At the close of the federal trial over whether President Donald Trump can lawfully send National Guard troops to Portland, attorneys posed dueling views of the city’s protests.
The gatherings have been persistent since they began in June and have led to damaged property — and even injuries. But the legal question that both sides confronted in the courtroom was whether the gatherings were so disruptive that they amounted to a rebellion and made it impossible to carry out federal law.
A legal team for the city of Portland and the states of Oregon and California said the situation in Portland has been manageable by local police. Protests may have peaked in June, the attorneys said, but largely subsided in July and August prior to Trump’s threats on social media to crack down on what he called the “war-ravaged” city.
They called it a vast overreach to federalize hundreds of members of the National Guard and deploy them to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the city’s south waterfront.
“This is, I think, one of the most significant infringements on state sovereignty in Oregon’s history, and now California’s history,” said Senior Assistant Attorney General Scott Kennedy with the Oregon Department of Justice.
Trump administration attorneys supported the deployment in their closing argument by highlighting presidential power. The laws broken by demonstrators have been significant, a Justice Department attorney said, and the president doesn’t have to wait for the gatherings to metastasize into a full-fledged rebellion.
“Everyone agrees there has been violence in Portland, around the ICE building. Everyone agrees agitators have placed items in the driveway,” Justice Department attorney Eric Hamilton said. “All of our disputes are questions of degree: How much violence was there? How strained are the officers who ordinarily provide protection at the Department of Homeland Security?”
U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut said Friday that she aimed to issue a ruling Sunday — the day that her temporary restraining order blocking the deployment of National Guard troops expires. The legal debate capped off a three-day trial in Portland that saw a handful of local, state and federal officials take the witness stand.
In their final, distilled arguments Friday afternoon, attorneys largely attempted to grade the levels of danger posed by the protests. Those arguments typically touched on the same few incidents that have occurred outside the ICE building.
The biggest protest of the summer coincided with the first, nationwide “No Kings” protest on June 15. That day saw numerous arrests both by federal law enforcement and by the Portland Police Bureau. There was largely consensus that the day was noteworthy in the city’s overall protest picture.
That same day protesters hurled rocks and used a stop sign like a battering ram on the building’s front doors. Federal law enforcement was prepared to use lethal force that day, officials testified, but used only chemical munitions like tear gas and pepper balls. Department of Justice attorneys claimed there were numerous injuries to federal law enforcement officers.
Portland police declared a riot that day and made several arrests. That might have been the pinnacle, according to Portland police officials. They testified that crowd sizes dwindled significantly afterward — about 30 people per night in July and August — which local police could manage.
But Hamilton pointed to testimony from federal officials who said the sustained conflicts wore on the men and women guarding the building. They highlighted only a couple specific incidents in September, prior to Trump’s first threats to intervene in the city.
One incident saw a person erratically park a car in the driveway and run off, leading to suspicions there was a bomb inside in the vehicle. A Portland police bomb squad later deemed it safe. That was something attorneys for the city and states pointed to as evidence the Portland Police Bureau responded quickly to emergencies at the building.
Protesters had also rolled out a prop guillotine one weekday night. It was mostly made of plywood, but reportedly looked real enough from a distance to scare federal law enforcement inside the building.
“It looked real to the officers,” Hamilton told Immergut.
Hamilton also accused Portland leaders of abetting the hostilities, and noted how the city recently slapped the building with a zoning violation. Hamilton accurately noted that part of the violation involved the plywood covering the windows for security, but omitted the city’s larger point that ICE violated its land use agreement by detaining people longer than 12 hours on several occasions.
“The bottom line: DHS needs help. The Guard is needed,” Hamilton said.
The case for reinforcing the building with National Guard troops partly involved the federal officers’ workload and stress levels. Justice Department attorneys said they were outmanned and that their staffing levels weren’t “sustainable.”
One regional deputy director had testified that officers with the federal protective service, the agency responsible for protecting government property across the country, had surged officers to Portland. Officers were on 30-day rotations initially, Hamilton said, but were so “strained” that rotations dropped to 20 days.
Still, even if Portland police couldn’t handle the crowds, Kennedy with the Oregon DOJ countered, the federal government still had vast, untapped manpower that didn’t require the National Guard. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has roughly 80,000 officers at its fingertips, he said.
Beyond the protests, Kennedy argued, the building was still serving its core functions — meeting with immigrants, detaining undocumented immigrants — as usual.
Cammilla Wamsley, a regional ICE supervisor, testified earlier Friday that this year she set a goal for her officers across Alaska, Oregon and Washington to make 30 immigration arrests per day.
Protests briefly shut the building down in the summer, but Wamsley was unable to say under cross-examination how that impacted the arrest goal. Government data reviewed by OPB earlier this month showed that immigration arrests barely slowed down, if at all, at the Portland offices.
Near the end of his closing argument, Kennedy noted to Immergut that the ICE building is covered with security cameras. Yet the Justice Department never submitted photo or video evidence to bolster their claims.
“There should be powerful video in defendant’s possession that would illustrate the urgency of at least some of those situations,” he said. “But defendants have not put a single video or image into the record.”
