A US federal judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from deploying National Guard troops from Texas and California to Portland, Oregon, escalating an already tense fight over the use of military personnel in domestic policing.
The ruling came late on Sunday from US District Judge Karin Immergut, who had already barred the deployment of Oregon’s own National Guard members to Portland the day before. In practical terms, the court ruling halted a plan that had moved quickly through the Pentagon, which confirmed that 200 members of the California National Guard had been reassigned to Portland to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties.
Judge Immergut, who was appointed by Trump, said there was no evidence that recent protests in Portland made the presence of federalized National Guard troops necessary. She also pressed government lawyers on how bringing in troops from other states was not simply a way to get around her earlier decision on Oregon’s own Guard.
The administration has framed Portland as the latest Democratic-led city caught in a broader push to address what Trump calls out-of-control crime amid protests over immigration enforcement. Trump has also authorized troop deployments from other states to Chicago. His aides and allies have cast the resistance to those deployments as a challenge to presidential authority, while city and state officials have treated them as a threat to local sovereignty.
The White House said the judge’s ruling was untethered in reality and the law, while press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president was legally within his rights to call up the National Guard in cases where he deems it appropriate. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, described the order as one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order he had seen. He later said the president was considering a very broad range of authorities to deploy federal assets despite the court intervention.
For now, the restraining order will remain in effect until at least 19 October, and the administration is expected to appeal quickly. The practical effect is to pause one of the administration’s most aggressive attempts yet to move Guard units across state lines into a city where protests over immigration enforcement have repeatedly brought federal officers and demonstrators into direct confrontation.
The case also sits against a wider legal backdrop. In September, a federal judge in California ruled Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles was illegal because it violated a law limiting the federal government’s ability to use military force for domestic matters. That ruling is already under appeal.
Chicago, meanwhile, has become another flashpoint, with Illinois state and city officials filing suit to block a similar planned deployment. Trump has said he may invoke the Insurrection Act if federal courts stop him from sending troops to US cities. The Portland ruling shows the legal fight over that strategy is likely to keep widening.
The ruling also signals that the court is testing whether the administration can justify moving Guard troops from one state to another when local officials and federal judges say the evidence is lacking. That makes Portland less a single-city dispute than a test case for how far the White House can stretch domestic military authority before the courts stop it.
