Judge Sides With Oregon in National Guard Case, Bars Deployment

For weeks, the Trump administration hung its embattled effort to deploy the military to Portland on a particular federal law. The statute, Title 10, Section 12406 of the U.S. Code, sets conditions under which the president may take command of a state’s National Guard—conditions which have been satisfied, according to the feds, by ongoing demonstrations outside the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.

In a significant ruling Friday evening, a federal judge flatly disagreed.

After a series of temporary interventions that for more than a month now have blocked the deployment and kept the federalized troops holed up on bases outside Portland, the latest order marks a final judgment in State of Oregon v. Trump, a case that hinged on the president’s authority to use military force on U.S. soil, but seemed to be as much about his prerogative to define reality itself—at least for the purposes of the law.

Here, U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut was the law’s arbiter. And, though precedent-bound to give “great deference” to Trump’s assessment of the situation in Portland, upon reviewing the evidence at trial, she nonetheless found his analysis lacking.

“The ‘precise standard’ to demarcate the line past which conditions would satisfy the statutory standard to deploy the military in the streets of American cities is ultimately a question for a higher court to decide,” Immergut wrote in an 106-page order. But she added, in light of the factual findings at trial, court precedent as well as history and tradition, “this Court finds that wherever this line precisely is, Defendants have failed to clear it.”

Under the terms of Immergut’s judgment, the federalized National Guard members who have been posted for weeks outside Portland are permanently blocked from being deploying in the city.

The immediate question, however, is whether those terms will hold. Higher courts appear poised to take a thwack at the case and related ones, which raise major legal questions as the Trump administration asserts broad power to deploy troops as he sees fit.

But for now, Immergut’s decision, conducted after a three-day trial last month in downtown Portland that built out the factual record in the case, stands as a rebuke to the administration’s efforts to use protests as a pretext for weaving the military into U.S. urban life.

“Today’s ruling is a huge victory for Oregon,” Attorney General Dan Rayfield said in a written statement. “The courts are holding this administration accountable to the truth and the rule of law.”

The ruling “validates the facts on the ground,” Gov. Tina Kotek said.

Oregon Senate Majority Leader Kayse Jama weighed in as well: “Today’s ruling renews my confidence that facts still matter in our courts and that checks on executive power are still possible.”

The White House offered a different perspective. “The facts haven’t changed,” said deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson in an email. “Amidst ongoing violent riots and lawlessness, that local leaders have refused to step in to quell, President Trump has exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets. President Trump will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities and we expect to be vindicated by a higher court.”

Oregon’s legal saga began shortly after a Sept. 27 post on Truth Social, a screenshot of which would form the eventual trial’s Exhibit 1: In the post, President Donald Trump declared he would send troops—authorized to use “Full Force, if necessary”—to “protect War ravaged Portland.”

It remains unclear how exactly the president formed his understanding of the conditions in the city. Whatever the case, a day after his announcement, Kotek told the president by phone that he had received bad intel. The president responded the next day by formally taking 200 troops from her command. Oregon sued hours later.

Federal data presented at trial showed protests at Portland ICE had become quite small by late September. But as the Oregon National Guard members prepared to deploy, and the federal law enforcement presence at ICE dramatically increased, demonstrations outside became newly contentious, and federal officers filled the South Waterfront neighborhood with tear gas and other munitions.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit proceeded. When, at Oregon’s request, Judge Immergut, who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump himself, temporarily blocked the deployment from proceeding, Trump moved to deploy National Guard members from elsewhere instead. Immergut blocked that too.

A month of legal wrangling ensued as the case twisted through the courts—an appeals court intervened and then vacated its own ruling, for example—and by late October, the trial commenced in downtown Portland.

Trump administration attorneys argued the ICE protests constituted a potential rebellion, and rendered it unable to enforce federal law—a legal justification to bring in the troops.

To build its case, the administration brought in federal law enforcement officers, who testified to anecdotal instances of violence and disorder—including a particularly riotous evening in June, four months before the call-up. As for the bigger picture, they described a general air of menacing hostility from the protesters who gathered at Portland ICE, hurling insults, sometimes obstructing vehicles from leaving.

Officers of the Portland Police Bureau who testified evidently saw the demonstrations in a different light. Compared with the city’s 2020 protests, the ICE protests were actually on balance relatively tame, they said, particularly in the weeks preceding the late-September call-up. Flare-ups tended to occur between demonstrators and counterdemonstrators. And where feds were themselves in the mix, they at times used force and showed levels of aggression disproportionate to the situation at hand.

On multiple occasions, Immergut writes, she found the Police Bureau officers’ accounts to be more credible than those offered by their federal counterparts. She found contradictions in the feds’ testimony. She also found it was often unsupported by evidence.

“The Court does not find this testimony to be credible,” she wrote in one instance, in regard to claims from a federal law enforcement officers that Portland police eventually all but stopped helping them.

Immergut found otherwise: “[The Federal Protective Service] did call PPB for help, and PPB routinely responded to these calls for help,” she wrote.

Thus, relying largely on Portland police testimony, some federal testimony, as well as corroborating evidence from the record, Immergut forged in her ruling what will go down as the court’s authoritative narrative of events.

After tensions peaked in June, Immergut found, they quickly abated due to the efforts of civil law enforcement officers. “And since that brief span of a few days in June,” she wrote, “the protests outside the Portland ICE facility have been predominately peaceful, with only isolated and sporadic instances of relatively low-level violence, largely between protesters and counterprotesters.”

Immergut acknowledged that some citizens may support Trump’s efforts to deploy troops as a helpful military supplement to effectuate his immigration agenda.

To these critics, she invoked the nation’s founders, who she said embodied their profound fear and distrust of military power in the U.S. Constitution and its amendments—a sentiment which has lived on through the decades as a tradition of resistance to military intrusion in civilian affairs.

The principle, Immergut wrote, “has been foundational to the safeguarding of our fundamental liberties under the Constitution.”