Fox News’ Laura Ingraham described pro-immigrant activists in Minnesota as “insurgents” and as an “insurgency” multiple times over the course of her January 12 episode. At one point, Ingraham floated the idea of President Donald Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, which authorizes use of the military against civilians in the United States under certain conditions, such as to suppress a rebellion.

Ingraham’s comments come after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7, sparking massive protests around the country. The agent fired at Good three times as she was attempting to drive away from him, according to independent analyses from The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Times and Post analyses contradict a statement from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, amplified by Fox News, which falsely claimed Good was attempting to ram her car into the agent. Right-wing media have almost universally defended the killing and disparaged Good, frequently blaming her for her own death. 

Ingraham’s rhetoric illustrates the degree to which conservative media are looking for Trump to escalate his attacks against protesters and immigrant communities more broadly. It also shows how the war on terror, and its logic of counterinsurgency, has evolved into a campaign the Trump administration is now waging against broad swaths of the American public.

“An insurgency, not a protest,” Ingraham said, describing reactions to the Minneapolis shooting in the first moments of her Monday evening show. She continued with that framing over the course of her opening segment, sometimes by airing bombastic social media posts and ascribing them to the entire movement protesting ICE’s killing of Good. 

“A Chinese propagandist on TikTok is telling insurgents here to start compiling lists of likely Trump supporters and other cooperators,” Ingraham said. After playing the clip, Ingraham added: “If this isn’t promoting an armed insurrection, I don’t know what is.”

“It starts with treating the patriots as enemies,” she continued. “Look what happened over the weekend — insurgents besieged a hotel in Minneapolis where they thought that ICE was staying.” 

“Now, this resistance, this insurgence is organized and well-executed,” Ingraham added. “It's meant to undermine our entire federal system, but we know Democrats don't care about Renee Good because to them she was just collateral damage.”

As Ingraham continued her monologue, the Fox host cast the anti-ICE protesters as violent threats. “The insurgents, they don’t care about double standards,” Ingraham said. “They are committed to ridding the country of Trump and his agents by any means necessary.”

“They want to deliver vigilante justice,” she added.

After detailing media coverage that was critical of the Trump administration, Ingraham said the negative press “fed the burgeoning insurgency — they wanted it to feed an insurgency.”

Her opening remarks concluded, Ingraham stayed on the topic with her first guest, former Border Patrol agent Ammon Blair.

“Do you believe in this situation that the Democrats care about really what happened to Renee Good or is she just, you know, she's like a prop in their insurgency play?” Ingraham asked.

Blair responded in kind, referring to a “war” between ICE and the public who opposes it. 

“Yeah, she's just a catalyst to continue their movement to the eradication of citizenship — look, at the end of this, this is what this war is about,” Blair said. “The war is about the idea and concepts of what a citizen is.” 

Ingraham’s next guest was Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). She began by asking for his “thoughts on where we are — could the Insurrection Act come into play?”

Roy responded by saying “of course the president should use the Insurrection Act from 1807” and claiming that “we, the average American, want that.”

Right-wing media figures have long fantasized about invoking the Insurrection Act. One notable example is Jeffrey Clark, who Trump attempted to install as acting attorney general in January 2021 while Trump was attempting to overturn the previous year’s election results. In July 2023, Clark appeared on the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and explained that he’d advised Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act during the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. Clark was a senior official at the Justice Department at the time. He currently works for the second Trump administration in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.