A federal judge appointed by Trump granted on Saturday evening the request for temporary protection of temporary protection against the occupation of the imminent national guard.
Judge Karin Immergut has written that some of the Trump administration’s arguments may disrupt the fundamental premise that the United States is a country of “constitutional law, no martial law”.
“The defendants have been one of the arguments which, if they are accepted, are likely to muddle the border between the civil and military federal power-to the detriment of this nation,” she wrote.
The Trump administration immediately appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Friday, Immergut seemed ready to grant the temporary ban order, while lawyers of the administration struggled powerfully during the oral arguments to report recent disorders in Portland which would justify deployment.
“As of September 27, 2025, it had been months that there had been a sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in Portland,” she wrote.
She added that the police had managed the sporadic episodes outside an ice installation which had been the site of larger demonstrations earlier in summer. She also rejected the arguments of the administration according to which violence elsewhere – lawyers of the Ministry of Justice had cited the murder of ice prisoners in Dallas – specifically strengthened the risk of violence in Portland.
The DOJ’s argument according to which the occasional use of Portland of other types of federal troops as a safeguard has shown that local police were not able to face the same way: “If the president could assimilate the embezzlement of federal resources to his inability to execute the federal law, then the president could send military troops practically anywhere,” she said.
She also wrote that President Trump’s own words harm his case, because his hyperbolic descriptions of Portland as a burst and burning showed that her “determination was simply without attachment of the facts”.
The same day that Immergut issued his decision, Trump announced that he would deploy 300 national guard troops in Chicago. This occupation is opposed by the Governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker (D) – who called “scandalous and non -American” deployment – and will also be noted by legal challenges.
Read the decision here:
