Oregon, Portland sue Trump over plan to send National Guard

The state of Oregon and city of Portland have gone to court to keep the Trump administration from sending troops to the city.

Officials with the state and city filed a motion in U.S. District Court Monday for a temporary restraining order to block the administration’s plans to federalize the Oregon National Guard — usually under the control of the governor — and deploy 200 members to Portland for 60 days. Donald Trump has claimed the city is “war-ravaged,” which it is not.

“When the president and I spoke yesterday, I told him in plain language that there is no insurrection or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland or any other city in our state,” said a Sunday statement from Gov. Tina Kotek. “Despite this — and all evidence to the contrary — he has chosen to disregard Oregonians’ safety and ability to govern ourselves. This is not necessary. And it is unlawful. And it will make Oregonians less safe.” The Advocate has sought further comment from Kotek but has not received a response.

Related: What the heck is happening in D.C.? Nothing, until Trump deployed the National Guard

“Oregon communities are stable, and our local officials have been clear: we have the capacity to manage public safety without federal interference,” added Attorney General Dan Rayfield. “Sending in 200 National Guard troops to guard a single building [the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility] is not normal. If you had a concern about safety at your own home, you’d make a few calls and fill the gaps — not call in an army. What we’re seeing is not about public safety, it’s about the president flexing political muscle under the guise of law and order, chasing a media hit at the expense of our community.”

The motion names as defendants the Department of Defense and its secretary, Pete Hegseth; the Department of Homeland Security and its secretary, Kristi Noem; and Trump.

“Citing nothing but a wildly hyperbolic pretext — the President says Portland is a ‘War ravaged’ city ‘under siege’ — Defendants have thus infringed on Oregon’s sovereign power to manage its own law enforcement activity and National Guard,” the document says.

“The facts do not remotely justify this overreach. Defendants’ actions appear focused on ongoing protests near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland. Those protests have been small in recent weeks — typically involving fewer than thirty people — and the protesters’ activities have not necessitated any arrests for months. But Defendants’ heavy-handed deployment threatens to escalate tensions and stoke new unrest. As a result, more of the Plaintiffs’ law enforcement resources will be spent responding to the predictable consequences of Defendants’ actions.”

Related: Donald Trump orders authoritarian takeover of Washington, D.C.

The motion calls these actions “patently unlawful.” They violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from engaging in civilian law enforcement; the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that police power lies with states, not the federal government. “And by singling out a disfavored jurisdiction for political retribution, these actions also eviscerate the constitutional principle that the states’ sovereignty should be treated equally,” the motion says.

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and mayors of nearby cities held a press conference Monday to declare united opposition to the administration’s plan. “In my moments of doubt, I worry that Portland will go alone as we have in the past,” Wilson said, according to The Oregonian. “When I look around the room today, I know we are more together than we have ever been.”

One of the times Portland was on its own was in 2020 during the unrest over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, Wilson said. Trump appears to have viewed videos showing those protests to back up his claim that Portland is “war-ravaged.”

In early September, he told journalists he had seen video footage documenting “the destruction of the city,” The Guardian reports. “That was not on my list, Portland, but when I watched television last night, this has been going on,” he said.

He did not name the specific TV report, but the previous night, Fox News had shown a report that mixed coverage of the current anti-ICE protests with a clip of a protester being pepper-sprayed by a federal agent in 2020. That clip “was wrongly described as having been shot in June of this year,” according to The Guardian. Trump also claimed the protesters were being paid.

He described “an imaginary version of Portland that bears no resemblance to the actual city, in which fences around the federal courthouse that was the scene of mass protests in 2020 have been removed and the central police headquarters no longer has boarded-up windows,” The Guardian reports.

Trump has recently expressed some doubt about the situation in Portland. In an interview Sunday with Yamiche Alcindor of NBC News, he said, “I spoke to the governor — she was very nice. “But I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place ... it looks like terrible.” He kept referring to his erroneous perception of Portland as “a hotbed of insurrection” throughout the interview.