Dive Brief:
- After a three-day trial, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut on Sunday issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops in Oregon, saying the federalization of troops from Oregon, California and Texas likely violates the 10th Amendment. She said a permanent injunction will follow by Friday.
- The federal government appealed Immergut’s earlier temporary restraining order, which blocked Trump from deploying federalized National Guard troops from anywhere in the country to Portland. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to rehear an earlier ruling that favored the Trump administration.
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The injunction “changes the appeal’s playing field,” said Paul Lucas, associate professor of criminal justice and criminology at East Carolina University. “It now becomes the operative order the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit must address.”
Dive Insight:
In its Oct. 20 stay of Immergut’s temporary restraining order, a split three-judge panel said the district judge “erred by discounting most of the evidence of events in Portland from June through September.” The panel said the Trump administration was likely to establish that it lawfully federalized the National Guard to quell protests outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland.
Immergut addressed the panel’s assertion that it “must give a great level of deference” to the president’s assessment that National Guard deployment is necessary. While applying “a great level of deference to the President’s determination that a predicate condition exists,” Immergut determined that the protests between June and September “were generally uneventful with occasional interference to federal personnel and property.”
“Based on trial testimony that this Court found credible, particularly the testimony of Portland Police Bureau command staff, who work in Portland and have first-hand knowledge of the crowds at the ICE building from June to the present, the protests in Portland at the time of the National Guard call outs are likely not a ‘rebellion,’ and likely do not pose a danger of rebellion,” Immergut wrote.
Lucas said Immergut’s new ruling “changes what the appeals court is looking at.”
“Instead of reviewing a quick, temporary stop, they now have to weigh a full injunction backed by detailed findings,” Lucas said. “So now, the big legal question is whether the federal government has met the legal requirements for federalization of National Guard troops, and Judge Immergut has leaned toward no, [it has] not done so convincingly. However, we will know more this Friday.”
