A Trump-appointed federal judge in Oregon has delivered a sharp rebuke to the administration’s attempts to militarize Portland, issuing a sweeping order that not only forbids the deployment of Oregon’s National Guard units under federal control, but now bars any state’s Guard — including California’s — from being sent into Oregon. That latter restriction, the judge declared, would apply across the board, and by implication would encompass efforts to bring in troops even from states like Texas.
The judge, Karin Immergut, first intervened after the administration attempted to federalize and send Oregon’s Guard to Portland. In her initial ruling, she found the evidence inadequate: the city’s recent protests, she held, did not rise to the level of rebellion or emergency that would justify invoking federal power over the Guard. That decision forced the administration to pivot abruptly to seeking Guard personnel from other states. Sensing a clear gambit to circumvent her decision, Immergut convened an emergency hearing and expanded her injunction. She explicitly prevented the relocation, federalization, or deployment of National Guard forces from any state to Oregon, in direct conflict with the administration’s plan to dispatch troops from California — and even potentially from Texas. In her view, sending state troops from outside Oregon was in “direct contravention” of the order she had already issued.
While the administration is known to have considered sending California and Texas National Guard contingents, the judge’s expanded ruling now blocks that workaround. She stated that nothing in the government’s arguments presented a changed circumstance to warrant an exception. Her expanded order asserts that the same constitutional and statutory concerns — including the requirements of the Posse Comitatus constraints and the sovereign rights of Oregon — apply no matter the Guard’s home state. In short, the judge concluded the administration cannot evade her original decision simply by swapping in troops from another state.
That said, the ruling is temporary: it remains in force until additional hearings or further judicial decisions refine or modify its scope. It may be subject to appeals or adjustments, especially given the high stakes and the nationwide precedent it might establish. But for now, the judge’s stance cuts across the administration’s most direct path, holding that no National Guard units, whether from Oregon, California, Texas, or elsewhere, may be deployed to Portland under the federalization scheme the White House has proposed.