The city of Portland, Ore., said Wednesday that President Trump’s bid to send in the National Guard was spurred by a “manufactured crisis” as a trial over Trump’s efforts to deploy the military on U.S. soil gets underway.
Caroline Turco, a lawyer representing Portland, said during opening arguments that the evidence would show that the city does not need the National Guard.
The judge must decide if the administration has been so impeded in its efforts to enforce immigration law that Trump should be allowed to “breach separation of powers to address the manufactured crisis,” she said.
“Are the protests in Portland so violent that the deployment of the National Guard is justified?” Turco asked. “The plaintiffs would submit to you, no.”
State and city officials are seeking to block the president’s efforts to send troops to patrol the city. They sued last month after Trump vowed to protect the “war-ravaged” city and its U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, which he said were “under siege.”
The trial, which is expected to last three days, began Wednesday. The local officials’ first witness is Cmdr. Franz Schoening of the Portland Police Bureau.
“Portland is not ‘war-ravaged.’ There is no rebellion, and the laws continue to be enforced every day,” Turco said.
Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer Eric Hamilton painted a different picture.
He said that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees who work in Oregon have faced threats and actual violence for months and could not contain the threat themselves, prompting their request for additional assistance.
Trial evidence, the DOJ lawyer argued, would show that the threats and violence diverted law enforcement resources and affected DHS’s ability to enforce the law, in addition to showing that requests for extra help from local law enforcement went ignored or “inadequately addressed.”
However, to side with the government, the judge does not need to find there was a true inability to execute the law or an actual danger of rebellion, Hamilton contended.
“Congress, in Section 12406, made those decisions for the president to make,” he said, referencing the provision of Title 10 invoked by Trump to call the troops into federal service.
Hamilton said that legal precedent from Trump’s deployment to Los Angeles established it’s enough for the court to find that Trump’s decision reflects “a tolerable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment.”
Scott Kennedy, Oregon’s senior assistant attorney general, said in the state’s opening remarks that the case marks a test of the “outer bounds” of presidential authority.
Congress set “clear guardrails” around the power it ceded to the executive branch in allowing the president to call up militias, but those limits preserve more than just the legislative branch’s power, he argued.
“It also protects the states from presidential overreach into local affairs, and it preserves the balance between law enforcement … and the armed forces,” Kennedy said, noting that the former is tasked with managing local crime, not the latter.
For now, the troops remain barred from being deployed.
U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee who is presiding over the trial, has issued two temporary restraining orders preventing the National Guard from being sent to Oregon, which remain intact for now.
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit paused one of Immergut’s orders last week, but the appeals court vacated that decision late Tuesday, saying the full court would rehear the case.
The trial comes at an inflection point for Trump’s bid to send military troops to patrol Democratic-led cities.
Trump has also called up the National Guard in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and legal challenges to the president’s efforts are pending. Troops are deployed in California and D.C., but courts have so far blocked deployment in Illinois, though the situation could quickly change.
The administration has filed an emergency application at the Supreme Court asking to let it deploy the National Guard to the Chicago area. The justices have not yet ruled on the matter.
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