It began as a courtroom victory for Oregon: late Saturday, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut granted a temporary restraining order blocking President Trump’s plan to federalize and deploy the Oregon National Guard to Portland, citing concerns that the administration lacked sufficient grounds to invoke federal authority over the state’s guard. The judge wrote sharply that the arguments for military intrusion were “untethered to facts” and warned that such action threatened state sovereignty.
But by Sunday night, the narrative had shifted. In what critics call a legal jiu-jitsu, the administration quietly moved to redirect California National Guard troops—already federalized under Trump’s earlier deployments—from Los Angeles toward Oregon. The Pentagon confirmed that about 200 Guard members would be reassigned to Portland to assist ICE and other federal operations.
Governor Gavin Newsom immediately vowed to sue. He denounced the maneuver as a brazen evasion of the courts, an abuse of executive power that treats state boundaries and judicial rulings as mere inconveniences. Oregon officials, too, expressed outrage: Governor Tina Kotek noted that 101 California guardsmen had arrived overnight, without any formal notification to Oregon authorities. Local leaders insisted there was no emergency or insurrection in Portland justifying a military occupation, and that law enforcement remained capable of handling protests.
The back-and-forth underscores a broader confrontation over executive authority, the role of the National Guard, and the limits of judicial oversight in domestic deployments. Judge Immergut’s order stands for now through October 17, but Sunday’s maneuver throws the future into doubt. In one day, the federal judiciary’s check on troop deployment was met with a new—and equally contentious—deployment stretching across state lines.
Absent a swift legal decision, the question looms: can a president lawfully sidestep a court’s orders by shifting troops from one state into another? The answer may not wait long.