A US federal judge in Oregon on Friday evening ruled that President Donald Trump unlawfully seized control of state National Guard units to police protests in Portland, issuing a sweeping injunction that sharply curtails the White House’s claimed power to deploy guard troops over a state’s objection.
In a 106-page opinion, US District Judge Karin Immergut held that Trump’s federalization of 200 Oregon National Guard members, followed by deployments involving federalized California and Texas Guard troops to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland, exceeded his statutory authority and violated the Tenth Amendment’s protections for state sovereignty.
Judge Immergut concluded after a three-day bench trial that even affording “great deference” to the president, the government failed to show either a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion” against federal authority in Portland or any inability to enforce federal immigration law “with the regular forces” already available. The evidence, she wrote, showed that serious unrest around the ICE building in South Portland was brief, peaked in mid-June, and had substantially subsided long before the guard was called. Local police, Oregon State Police, and augmented federal law enforcement were “sufficient” to secure the facility and maintain order.
“The evidence demonstrates that these deployments, which were objected to by Oregon’s governor and not requested by the federal officials in charge of protection of the ICE building, exceeded the president’s authority,” Judge Immergut wrote, emphasizing that the guard, unless lawfully federalized, remains a state militia under the command of the governor, not an all-purpose domestic force at the president’s disposal.
The lawsuit, brought by the State of Oregon, the City of Portland, and later joined by California, challenged Trump’s decision to override Governor Tina Kotek’s refusal to activate the Oregon Guard for immigration-related protest policing and instead unilaterally federalize those troops. It also targeted memoranda authorizing deployments of California and Texas Guard units to the same one-block ICE facility, despite the absence of any request from the federal officials actually responsible for its security.
President Trump has repeatedly depicted Portland as “war-ravaged,” citing months of violent extremism, threats to officers, and strain on the Federal Protective Service. Judge Immergut rejected that characterization as inconsistent with contemporaneous reports and the testimony of on-the-ground law enforcement. The court found that crowds were often fewer than a few dozen people, that most demonstrations were peaceful, that more federal officers than protesters were present on many nights, and that the scattered violence and property damage did not impede ICE from carrying out immigration enforcement beyond a short-lived June disruption.
Judge Immergut also rejected the administration’s reliance on “Antifa” as proof of an organized insurrectionary threat in Portland. Citing testimony from Portland Police Bureau commanders, she found no evidence that Antifa in the city constituted a cohesive organization directing the ICE protests or orchestrating violence against the government. Assertions of an organized campaign to overthrow federal authority, she wrote, were unsupported by the record.
Since the statutory predicates for federalization were not met, the court held that Trump’s orders commandeered Oregon’s militia in violation of the Tenth Amendment and intruded on Oregon’s sovereign authority when coupled with the attempted deployment of other states’ guard units into its territory. The ruling leans heavily on the Supreme Court’s anti-commandeering line of cases and the structural limits embedded in the Militia Clauses, while applying the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s recent decision in Newsom v. Trump to cabin deference to presidential determinations under §12406.
Governor Kotek hailed the ruling as a “validation of the facts on the ground” and a repudiation of what she called a “gross abuse of power” by the White House. Friday’s decision comes as a related challenge from Illinois, where federal courts have likewise questioned Trump’s reliance on §12406 to send Guard troops to ICE protest sites, is already before the Supreme Court.
