer with the Climate Disobedience Center, who discusses her group’s distribution of information about the “Call to Courage” campaign – an effort to reach out to military personnel to not comply with unlawful and unconstitutional presidential orders, amid concern that if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act he could abuse that power to target protesters and use state violence to suppress dissent.
NASTASIA LAWTON STICKLER: The language of the Insurrection Act is that the military can be called up to address an insurrection in any state, which makes it impracticable to carry out state law. And so that language is really vague and it never really defines what kind of crisis, what scale of crisis warrants calling up the military to enforce civil law.
I think the fear is that while the proclamation contains the invocation of Insurrection Act to the southern border, there really are no guardrails around what other “crises” this administration deems necessary to invoke the Insurrection Act. So the fear is that with those guardrails out of place, the Insurrection Act could be invoked to quell protest to any of the ICE abductions that have been happening, or solidarity with Palestinian people or protest to the fossil fuel industry, which is very obviously being propped up by this administration. So the vagueness of the language and the moral corruptness of this administration, I think give us reason to be extremely concerned that if this act were to be invoked, there’s no telling where it would stop in the enforcement of civil law by our military.
SCOTT HARRIS: Are there any roadblocks to a President Donald Trump or any other president from invoking the Insurrection Act? For instance, could federal courts or the U.S. Supreme Court get involved in a declaration of an emergency of that gravity that, in the mind of a president like Trump, could justify all sorts of repression of peaceful protests let alone suspension of the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution?
NASTASIA LAWTON STICKLOR: That’s a great question to which I don’t have a good legal answer, but we have been seeing in other areas, most notably in the abductions that ICE has been carrying out recently that even in cases where the courts have found the actions of the administration to be unlawful or unconstitutional, one, that process takes time. It takes time to make its way through the court system even up to the Supreme Court. And two, there really isn’t any reason to be assured at this point that the administration is even going to follow court orders.
We’ve seen time and again that the administration is ignoring orders from circuit courts and even the Supreme Court in the case of Kilmar Albrego Garcia, who’s being held unlawfully in El Salvador, that the administration is both dragging its feet and using any excuse at can to not follow the orders of the court. So I do imagine that there are legal avenues to be able to challenge that. It’s not clear whether or not those legal avenues are actually going to put a stop to what the administration is carrying out.
SCOTT HARRIS: Especially in view of the really extremist supermajority that now sits on the US Supreme Court.
NASTASIA LAWTON STICKLOR: Yes, exactly.
SCOTT HARRIS: Nastasia, tell our listeners about the Call the Courage campaign. It’s really pivoted on the Article 90 and 92 of the U.S. Military Code, which gives a soldier the right to disobey an illegal order violating the U.S. Constitution.
NASTASIA LAWTON STICKLOR: Yeah. So we sent out this campaign, we shared it with our networks. It’s not a Climate Disobedience Center campaign, but one that has been built by lots of different organizers, community members and we felt that it was really important to share.
So the basis of the campaign really at its heart is about relationship building, which I think is the foundation of any kind of successful organizing that we want to do. So it encourages and gives folks a roadmap to learn a little bit more about military code and the ways in which military folks are protected from carrying out illegal orders.
And it also encourages people to form relationships with people, to talk to people face-to-face. The tagline of the project is, Please Don’t Turn on Us. And it’s really about humanizing ourselves to our military neighbors, humanizing them and building a structure of relationship and support that makes it a lot harder to be turned against each other should something like the Insurrection Act come into play.
SCOTT HARRIS: Nastasia, how are organizers of this Call to Courage campaign doing outreach and education as soldiers advising them of their rights to disobey direct orders in the event those orders are deemed to be unlawful or unconstitutional?
NASTASIA LAWTON STICKLOR: Yeah, so folks have been going right to military bases to the extent that they’re able to approach them. They have had conversations with military personnel. Military personnel are not allowed to take flyers from anyone while they’re on duty, but they have been able to take photographs of the resource that people are taking with them. It is a linktree that has a lot of categories of resources.
So people have been doing that, have been showing up to bases. People have been talking with friends and family who are in the military. Veterans have been really on the forefront of this work, both sort of having the knowledge and experience of having been in the military as well as organizing experience. So people have just been trying to make inroads wherever they can and build humanizing relationships wherever they can, whether it’s by just showing up at a base that is near where they live, or talking to people that they already have relationships with who are in the military.
For more information, visit the Call To Courage Campaign at climatedisobedience.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor (26:32) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For weekly updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook now underway, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
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