President Donald Trump’s administration filed an emergency motion on Sunday with the Ninth Circuit Court to appeal U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut’s decision earlier this month that permanently blocked the administration from deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, amid daily protests and violent riots against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in the city.
According to KPTV, the Trump administration’s emergency motion on Sunday comes after Immergut determined that the president’s order to deploy the National Guard to Portland was illegal following a three-day trial. The Post Millennial reported that the federal judge ruled that Trump’s National Guard deployment order likely violated Title 10 section 12406, which allows the National Guard to be federalized in response to an invasion, a rebellion, or a situation that prevents federal laws from being executed with “regular forces.”
In a 106-page opinion on November 7, Immergut ruled, “This Court concludes that Plaintiffs have demonstrated that Defendants violated 10 U.S.C. § 12406 and the Tenth Amendment and satisfy the requirements for a permanent injunction.”
According to The Post Millennial, prior to the judge’s ruling, the Trump administration had argued that the president was legally permitted to federalize the National Guard and deploy National Guard troops to Portland to protect the ICE facility in the city against violent protests and riots, which have continued daily since June 7.
In Sunday’s emergency motion, the Trump administration claimed that Immergut “wholly failed” to give the president the “deference required,” “wrongly downplayed the dangerous conditions at the ICE facility,” and considered the violence against ICE officials in June as “irrelevant” to the president’s “plainly lawful” decision to order the deployment of the National Guard.
In a Monday statement obtained by KPTV following Sunday’s emergency motion, Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield’s office said, “From the start, this case has been about making sure that facts — not political whims — guide how the law is applied. The district court’s ruling made it clear that this administration must be accountable to the truth and to the rule of law.”
“Our values haven’t changed. We must not normalize the use of military in our streets,” Rayfield’s office added. “We will keep defending Oregon values and standing up for our state’s authority to make decisions grounded in evidence and common sense.”
