Juliette Kayyem: Riots Have Not Reached Insurrection Level

America Protests Washington — Demonstrators gather to protest the death of George Floyd, Wednesday, June 3, 2020, outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Floyd died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers.

Hannah Uebele is a producer for Under the Radar with Callie Crossley and previously worked as associate producer for Boston Public Radio. She graduated from Tufts University with a B.S. in English and Environmental Studies. She's a proud Delawarean but has found herself saying "wicked" more and more often, so the Bostonian metamorphosis is well underway.Contact: hannah_uebele@wgbh.org

June 03, 2020

Updated August 07, 2023

Homeland security expert Juliette Kayyem spoke with Boston Public Radio on Wednesday about President Donald Trump's claim to invoke the Insurrection Act. If invoked, the U.S. military could be deployed to stop racial justice rioting across the country.

"The president invokes the threat of the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the president to utilize active military for law enforcement purposes, regardless of whether a governor asks for it or not," Kayyem said. "The president, who doesn't know how to actually manage everything, goes to the limits of his power and says he's going to deploy active military."

An insurrection is what happens when you lose control of the enforcement of federal law, Kayyem noted, and any riots that have happened have not reached the level of an insurrection.

"The [rioting] the other night was bad, but it was not an insurrection — the system was not faltering, we weren't at an existensial crisis," she said. "This was looting and rioting, but this was just a lot of people asserting First Amendment rights, and a very very small minority of them being jerks."

Kayyem is an analyst for CNN, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.