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A US judge will not allow President Donald Trump to deploy National Guard members to the city of Portland, Oregon.

The ruling is the latest in a weeks-long court battle over whether the president violated federal law when he sent troops to a US city despite objections from local officials.

Troops had been blocked from deploying to the city due a temporary court order. Now, that order is permanent.

The Portland deployment is part of a series of efforts by Trump administration to subdue protests against federal immigration raids in primarily Democrat-led cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington DC.

The decision by US District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, is the first time the Trump administration was permanently blocked from deploying troops to a city.

The administration is widely expected to appeal the decision, though, and the issue could end up before the Supreme Court.

When she ruled against the Trump administration earlier this month, Judge Immergut issued two temporary restraining orders. One blocked Trump from mobilising the Oregon National Guard to Portland, while another, broader order stopped him from sending in any troops from any state to Oregon. Trump had tried to send forces from California and Texas.

In the 106-page ruling, Judge Immergut said that she was not blocking the president from ever using National Guard troops, but said that in Portland “the President did not have a lawful basis to federalize the National Guard”.

She wrote that there was neither a rebellion or danger of a rebellion where the president needed to deploy troops.

She also said Trump had violated the 10th amendment of the US Constitution, which gives states any powers not explicitly granted to the federal government.

The judge added that she would leave it to a higher court to set a standard for when a president can “deploy the military in the streets of American cities”, but that “wherever this line precisely is, defendants have failed to clear it. “

In Oregon, there have been competing narratives between state and local officials and the Trump administration on what exactly is happening on the ground.

The Department of Justice has described the city as “war-ravaged” and said there has been a violent siege at a Portland immigration detention facility.

“As we have always maintained, President Trump is exercising his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel following violent riots that local leaders have refused to address,” the White House previously said.

But local officials and many city residents have said the violence is not widespread and is contained by Portland police.

“This case is about whether we are a nation of constitutional law or martial law,” Portland’s attorney Caroline Turco said.

Members of the National Guard hold long guns while patrolling outside the World War II Memorial along the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on August 27. On Monday, a federal appeals court reversed a temporary restraining order, allowing President Donald Trump to federalize and deploy the National Guard to Portland. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo

Oct. 20 (UPI) — A federal appeals court Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to federalize and deploy the Oregon National Guard into what he is calling “war-ravaged” Portland.

Monday’s 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reverses a temporary restraining order that blocked the troops, as the administration challenges a lawsuit filed by Oregon and Portland officials. The case is still scheduled for trial on Oct. 29.

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the deployment of 200 Oregon National Guard troops after the president called Portland a “war-ravaged” city and said the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices there were “under siege.”

Last week, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut extended two temporary restraining orders, saying the president could not federalize Oregon’s National Guard as, “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.” The Trump administration promptly appealed Immergut’s first restraining order to the Ninth Circuit.

“Even if the president may exaggerate the extent of the problem on social media, this does not change that other facts provide a colorable basis to support the statutory requirements,” Monday’s order read.

“Rather than reviewing the president’s determination with great deference, the district court substituted its own determination of the relevant facts and circumstances.”

At a hearing on Oct. 9, the 9th Circuit judges heard 20-minute arguments from Oregon attorneys and from the U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Department attorneys argued that the troops are needed to protect Portland’s ICE facility following protester clashes with federal agents. Oregon officials claimed the administration was exaggerating.

Portland is one of several cities where the Trump administration has deployed the National Guard. The administration has also deployed troops to Memphis, Tenn., and is working to deploy the National Guard to Chicago to curb crime and protect federal buildings, as ICE agents crack down on illegal immigration.

Trump said earlier this month he would be open to invoking the Insurrection Act, “if necessary” to deploy the National Guard.

There are few laws President Trump name-checks more frequently than the Insurrection Act.

A 200-year-old constellation of statutes, the act grants emergency powers to thrust active-duty soldiers into civilian police duty, something otherwise barred by federal law.

Trump and his team have threatened to invoke it almost daily for weeks — most recently on Monday, after a reporter pressed the president about his escalating efforts to dispatch federalized troops to Democrat-led cities.

“Insurrection Act — yeah, I mean, I could do that,” Trump said. “Many presidents have.”

