The city of Portland has emerged at the center of three relationships key to the American system of government: the federal government and the states, the courts and the executive branch, and law enforcement and the military.
That was the opening idea in Federal District Judge Karin Immergut’s Oct. 4 order blocking federal deployment of troops to the streets of Portland. She followed it with this: “Whether we choose to follow what the Constitution mandates with respect to these three relationships goes to the heart of what it means to live under the rule of law in the United States.”
That point was underlined, in dark ink, by what happened just as she signed the order prohibiting the use of Oregon National Guard troops in Portland: An order from the White House ordering troops from California and Texas to the Oregon city.
As word of that emerged, the state of Oregon, which had legally attacked the first deployment, asked for a temporary restraining order in the case of troops from other states. She swiftly signed the followup order as well.
Where all this is heading remains unclear. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is set to hear arguments Thursday, and the Trump administration continues to defend its decision and decry Portland.
But the concerns raised by Immergut, appointed to the bench in 2019 by Donald Trump in his first term, are worth reviewing as we consider the stakes of what is happening. And these are stakes which involve people and places far beyond Oregon.
First, she noted that the only disturbances related to federal activities — immigration, specifically — have been concentrated within just one block and on just one building, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building on Macadam Road, south of downtown. Additionally, Immergut pointed out more than 1,500 state and local law enforcement officers, many of them specifically trained in crowd control, have been available if needed.
For a couple of weeks in mid-June, protests were more fierce, resulting in four arrests involving assault and vandalism. But according to reports submitted to the court, protests since have been lightly attended and generally peaceful. Since mid-July the Portland Police Bureau has “carried out routine monitoring of the ICE-Facility protests without serious incident … [and] the risks posed by nightly ICE-Facility protests have not merited anything more than standard, periodic monitoring like any other neighborhood in the City.” The Immergut order carefully reviewed activity outside the ICE building, and found nothing local police should not have easily been able to handle.
The judge said the state and city provided plenty of evidence that “the protests at the Portland ICE facility were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days — or even weeks — leading up to the President’s directive on September 27, 2025.” Portland police logs “also show that the protest activity in September generally did not involve violence against federal property or personnel.”
The law requires that presidential declarations be given considerable deference, but the judge said that is “not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground.”
Immergut outlined broader issues as well. Federal takeover of enforcement at Portland would violate “the state’s Tenth Amendment right to control its National Guard. This encroachment on Oregon’s police power leaves an indelible mark on Oregon’s “sovereignty under the Constitution.”
She also warned specifically about the dangers of injecting military rule into traditionally civilian areas: “this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of this nation.”
The judge framed the argument within a legal discussion, but that question of the broader use of military power in American civilian settings is much more than hypothetical. An Oct. 3 news report from the Minneapolis Star Tribune said that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had been considering sending a top strike force, the Army 82nd Airborne infantry division, a unit with deep experience in combat in Vietnam and Afghanistan and reaching back to World War I, to Portland. The national guard option seems to have been selected instead.
All that takes on extra weight after Trump’s own comments on Sept. 30 when speaking to hundreds of top military officers that the nations’ armed forces should start using cities as “training grounds.”
Portland has never been a place, as he told Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, that “looks like World War II. Your place is burning down.” It wasn’t and it isn’t. At the moment, court orders may be among the few things that keep it that way.
This column and image originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.