Judge Issues Permanent Injunction Against Trump’s Deployment Of Oregon National Guard

Judge Karen Immergut issued a permanent injunction in the US District Court for the District of Oregon yesterday after finding President Trump had no colorable basis to invoke Title 10 and that the deployment of National Guard troops to the South Portland ICE facility exceeded the President’s authority.

National Guard Permanently Restrained from Deployment to Oregon

During a three-day trial that included the testimony of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials and hundreds of exhibits describing protest activity outside the Portland ICE building, Judge Immergut noted that the deployment of he Oregon and California National Guard, which were objected to by Oregon’s governor and not requested by the federal officials in charge of protection of the ICE building, exceeded the President’s authority.

After the court extended the ban on Trump’s Oregon troop deployment last Sunday, Judge Immergut issued her ruling in the underlying lawsuit yesterday.

The judge applied history and tradition, in conjunction with the lawsuit Newsom v. Trump, to answer the two key questions regarding whether the President had a colorable basis to invoke Title 10, Section 12406(3).

Judge Immergut reflected that Congress’s 1792 delegation of its calling forth power mapped onto the clause’s three enumerated conditions that were further amplified in the Militia Act of 1792:

(1) “to execute the Laws of the Union”;

(2) “suppress Insurrections”; and

(3) “repel Invasions whenever the United States shall be invaded, or be in imminent danger of invasion from any foreign nation or Indian tribe”

The meaning of “unable … to execute the laws of the United States” in 10 U.S.C. § 12406(3) has remained consistent from the Founding to the present and suggests that this precondition arises when federal courts or federal law enforcement cannot function without the militia’s intervention.

Historical practice also confirms that the President’s power to call forth the militia “to execute the Laws of the Union” is limited to situations when the civil power is unable to do so. Insofar as a rebellion is concerned, she noted that we do not call the 300,000 Americans who participated in the March on Washington rebels, even though they openly opposed the tradition of legal segregation. Nor do we refer to the movement in high schools to don black armbands in opposition to the Vietnam War as a rebellion.

A rebellion is defined as an organized group engaged in sustained, armed hostilities to overthrow an instrumentality of government by unlawful or antidemocratic means. But rebellion is not synonymous with the Civil War.

In Portland, the President did not call out the National Guard in response to disturbances outside the Portland ICE facility in June, but federalized the Oregon National Guard only on September 27, three months after any exigency that may have existed in June had long subsided. Only 11 injuries were reported in June, 4 in July, 6 in August, and none in September. None of the isolated instances of violence resulted in serious, let alone life-threatening, injuries.

Also, doxing incidents of federal officers reported between June and October 2025 did not “significantly impede the ability of federal officers to execute the laws.

The court also noted that “Antifa” is not an organized group and is a term frequently misused. Still, there is no evidence corroborating that ideology or demonstrating leadership or differentiation among protesters based on this label.

Judge Immergut found that the Plaintiffs have demonstrated that the Defendants violated 10 U.S.C. § 12406 and the Tenth Amendment.

She permanently restrained Pete Hegseth, the US Department of Defense, and Kristi Noem, and the US Department of Homeland Security, from implementing the memoranda that federalized and deployed members of the National Guard in Oregon.

The permanent injunction is now in full force and effect.