Roughly a third of U.S. presidents have called on the statutes at some point — but history also shows the law has been used only in moments of extraordinary crisis and political upheaval.

The Insurrection Act was Abraham Lincoln’s sword against secessionists and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s shield around the Little Rock Nine, the young Black students who were the first to desegregate schools in Arkansas.

Ulysses S. Grant invoked it more than half a dozen times to thwart statehouse coups, stem race massacres and smother the Ku Klux Klan in its South Carolina cradle.

But it has just as often been wielded to crush labor strikes and strangle protest movements. The last time it was invoked, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was in elementary school and most U.S. soldiers had not yet been born.

Now, many fear Trump could call on the law to quell opposition to his agenda.

“The Democrats were fools not to amend the Insurrection Act in 2021,” said Kevin Carroll, former senior counsel in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term. “It gives the president almost untrammeled power.”

It also precludes most judicial review.

“It can’t even be challenged,” Trump boasted Monday. “I don’t have to go there yet, because I’m winning on appeal.”

If that winning streak cools, as legal experts say it soon could, some fear the Insurrection Act would be the administration’s next move.

“The Insurrection Act is very broadly worded, but there is a history of even the executive branch interpreting it narrowly,” said John C. Dehn, an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

The president first floated using the Insurrection Act against protesters in the summer of 2020. But members of his Cabinet and military advisors blocked the move, as they did efforts to use the National Guard for immigration enforcement and the military to patrol the border.

“They have this real fixation on using the military domestically,” Carroll said. “It’s sinister.”

In his second term, Trump has instead relied on an obscure subsection of the U.S. code to surge federalized soldiers into blue cities, claiming it confers many of the same powers as the Insurrection Act.

Federal judges disagreed. Challenges to deployments in Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., and Chicago have since clogged the appellate courts, with three West Coast cases before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and one pending in the 7th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Illinois.

The result is a growing knot of litigation that experts say will fall to the Supreme Court to unwind.

As of Wednesday, troops in Oregon and Illinois are activated but can’t be deployed. The Oregon case is further complicated by precedent from California, where federalized soldiers have patrolled the streets since June with the 9th Circuit’s blessing. That ruling is set to be reheard by the circuit on Oct. 22 and could be reversed.

Meanwhile, what California soldiers are legally allowed to do while they’re federalized is also under review, meaning even if Trump retains the authority to call up troops, he might not be able to use them.

Scholars are split over how the Supreme Court might rule on any of those issues.

“At this point, no court … has expressed any sympathy to these arguments, because they’re so weak,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor at Yale Law School.

Koh listed the high court’s most conservative members, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., as unlikely to push back against the president’s authority to invoke the Insurrection Act, but said even some of Trump’s appointees — Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — might be skeptical, along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

“I don’t think Thomas and Alito are going to stand up to Trump, but I’m not sure that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts can read this statute to give him [those] powers.”

The Insurrection Act sidesteps those fights almost entirely.

It “would change not only the legal state of play, but fundamentally change the facts we have on the ground, because what the military would be authorized to do would be so much broader,” said Christopher Mirasola, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Congress created the Insurrection Act as a fail-safe in response to armed mobs attacking their neighbors and organized militias seeking to overthrow elected officials. But experts caution that the military is not trained to keep law and order, and that the country has a strong tradition against domestic deployments dating to the Revolutionary War.

“The uniformed military leadership in general does not like getting involved in the domestic law enforcement issue at all,” Carroll said. “The only similarities between police and military is that they have uniforms and guns.”

Today, the commander in chief can invoke the law in response to a call for help from state leaders, as George H.W. Bush did to quell the 1992 Rodney King uprising in L.A.

The statute can also be used to make an end-run around elected officials who refuse to enforce the law, or mobs who make it impossible — something Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy Jr. did in defense of school integration.

Still, modern presidents have generally shied from using the Insurrection Act even in circumstances with strong legal justification. George W. Bush weighed invoking the law after Hurricane Katrina created chaos in New Orleans but ultimately declined over fears it would intensify the already bitter power struggle between the state and federal government.

“There are any number of Justice Department internal opinions where attorneys general like Robert Kennedy or Nicholas Katzenbach said, ‘We cannot invoke the Insurrection Act because the courts are open,’” Koh said.

