By Tiffany Williams –
A federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s move to deploy the National Guard in Portland, slamming the order as unjustified and a threat to state sovereignty.
U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut issued the injunction Saturday in a lawsuit brought by Oregon officials and the city of Portland. She said the relatively small protests in the city didn’t warrant federalized troops and warned the deployment risked trampling on Oregon’s autonomy.
“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” Immergut wrote. “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.”
The Trump administration immediately filed a notice of appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
State and city officials sued to block the deployment last week, a day after the president announced that 200 Oregon National Guard troops would be federalized to protect federal property. Trump called Portland “war-ravaged.”
Oregon leaders called that claim absurd. The protests outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building had drawn only small crowds—usually a few dozen people—before the announcement.
Immergut said the administration’s reasoning didn’t line up with the facts.
While the president generally has broad discretion to federalize the Guard when local authorities can’t enforce the law, the judge found that wasn’t the case in Portland. The demonstrations, she said, “were small and uneventful.”
“The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts,” Immergut wrote.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson defended the president’s move, saying Trump “exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement” and expressed confidence the administration would be vindicated on appeal.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield called the ruling “a healthy check on the president.”
“It reaffirms what we already knew: Portland is not the president’s war-torn fantasy,” Rayfield said. “Our city is not ravaged, and there is no rebellion. Members of the Oregon National Guard are not a tool for him to use in his political theater.”
Trump has repeatedly deployed or threatened to deploy federal troops in major cities, often Democratic-led, including Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, and Memphis. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled his deployment of roughly 4,700 National Guard soldiers and Marines to Los Angeles was illegal but allowed 300 to remain under strict limits. That decision is under appeal.
In Portland, protests have been confined to a single block in a city of 636,000 residents spanning 145 square miles. Crowds swelled slightly after the Sept. 28 deployment announcement, but police said arrests were limited to two people on assault charges. A peaceful march that same day drew thousands downtown without incident.