Elizabeth Goitein

And that's the law that normally prohibits federal armed forces from engaging in law enforcement.

So if he were to invoke the act, that would give him the authority to deploy active duty armed forces or police.

to federalize National Guard forces and deploy them to quell civil unrest or to execute the law.

And that could include law enforcement activities such as conducting arrests and seizures.

and searches.

And under the Insurrection Act, the president has broad discretion to decide how many troops need to be deployed and what activities the troops can conduct.

It is really the biggest gun in the president's domestic deployment arsenal.

Well, my main fear is less about the specific actions that they will take, but the consequences of militarizing U.S.

cities and militarizing law enforcement functions.

I think the immediate effect of deploying them will be to enable and embolden security.

ICE officers in their own disruptive and illegal conduct.

But I think there are concerns beyond that, because I think the presence of the military in the numbers that I expect we would see in our cities would be extremely, on the one hand, chilling.

I think there are a lot of people who would be afraid to

just live their lives and go outside and go to restaurants.

And we saw a little of that here in Washington, D.C., when National Guard forces were deployed here.

But on the other side, I think there will be people for whom this is such an outrage that it really is going to inflame tensions rather than diffusing the situation and that it will escalate matters.

And in that context, one of the things I worry about is the fact that I do think that

service members are better trained and more disciplined and more professional than the ICE agents that we've seen in Minneapolis.

But their training is fundamentally different.

They are not trained to handle civil unrest situations.