By Dietrich Knauth
(Reuters) -A federal judge in Portland, Oregon, will hold a hearing on Friday to consider next steps in a legal battle over President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy National Guard troops to the city, after an appeals court ruled this week that the president likely has the authority to do so.
That ruling put on hold the judge’s initial order blocking Trump from taking control of Oregon’s National Guard and sending them to Portland. But it did not apply to her second order, still in effect, barring deployment of troops from any state, including Oregon, after Trump attempted to circumvent the first one by sending troops from California and Texas.
In a rare use of the U.S. military for domestic purposes, Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and announced plans to send them to other cities, including Portland and Chicago.
Democratic-led states and cities have filed lawsuits to block the deployments. Courts have yet to issue final rulings on whether the actions are lawful.
Justice Department lawyers will ask U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut at Friday’s hearing to lift her second order, arguing it relies on the legal reasoning already rejected by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in its review of the first order.
If Immergut, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, agrees, the administration could move forward with the deployment.
Oregon has argued that the three-judge 9th Circuit panel, which included two Trump-appointed judges, got it wrong. The state has asked Immergut to maintain the status quo while it appeals and has asked the 9th Circuit to reconsider the case with a larger panel of 11 judges.
Trump on September 27 had ordered 200 National Guard troops to Portland, continuing his administration’s unprecedented use of military personnel in U.S. cities to suppress protests and bolster domestic immigration enforcement.
City and state officials sued the administration in a bid to stop the Portland deployment, arguing that Trump’s action violates several federal laws that govern the use of military forces as well as the state’s rights under the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment.
The lawsuit accused Trump of exaggerating the severity of protests against his immigration policies to justify illegally seizing control of state National Guard units.
Immergut said there was no evidence that recent protests in Portland rose to the level of a rebellion or seriously interfered with law enforcement, and said Trump’s description of the city as war-ravaged was “simply untethered to the facts.”
Immergut has scheduled a trial for October 29 for a more thorough evaluation of evidence about the protests and Trump’s decision to send troops.
She is one of three district court judges who have ruled against Trump’s National Guard deployments. Two appeals courts have split on the issue in preliminary rulings. Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on his authority over the National Guard.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and David Gregorio)
