Appeals court clears Trump’s Portland troop deployment

What happened

A divided panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Monday lifted a lower court’s temporary block of President Donald Trump’s deployment of the Oregon National Guard in Portland.

The ruling was the “latest win for Trump’s effort to deploy the military into cities across the country over the fierce objections of state and local leaders,” Politico said. In Chicago, meanwhile, a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals panel last week unanimously upheld a federal judge’s restraining order barring Trump’s troop deployment in Illinois.

Who said what

In the Oregon case, Judges Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade, both Trump appointees, said U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut — also appointed by Trump — had “accorded no deference to the president’s determination that he could not execute federal laws with regular forces” outside an ICE facility in Portland. The third judge on the appeals panel, Bill Clinton appointee Susan Graber, urged her 9th Circuit colleagues to reconsider the case “en banc” and “vacate” the “absurd” majority opinion “before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur.”

The “legal fight over a Portland deployment has significant ramifications” for Trump’s current and threatened Guard activations in other Democratic-run cities, The New York Times said. Much of the litigation in Portland and Chicago “has turned on whether the Trump administration’s accounts of violence at anti-ICE protests are accurate.” Immergut said Trump’s tales of violence and “rebellion” in “war ravaged” Portland were “simply untethered to the facts.”

Nelson and Bade said even if Trump “may exaggerate” the problems, Immergut was wrong to substitute her “own assessment of the facts for the president’s assessment of the facts.” Graber disagreed, writing that while the “political branches” can engage in “political theater” and a “measure of bending — sometimes breaking — the truth,” the “judicial branch” was founded to “rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda.”

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What next?

Trump “is still barred from actually deploying” troops in Oregon, “at least for now,” because the 9th Circuit panel did not rule on Immergut’s second order blocking the deployment of any Guard troops in Portland, The Associated Press said.