Trump readies troops from California and Texas for Oregon and Illinois

By Shawn Hubler, Anna Griffin and Eric Schmitt

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration has sent hundreds of California National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, and mustered hundreds more from Texas, despite the objections of impacted governors and a stern federal ruling just Saturday (4) that sought to block military forces.

The extraordinary moves sidestepped the ruling of Judge Karin Immergut of US District Court in Oregon, who had issued a temporary restraining order that prevented the Trump administration from mobilizing 200 Oregon troops for a 60-day deployment in the state. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to neighbouring California.

Besides California, the president also ordered as many as 400 members of the Texas National Guard to prepare for deployment for “federal protection missions” in Portland, Chicago and potentially other cities, according to a letter released by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, on Sunday (5) night. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas fully backed the deployment.

“You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it,” he wrote on social media. “No Guard can match the training, skill, and expertise of the Texas National Guard.”

The Texas move emerged as Immergut convened an emergency hearing on the deployment of the California Guard.

The blizzard of moves, from Texas to California, Illinois to Oregon, left governors and the courts scrambling to keep pace.

“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, said in a statement.

The president had said the troops were needed to respond to demonstrations at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland and another in suburban Chicago.

But Immergut wrote that the protests in Portland, which have been generally small, “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. The Trump administration quickly appealed.

Then, in a pivot that outraged both states, the president dispatched 200 to 300 troops that had been commandeered earlier this summer and sent to Los Angeles as part of another contested federal deployment. The decision to essentially substitute California troops for the thwarted Oregon deployment drew vehement criticism from Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon, both of whom are Democrats.

Late Sunday, California joined Oregon’s lawsuit and the two states asked the US District Court for the District of Oregon for a second restraining order to block the use of the California troops. An expedited hearing was set for Sunday night.

“The commander in chief is using the US 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,” Newsom said in a statement. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said that the move violated not only federal law, but also the order under which the president had commandeered the California troops.

The mayor of Portland, Keith Wilson, charged that federal authorities were not only overstating the protests, but “trying to inflame a situation that has otherwise been peaceful.” The deployment of troops from a neighbouring state without the consent of either governor was ‘far beyond the pale’, he said.

Kotek said she had received no prior notification from the federal government, which had flown more than 100 of the California troops to Oregon by Sunday morning,

“The facts haven’t changed,” she said. “There is no need for military intervention in Oregon. There is no insurrection in Portland. No threat to national security.”

Referring to the president, she added: “I kind of don’t even care at this point where he is getting his information, because he is intentionally disregarding the facts on the ground.”

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said that 200 California National Guard troops had been reassigned to Portland from duty in the Los Angeles area “to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”

A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, said 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 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.”

The president has pushed to deploy National Guard troops in a number of major US cities, most of them heavily Democratic, saying that military forces were needed to combat crime and support immigration enforcement. On Sunday, Pritzker charged that the mustering of guard troops from Texas was aimed at escalating tensions.

“It started with federal agents,“ Pritzker said in a statement. “It will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.”

Pritzker said he had not been contacted by anyone in the federal government to coordinate or discuss the deployment.

The president has also sent Guard troops to Washington, DC.

National Guard forces — largely part-time troops who typically work in civilian jobs full time — are normally under the control of the states, with governors serving as commanders. The 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 of them.

The California troops sent to Oregon overnight were taken under federal control during the summer after scattered protests broke out in Los Angeles and some surrounding cities against a series of heavily militarized ICE raids. At one point, nearly 5,000 federal troops, most of them National Guard members, were camped at military facilities south of Los Angeles.

Trump administration officials said the deployment was necessary because state and local “sanctuary” laws, passed to reinforce trust between immigrant communities and police, were keeping local authorities from taking part in the federal immigration crackdown.

Democratic leaders in California, however, charged that the administration had employed much more force than necessary in the crackdown and had then used the ensuing expression of public outrage as a pretext to send in troops. Kotek accused allies of Trump of deliberate provocation at the Portland ICE facility.

“We’re hearing they’re having social media influencers on the rooftop of the building,” she said. “They’re clearly trying to antagonize the crowds.”

Judge Charles R. Breyer of the US District Court in San Francisco ruled last month that the troops sent to the Los Angeles area had been used illegally as a “national police force.” After he handed down the ruling, which has been stayed pending appeal, state lawyers filed a motion demanding that the last batch of remaining California National Guard troops under federal control — about 300 soldiers — be released.

Those legal actions, however, did not deal with the question of whether one state’s National Guard troops can be federalized by the president over the governor’s objections and then deployed into another nonconsenting state. Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said that he could not remember another time when one state’s National Guard was deployed in another state over the objections of both governors involved.

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 sent to Portland were legally part of the federal armed forces. That meant that the president could send them into any state without that state’s consent, as long as the federalization and deployment were otherwise lawful.

But she said that by the reasoning detailed in Immergut’s ruling concerning the Oregon National Guard, the deployment of the California troops to Portland was probably not lawful.

The statute under which the president dispatched the troops — Section 12406 of Title 10 of the US Code — specifies certain conditions that must be present to justify the action. Immergut found that those conditions were not present in Portland.

Though the order was specific to the Oregon National Guard, Goitein said in an email, the reasoning would apply equally to the California National Guard, and the deployment of federalized troops in Portland would be unlawful wherever they came from.

The president’s repeated depictions of Portland as “on fire” 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 ebbed in August and September.

On Sunday, residents and tourists in the city were largely revelling in a sunny fall morning, playing fetch with their dogs in neighbourhood parks, standing in long lines for brunch and crowding downtown sidewalks to cheer on runners in the annual city marathon. Outside the ICE facility in southwest Portland, 2 miles from the central city, about 70 protesters chanted, barbecued and passed out bottled water as passing motorists honked in mutual disapproval of the Trump administration.

“There are more people filming each other than there are rabble-rousers,” said Alex Knots, 58, a demonstrator who said he works in the tech industry.

But city and state leaders raised warnings that the actions of federal law enforcement officers and provocateurs aligned with Trump could bring violence.

“This is an aggressive approach trying to inflame a situation that has otherwise been peaceful,” Wilson said.

The president’s decision to focus on Portland has drawn some protesters from outside the city, including right-wing counter-demonstrators, and has 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.

Federal agents who had confined their crowd dispersal efforts to the driveway and street immediately outside the building extended their efforts by several blocks Saturday night, 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.

“What was unlawful yesterday is unlawful today,” said Dan Rayfield, the Oregon attorney general.

California’s attorney general, Bonta, said that the deployment was not only a violation of the relevant federal statute, but also a breach of the president’s earlier order, using troops that he had argued were needed in California “for completely unrelated activity in Oregon.”

“It’s our National Guard — California’s National Guard,” Bonta told reporters late Sunday. “Not Trump’s Royal Guard, as he seems to think.”

-New York Times