The Trump administration sent 300 federalized members of the California National Guard to Oregon on Saturday night and early Sunday, after a federal court had blocked him from deploying the Oregon National Guard in that state, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. Mr. Newsom denounced the move as a “breathtaking abuse of power” and said California would sue.
The move came less than a day after Judge Karin Immergut of U.S. District Court in Oregon issued a temporary restraining order that prevented the Trump administration from mobilizing 200 Oregon troops for a 60-day deployment there. Mr. Trump had said the troops were needed to respond to demonstrations at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, but the judge wrote that the protests “were not significantly violent or disruptive” and that she expected a trial court to agree with the state’s contention that the president had exceeded his constitutional authority.
“This isn’t about public safety, it’s about power,” Mr. Newsom said of the California troops in a statement. “The commander in chief is using the U.S. military as a political weapon against American citizens. We will take this fight to court, but the public cannot stay silent in the face of such reckless and authoritarian conduct by the president of the United States.”
A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said that the president had “exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement.”
Referring to Mr. Newsom by a disparaging nickname, she added that the governor “should stand on the side of law-abiding citizens instead of violent criminals destroying Portland and cities across the country.”
In Oregon, state and local officials expressed outrage.
“This action circumvents the court’s decision and threatens to inflame a community that has remained peaceful,” Mayor Keith Wilson of Portland said.
Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon said that 101 federalized California National Guard members had already arrived in her state by Sunday morning. There had been no prior notification from the federal government to her administration, she said.
“The facts haven’t changed,” she added. “There is no need for military intervention in Oregon. There is no insurrection in Portland. No threat to national security.”
The president has pushed to deploy National Guard troops in a number of major U.S. cities, most of them heavily Democratic, saying that military forces were needed to combat crime and support immigration enforcement. On Saturday, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, said that Mr. Trump planned to send 300 Guard troops to Chicago soon, a move that the governor has said was aimed at escalating tensions. The president has also sent Guard troops to Washington, D.C.,
Starting in June, Mr. Trump sent nearly 5,000 National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles during protests there over aggressive immigration enforcement. Most of the troops have since been withdrawn.
A federal judge has ruled that those troops were used illegally for domestic law enforcement. But that ruling has been stayed pending an appeal, and 300 troops have remained deployed in Southern California. Those were the troops that have been sent to Oregon, Mr. Newsom said.
National Guard forces — largely part-time troops who typically work in civilian jobs full time — are normally controlled by the states, with governors serving as commanders. Troops often are deployed to help after natural disasters or when civil disorder overwhelms local law enforcement authorities, but in some circumstances federal law allows the president to take control.
The California troops sent to Oregon overnight were federalized this summer after scattered protests in Los Angeles and some surrounding cities against a series of heavily militarized ICE raids.
Trump administration officials said the deployment of active-duty troops into an American city was necessary because state and local “sanctuary” laws, passed to reinforce trust between immigrant communities and the police, were limiting the local authorities’ ability to take part in the federal immigration crackdown.
Democratic leaders in liberal-dominated California, however, charged that the administration had used unnecessary force in conducting immigration enforcement and then used the ensuing public outrage as a pretext to send the U.S. military into their state.
Last month, Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco ruled that the troops had been illegally used in California as a “national police force.” After that ruling, California’s lawyers filed a motion demanding that the 300 remaining federalized troops be released.
Neither legal action, however, dealt with whether one state’s National Guard can be federalized by the president over a governor’s objections and deployed into another nonconsenting state.
Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school, said that the California National Guard troops that were being sent to Portland were legally part of the federal armed forces. That means the president can send them into any state without that state’s consent, as long as the federalization and deployment are otherwise lawful.
But, she said, under Judge Immergut’s ruling, the deployment is most likely not lawful.
The conditions required for a federal deployment under Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the statute under which the president dispatched the National Guard troops, are not present in Portland, the judge found. And while her order was specific to the Oregon National Guard, Ms. Goitein said in an email, its logic applies equally to the California National Guard.
As a result, she said, a deployment of federalized troops in Portland is unlawful whether those troops come from California or Oregon.
The president’s repeated depictions of Portland as “on fire” have diverged from reality, the judge found, citing a month of reports from the Portland Police Bureau showing that the size and intensity of the nightly ICE protests had been ebbing in August and September. On Sunday, residents and tourists were largely reveling in a sunny fall morning, playing fetch with their dogs in neighborhood parks, standing in long lines for brunch and crowding downtown sidewalks to cheer on runners in the annual city marathon.
But the president’s decision to focus on Portland has also drawn protesters from outside the city, including right-wing counter-demonstrators, and heightened tensions. Over the weekend, federal immigration officers at the city’s ICE building escalated their use of force, turning swiftly to tear gas and pepper balls during a Saturday afternoon march to protest the proposed deployment.
On Saturday night, federal agents who had confined their crowd dispersal efforts to the driveway and street immediately outside the building extended their efforts to several blocks beyond, using gas, pepper balls and flash-bang grenades to send demonstrators scattering.
Oregon officials said the situation still fell far short of any need for military intervention.
Dan Rayfield, the state’s attorney general, indicated that the state would return to court to try to block the deployment. State lawyers could ask Judge Immergut to expand her temporary restraining order to include National Guard soldiers from other states.
Aishvarya Kavi contributed reporting.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
The post Trump Sends California National Guard Troops to Portland, Ore. appeared first on New York Times.
