NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Hezly Rivera was the fresh face a year ago. The newcomer. The teenager on a team of 20-something Olympic gymnasts, doing her best to absorb what she could from Simone Biles, Sunisa Lee, Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles.
The one thing that stood out, even more than the sometimes otherworldly gymnastics, is the way her fellow gold-medal-winning teammates went about their business.
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Overall gold medalist Hezly Rivera of WOGA, center, silver medalist Leanne Wong, of the University of Florida, left, and bronze medalist Joscelyn Roberson, of World Champions Centre, right, pose after the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Overall gold medalist Hezly Rivera of WOGA, center, silver medalist Leanne Wong, of the University of Florida, left, and bronze medalist Joscelyn Roberson, of World Champions Centre, right, pose after the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Skye Blakely of the University of Florida competes on the balance beam during the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Leanne Wong of the University of Florida competes on the uneven bars during the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Hezly Rivera of WOGA competes on the uneven bars during the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Hezly Rivera of WOGA reacts after competing on the uneven bars during the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
“They looked so confident,” Rivera said. “They're like, ‘I’m going to go out and I'm going to hit.' It gave me that confidence as well.”
Looks like it.
The now 17-year-old who says she's paying no attention to the idea that she's the leader of the women's program in the early stages of the run-up to the 2028 Olympics certainly looks the part.
Buoyed by a polished steadiness — and a beam routine that finally looked the way it does back home at her home gym in Texas — Rivera captured her first national title Sunday night at the U.S. Championships. Her two-day total of 112.000 was good enough to fend off a challenge from Leanne Wong and put her in excellent position to lead the four-woman American delegation at the world championships in Jakarta, Indonesia, in October.
Rivera, by far the youngest member of the five-woman team that finished atop the podium in Paris a year ago, bounced back from a shaky performance at the U.S. Classic last month with the kind of measured, refined gymnastics that she attributed to simply “letting go” of whatever pressure she might feel as the lone Olympic gold medalist in a remarkably young field.
“No matter how rough the competition is, I still can get back into the gym and work hard because all those months previously that I’ve been working hard, I know it’s going to show up eventually,” she said. “So it kind of just took a weight off my shoulders.”
Rivera, at the very least, locked up a spot in the world championship selection camp next month. So did Wong, a four-time world championship medalist, budding entrepreneur and pre-med student who shows no signs of slowing down despite years of competing collegiately and at the elite level simultaneously.
Asked how she juggles it all, the 21-year-old who insists she doesn't keep a planner said she lives by the motto “there's time for everything.”
Joscelyn Roberson, an Olympic alternate last summer, shook off an ankle injury suffered at the end of her floor routine to finish third as the three most internationally experienced athletes in the field looked ready to lead after spending most of the last Olympic quad learning from Biles and company.
“You go from, ‘Oh you’re so young, you’re so young,’ to, ‘Oh, you are the older kid,’” the 19-year-old Roberson said. “People say, ‘How are you feeling?’ Like, I honestly don’t feel that different.”
Two summers ago, Roberson was Biles' bouncy sidekick. Now she's among the leaders of the next wave.
“I felt like more responsible to let the little, smaller, less experienced kids know it’s not the end of the day if you have a bad day or if you had one fall,” Roberson said. “I want to help them grow instead of think ‘I have to be perfect.’”
Roberson then walked the walk. Or maybe limped the limp. She appeared ready to make it a three-woman race for first until she turned an ankle on the final tumbling pass of her floor routine.
The rising sophomore at Arkansas gingerly continued on anyway. She gritted her way through her vault dismount, though the five-tenths (0.5) deduction for using an additional pad for her protection took her out of contention for the all-around.
Still, the victory hardly came easy for Rivera. She was pushed through four rotations by Wong, who started Sunday with a stuck Cheng vault and didn't relent over the course of two hours.
Rivera responded each time — she posted the top scores on three of the four events — but it wasn't until she walked off the podium following her floor routine with victory in hand that she could relax.
“Everything fell into place,” Rivera said. “I tried not to get too overwhelmed because nerves obviously can be there, especially when you know you’re in a spot to win a national title, but I just took all pressure off myself.”
Skye Blakely, who was injured at the Olympic Trials in both 2021 and 2024, was sublime on both uneven bars and balance beam to put herself in consideration to make the world team.
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Overall gold medalist Hezly Rivera of WOGA, center, silver medalist Leanne Wong, of the University of Florida, left, and bronze medalist Joscelyn Roberson, of World Champions Centre, right, pose after the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Skye Blakely of the University of Florida competes on the balance beam during the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Leanne Wong of the University of Florida competes on the uneven bars during the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Hezly Rivera of WOGA competes on the uneven bars during the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Hezly Rivera of WOGA reacts after competing on the uneven bars during the senior women's finals of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump would not be the first president to invoke the Insurrection Act, as he has threatened, so that he can send U.S. military forces to Minnesota.
But he'd be the only commander in chief to use the 19th-century law to send troops to quell protests that started because of federal officers the president already has sent to the area — one of whom shot and killed a U.S. citizen.
The law, which allows presidents to use the military domestically, has been invoked on more than two dozen occasions — but rarely since the 20th Century's Civil Rights Movement.
