“I’ve Never Had a Trial Quite Like This”: Judge Plans Swift Ruling on Portland Troop Deployment

A historic trial over the president’s power to deploy the military on U.S. soil concluded Friday evening in downtown Portland. And now the city once again waits.

A temporary court block on the deployment of federalized National Guard members in Oregon is set to expire 11:59 p.m. Sunday.

The judge, Karin J, Immergut, is mindful of the looming deadline. She will be working through the weekend, she said. She plans to rule by the end of Sunday on the legality of President Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy the military, over the objections of local officials, to aid U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials allegedly besieged by protesters in Portland.

More than a thousand exhibits and dozens of hours of depositions and sworn testimony were assembled or elicited by a broad cast of lawyers—from the Trump Administration, from the states of Oregon and California, and from the city of Portland—who, over the past three days, packed into the federal courthouse’s 13th floor.

The proceedings, many observed, came together at a far faster pace than normal. Perhaps as much as testimony, Friday was occupied by inside-baseball discussions around, say, evidence admissibility, with Immergut offering some grace for small administrative errors and technical snafus to the harried attorneys who have been working this high profile case.

“I’ve never had a trial quite like this honestly,” Immergut said at one point from the bench Friday, alluding to the truncated timeline in which the court is working and the scale of evidence at hand.

Meanwhile, the issues now before her, plaintiffs argue, cut to questions at the heart of the U.S. legal order.

“I personally think that it’s no exaggeration to say that in their debates over the constitution, our nation’s founders were afraid of the issue that we’re debating in court today,” Scott Kennedy of the state of Oregon said in closing arguments, which began a little after 2 pm.

The Trump administration’s attempts to deploy the guard members, he added, count among the most significant infringements on Oregon’s sovereignty in its history.

The law the Trump administration has invoked—10 U.S.C. 12406—establishes certain conditions under which the president may federalize the national guard for domestic use. One of those conditions is a rebellion. Another is when the president cannot otherwise execute federal law.

In closing remarks, Eric Hamilton of the U.S. Department of Justice reiterated the Trump administration’s core position: It is not for a court to review whether such predicates have been met.

That determination, he said, “belongs exclusively to the president, whose decision is conclusive on all other persons.”

Still, even if the court does review the president’s judgement on the matter, Hamilton added, no trial was necessary, because the central facts are not in dispute.

“Everyone agrees there has been violence in Portland around the ICE building,” he said. “Everyone agrees there was a riot on June 14 at the ICE building. ”Everyone agrees agitators have placed objects in the driveway of the ICE building. All our disputes are matters of degree."

Congress, he said, has empowered the nation’s democratically elected leader to assess such facts and respond accordingly.

Hamilton listed various protester transgressions mentioned at trial: how they shined lights at federal officers, shouted horrible slurs and threats, placed a prop guillotine in the road. Day in and day out, they blocked the ICE facility driveway, requiring the feds to divert scarce manpower to the security and functioning of the office. And all the while, he added, Portland local law enforcement offered little help at all.

In sum, Hamilton said, the conditions in Portland are such that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which runs ICE, needs military help to do its job.

In opposition to Hamilton, Kennedy, of Oregon, warned Judge Immergut that the Trump administration would base its case on sporadic instances of disorder.

But he urged the court to consider tho totality of circumstances over recent months outside the ICE facility, underscoring his argument with a slideshow filled with graphs and points gathered from the evidentiary record.

Federal data showed that the protester crowd at Portland ICE was, in line with a longterm trend, quite small in the days leading up to Trump’s Sept. 27 announcement that he would call in the troops, and that in fact DHS had plenty of officers from which it could have sought help.

It was telling, Kennedy said, that top officials in the region tasked with protecting federal facilities were not even consulted before that announcement. It was also telling that the feds, who are certainly in possession of troves of security footage, did not put a single video or image into the court record to substantiate their claims of heinous protestor crimes disrupting their work.

In fact, their work was not significantly disrupted, Kennedy said. Regional ICE field director Cammilla Wamsley testified Friday that she sought last year to double the amount of immigration arrests in the Pacific Northwest, he pointed out, but never claimed that the protests had a negative impact on her efforts to do that.

The point of all of this was to show that that Trump’s move to activate the National Guard did not reflect a good-faith, plausible analysis of the situation on the ground in Portland. Getting to the heart of his position, Kennedy argued that a military deployment was an inappropriate response to intermittent crimes and disorder and offensive conduct, which are unfortunate everyday challenges of modern urban life.

“And again,” he added, “that is why we have federal and local law enforcement.”

Immergut’s eventual decision, whatever it may be, will almost certainly face further judicial review: The 9th U.S. Circuit court of Appeals is poised to rehear the Portland case. And the U.S. Supreme Court is looking into Trump’s efforts to deploy troops in Chicago.

But for now, a key chapter in the saga nears its end. “Thank you, everybody,” Immergut said, adjourning the court and returning to her chambers as the early stages of autumn darkness began to descend outside. Filing from the courtroom with their binders, attorneys seemed at ease, some trading jokes and farewells. Before long, the 13th floor of the courthouse grew quiet as the assembled took the elevator to street level and embarked back into the city.