The Trump White House Seriously Weighed Suspending Habeas Corpus and Invoking the Insurrection Act

Newly disclosed internal memoranda show that during the early months of his second term, Trump’s White House gave serious consideration to two of the most extreme assertions of executive power imaginable: suspending the writ of habeas corpus to detain immigrants, and invoking the Insurrection Act to put the military on American streets against protesters. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Trump’s deportation czar, pushed to strip immigrants of their right to challenge their detention in court, and Vice President JD Vance argued for invoking the Insurrection Act to quell unrest in Minnesota after federal agents killed critical care nurse Alex Pretti. That neither was ultimately carried out is cold comfort—the deliberations show how close the administration came to crossing lines the country has held for generations.

The New York Times reports:

Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas Mr. Miller had been pushing that alarmed Mr. Scharf [an arch-conservative lawyer serving as the White House staff secretary]. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps. …

“The history of habeas corpus dates back to the very dawn of English common law,” he recorded in his memo to Ms. Wiles [Trump’s Chief of Staff]. “Denial of habeas corpus rights was a key grievance underlying the American Revolution, and the right to apply to the federal courts for habeas review dates to the beginning of the republic.” …

In the case of the Insurrection Act, Vice President JD Vance pushed to invoke it just days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a Minnesota critical care nurse who was protesting the administration’s immigration policies. …

“The Insurrection Act serves as a break-the-glass exception to the traditional, general prohibition on the use of the military in the domestic setting,” Mr. Scharf wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 29, tracing the history of its use.

It is a measure of how far this administration’s instincts run that suspending habeas corpus and deploying the military domestically were live options, debated on the merits at the highest levels of the White House. The constraints that stopped them were not the president’s own restraint but the prospect of losing in court—and the fact that a handful of advisers still see a downside to such measures. That the guardrail held this time is no guarantee it will the next.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.