Federal forces typically are called to quell widespread violence that has broken out on the local level — before Washington's involvement and when local authorities ask for help. When presidents acted without local requests, it was usually to enforce the rights of individuals who were being threatened or not protected by state and local governments. A third scenario is an outright insurrection — like the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Experts in constitutional and military law say none of that clearly applies in Minneapolis.
“This would be a flagrant abuse of the Insurrection Act in a way that we've never seen,” said Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program. “None of the criteria have been met.”
William Banks, a Syracuse University professor emeritus who has written extensively on the domestic use of the military, said the situation is “a historical outlier” because the violence Trump wants to end “is being created by the federal civilian officers” he sent there.
But he also cautioned Minnesota officials would have “a tough argument to win” in court, because the judiciary is hesitant to challenge “because the courts are typically going to defer to the president” on his military decisions.
Here is a look at the law, how it's been used and comparisons to Minneapolis.
George Washington signed the first version in 1792, authorizing him to mobilize state militias — National Guard forerunners — when “laws of the United States shall be opposed, or the execution thereof obstructed.”
He and John Adams used it to quash citizen uprisings against taxes, including liquor levies and property taxes that were deemed essential to the young republic's survival.
Congress expanded the law in 1807, restating presidential authority to counter “insurrection or obstruction” of laws. Nunn said the early statutes recognized a fundamental “Anglo-American tradition against military intervention in civilian affairs” except “as a tool of last resort.”
The president argues Minnesota officials and citizens are impeding U.S. law by protesting his agenda and the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Customs and Border Protection officers. Yet early statutes also defined circumstances for the law as unrest “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course” of law enforcement.
There are between 2,000 and 3,000 federal authorities in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, compared to Minneapolis, which has fewer than 600 police officers. Protesters' and bystanders' video, meanwhile, has shown violence initiated by federal officers, with the interactions growing more frequent since Renee Good was shot three times and killed.
“ICE has the legal authority to enforce federal immigration laws,” Nunn said. “But what they're doing is a sort of lawless, violent behavior” that goes beyond their legal function and “foments the situation” Trump wants to suppress.
“They can't intentionally create a crisis, then turn around to do a crackdown,” he said, adding that the Constitutional requirement for a president to “faithfully execute the laws” means Trump must wield his power, on immigration and the Insurrection Act, “in good faith.”
Courts have blocked some of Trump's efforts to deploy the National Guard, but he'd argue with the Insurrection Act that he does not need a state's permission to send troops.
That traces to President Abraham Lincoln, who held in 1861 that Southern states could not legitimately secede. So, he convinced Congress to give him express power to deploy U.S. troops, without asking, into Confederate states he contended were still in the Union. Quite literally, Lincoln used the act as a legal basis to fight the Civil War.
Nunn said situations beyond such a clear insurrection as the Confederacy still require a local request or another trigger that Congress added after the Civil War: protecting individual rights. Ulysses S. Grant used that provision to send troops to counter the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists who ignored the 14th and 15th amendments and civil rights statutes.
During post-war industrialization, violence erupted around strikes and expanding immigration — and governors sought help.
President Rutherford B. Hayes granted state requests during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 after striking workers, state forces and local police clashed, leading to dozens of deaths. Grover Cleveland granted a Washington state governor's request — at that time it was a U.S. territory — to help protect Chinese citizens who were being attacked by white rioters. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to Colorado in 1914 amid a coal strike after workers were killed.
Federal troops helped diffuse each situation.
Banks stressed that the law then and now presumes that federal resources are needed only when state and local authorities are overwhelmed — and Minnesota leaders say their cities would be stable and safe if Trump's feds left.
As Grant had done, mid-20th century presidents used the act to counter white supremacists.
Franklin Roosevelt dispatched 6,000 troops to Detroit — more than double the U.S. forces in Minneapolis — after race riots that started with whites attacking Black residents. State officials asked for FDR's aid after riots escalated, in part, Nunn said, because white local law enforcement joined in violence against Black residents. Federal troops calmed the city after dozens of deaths, including 17 Black residents killed by local police.
Once the Civil Rights Movement began, presidents sent authorities to Southern states without requests or permission, because local authorities defied U.S. civil rights law and fomented violence themselves.
Dwight Eisenhower enforced integration at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy sent troops to the University of Mississippi after riots over James Meredith's admission and then pre-emptively to ensure no violence upon George Wallace's “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” to protest the University of Alabama's integration.
“There could have been significant loss of life from the rioters” in Mississippi, Nunn said.
Lyndon Johnson protected the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery after Wallace's troopers attacked marchers' on their first peaceful attempt.
Johnson also sent troops to multiple U.S. cities in 1967 and 1968 after clashes between residents and police escalated. The same thing happened in Los Angeles in 1992, the last time the Insurrection Act was invoked.
Riots erupted after a jury failed to convict four white police officers of excessive use of force despite video showing them beating a Rodney King, a Black man. California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush for support.
Bush authorized about 4,000 troops — but after he had publicly expressed displeasure over the trial verdict. He promised to “restore order” yet directed the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation, and two of the L.A. officers were later convicted in federal court.
President Donald Trump answers questions after signing a bill that returns whole milk to school cafeterias across the country, in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
