By Dietrich Knauth
(Reuters) -A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked U.S. President Donald Trump from deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to the city of Portland while a lawsuit challenging the move plays out.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut in Portland is a setback for Trump, a Republican, as he seeks to dispatch the military to cities he describes as lawless over the objections of their Democratic leaders.
Democratic Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield’s office filed the lawsuit on September 28, a day after Trump said he would send troops to Portland to protect federal immigration facilities from “domestic terrorists.”
The case was initially assigned to U.S. District Judge Michael Simon, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama. He recused himself after the Trump administration raised concerns about comments made by his wife, a congresswoman, criticizing the troop deployment. The case was reassigned to Immergut, who was appointed by Trump during his first term in office.
Oregon asked the court to declare the deployment illegal and block it from going forward, saying Trump was exaggerating the threat of protests against his immigration policies to justify illegally seizing control of state National Guard units.
While Trump described the city as “War ravaged,” Oregon said that Portland protests were “small and sedate,” resulting in only 25 arrests in mid-June and no arrests in the three-and-a-half-months since June 19. Oregon’s lawsuit said that Trump announced the troop deployment after Fox News showed video clips from “substantially larger and more turbulent protests” in Portland in 2020.
The stark divide in how the two sides described the situation on the ground in Portland was evident at a Friday court hearing before Immergut.
U.S. Department of Justice attorney Eric Hamilton said that “vicious and cruel radicals” had laid siege to the Portland headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The decision to send 200 troops – just 5% of the number recently sent to respond to Los Angeles protests – showed restraint, Hamilton said.
Caroline Turco, representing Portland, said that there had been no violence against ICE officers for months and that recent ICE protests were “sedate” in the week before Trump declared the city to be a war zone, sometimes featuring less than a dozen protesters.
“The president’s perception of what is happening in Portland is not the reality on the ground,” Turco said. “The president’s perception is that it is World War Two out here. The reality is that this is a beautiful city with a sophisticated police force that can handle the situation.”
Immergut asked attorneys how much deference she should give to Trump’s description of Portland in social media posts, and seemed skeptical about treating those posts as an official legal determination.
“Really? A social media post is going to count as a presidential determination that you can send the National Guard to cities?” Immergut asked. “I mean, is that really what I should be relying on as his determination?”
Oregon’s lawsuit argued that Trump’s deployment violates several federal laws and the state’s sovereign right to police its own citizens. Trump’s decision to send troops only to “disfavored” Democratic cities like Portland also violates the state’s rights under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit is the latest legal challenge to Trump’s deployments of military forces to Democrat-led cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, which he says were overrun with crime and hostile to immigration enforcement.
State and local Democratic leaders have disputed those claims and accused Trump of violating longstanding U.S. laws and norms against using the military for domestic law enforcement.
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from using the military to fight crime in California on September 2, but that ruling is on hold while the administration appeals.
Washington D.C.’s Democratic attorney general filed a lawsuit on September 4 to end Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital. A judge has yet to rule on the request.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien and Dietrich Knauth in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Lincoln Feast and Rosalba O’Brien)
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