Despite its extraordinary power, Koh and other experts said the law has guardrails that may make it more difficult for the president to invoke it in the face of naked bicyclists or protesters in inflatable frog suits, whom federal forces have faced down recently in Portland.

“There are still statutory requirements that have to be met,” said Dehn, the Loyola professor. “The problem the Trump administration would have in invoking [the law] is that very practically, they are able to arrest people who break the law and prosecute people who break the law.”

That may be why Trump and his administration have yet to invoke the act.

“It reminds me of the run-up to Jan. 6,” Carroll said. “It’s a similar feeling that people have, a sense that an illegal or immoral and unwise order is about to be given.”

He and others say an invocation of the Insurrection Act would shift widespread concern about military policing of American streets into existential territory.

“If there’s a bad faith invocation of the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to go beat up anti-ICE protesters, there should be a general strike in the United States,” Carroll said. “It’s a real break-the-glass moment.”

At that point, the best defense may come from the military.

“If a really unwise and immoral order comes out … 17-year generals need to say no,” Carroll said. “They have to have the guts to put their stars on the table.”

Marc Benioff has become the latest Silicon Valley tech leader to signal his approval of President Trump, saying that the president is doing a great job and ought to deploy the National Guard to deal with crime in San Francisco.

The Salesforce chief executive’s comments came as he headed to San Francisco to host his annual Dreamforce conference — an event for which he said he had to hire hundreds of off-duty police to provide security.

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they [National Guard] can be cops, I’m all for it,” he told The New York Times from aboard his private plane.

The National Guard is generally not allowed to perform domestic law enforcement duties when federalized by the president.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s use of National Guard soldiers in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act — which restricts use of the military for domestic law enforcement — and ordered that the troops not be used in law enforcement operations within California.

Trump has also ordered the National Guard to deploy to cities such as Portland, Ore., and Chicago, citing the need to protect federal officers and assets in the face of ongoing immigration protests. Those efforts have been met with criticism from local leaders and are the subject of ongoing legal battles.

President Trump has yet to direct troops to Northern California, but suggested in September that San Francisco could be a target for deployment. He has said that cities with Democratic political leadership such as San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles “are very unsafe places and we are going to straighten them out.”

“I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training for our military, our national guard,” Trump said.

Benioff’s call to send National Guard troops to San Francisco drew sharp rebukes from several of the region’s elected Democratic leaders.

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins said she “can’t be silent any longer” and threatened to prosecute any leaders or troops who harass residents in a fiery statement on X.

“I am responsible for holding criminals accountable, and that includes holding government and law enforcement officials too, when they cross the bounds of the law,” she said. “If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents, use excessive force or cross any other boundaries that the law prescribes, I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) also took to X to express indignation, saying “we neither need nor want an illegal military occupation in San Francisco.”

“Salesforce is a great San Francisco company that does so much good for our city,” he said. “Inviting Trump to send the National Guard here is not one of those good things. Quite the opposite.”

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office offered a more muted response, touting the mayor’s efforts to boost public safety in general, but declining to directly address Benioff’s remarks.

Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the mayor, noted that the city is seeing net gains in both police officers and sheriff’s deputies for the first time in a decade. He also highlighted Lurie’s efforts to bring police staffing up to 2,000 officers.

“Crime is down nearly 30% citywide and at its lowest point in decades,” Lutvak said. “We are moving in the right direction and will continue to prioritize safety and hiring while San Francisco law enforcement works every single day to keep our city safe.”

When contacted by The Times Friday night, the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who vociferously opposed the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, did not issue a comment in response to Benioff.

Benioff and Newsom have long been considered friends, with a relationship dating back to when Newsom served as San Francisco’s mayor. Newsom even named Benioff as godfather to one of his children, according to the San Francisco Standard.

Benioff has often referred to himself as an independent. He has donated to several liberal causes, including a $30-million donation to UC San Francisco to study homelessness, and has contributed to prior political campaigns of former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Hillary Clinton.

However, he has also donated to the campaigns of former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, both Republicans, and supported tougher-on-crime policies and reducing government spending.

Earlier this year, Benioff also praised the Elon Musk-led federal cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

“I fully support the president,” Benioff told the New York Times this week. “I think he’s doing a great job.”