WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has ordered several hundred active-duty military police troops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota in the event that President Donald Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, according to a senior U.S. official.

The alert, which was described as precautionary, comes on top of a similar order issued recently to 1,500 infantry soldiers from the Army’s 11th Airborne Division in Alaska and as many as 200 Texas National Guard troops.

Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act, a rarely invoked 1807 law, in response to protests that erupted after a federal immigration officer killed Renee Good, a Minneapolis woman, on Jan. 7. He has since reversed course and suggested that it was not necessary. The law would allow the president to send federal troops to an area to quell a rebellion without getting approval from local officials.

Designated for Domestic Contingencies

The units being alerted are part of a standard package of forces that had been designated for domestic contingencies well before the killing of Good and the protests that followed, officials said. Military police troops, who act as guards and law enforcement on military bases, are trained to interact with the public. They can help direct traffic, control crowds or provide other support to local law enforcement.

In late December, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not deploy active-duty troops to Illinois over the objection of local officials. In the wake of that decision, Trump abandoned efforts to deploy National Guard troops in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.

The Insurrection Act was last invoked by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 in response to riots following a jury’s decision not to convict four white police officers of using excessive force in the beating of Rodney King, a Black man.

Gov. Pete Wilson of California and Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles had asked Bush for federal assistance to restore order.

Trump talked about invoking the law in 2020 to quell protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But the president’s defense secretary, attorney general and chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff convinced him that the deployment of active-duty forces would be counterproductive.

The order putting the troops on notice to deploy was reported earlier by MS NOW.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Greg Jaffe/David Guttenfelder
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