The 200 soldiers who may appear in Portland in the coming days will come from National Guard companies based in Salem and Woodburn, a National Guard official said Tuesday.
And as Congress grapples with the likelihood of a government shutdown, the 60-day deployment ordered by President Trump on Sunday is expected to cost federal taxpayers at least $3.8 million.
Those details emerged in a brief legislative hearing in Salem on Tuesday, the first to grapple with the possibility of military personnel rolling into the state’s largest city.
Appearing before a budget committee, Russell Gibson with the Oregon Military Department, could not offer much insight into precisely what troops will be doing if they arrive in Portland.
“The details of the mission are still to be determined,” Gibson told the committee, “but they are, as you all assumed, to protect federal facilities.”
That description differed somewhat from a release sent out by the White House on Tuesday announcing that troops would “crush violent radical left terrorism in Portland.”
Gibson also offered a timeline that suggests soldiers will not be arriving in the next couple of days. He told lawmakers that troops selected for the mission would begin reporting “today and tomorrow,” and would spend between four and seven days in processing and training before being deployed.
He noted that troops under orders issued by Trump would be under the command of the U.S. Army, not the state.
“U.S. Army North is providing all that training and providing those rules for the use of force,” Gibson said. “When we receive those, I’d be happy to share those with you.”
The Oregon National Guard selected troops for the deployment from two companies that have received special training in crowd control actions. One is a military police company based in Salem and the other is an infantry company out of Woodburn, Gibson said.
Some of those members are police officers in their civilian lives. Roughly half of the military police company serves as law enforcement, Gibson told lawmakers.
“If they are law enforcement in Portland or Multnomah County, we’re not putting them on this deployment because that takes them away from the actual activity that they’re supposed to be doing,” he said.
Trump ordered the deployment Sunday — a day after Gov. Tina Kotek declined an invitation by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deploy the guard on her own authority. The stated reason for the action is small but persistent protests outside of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the city’s South Waterfront neighborhood.
But local officials point out that the apocalyptic descriptors Trump has often heaped onto the city bear little resemblance to the mostly low-key protests that have been playing out for months. Kotek, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and others have suggested that Trump might have been given the wrong impression by recirculated footage of large and sometimes violent protests in 2020.
Those arguments have had little sway with Trump. Addressing top brass from the U.S. military on Tuesday, the president invoked Portland after explaining that he would like to use American cities as “training grounds for our military.”
“It looks like a war zone,” Trump said. “And I get a call from the liberal governor: ‘Sir, please don’t come in. We don’t need you.’ I said, ‘Well, unless they’re playing false tapes this looks like World War II.”
Trump’s comments drew rebuke from legislative Democrats.
“I’m not going to lie, this whole issue is driving me a little bit nutty,” said state Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth, a former member of the Oregon Air National Guard. “I never imagined ... that the language being used by a U.S. president would be similar to language used by people in far off countries about using cities for training.”
The legal vehicle by which the president called up the guard, known as Title 10, means that soldiers cannot be used for law enforcement purposes. That point was emphasized by state Rep. Jeff Helfrich, R-Hood River.
“We’re not talking about Humvees rolling down the street, enforcing traffic laws,” said Helfrich, a former Portland police sergeant. “We’re talking about troops, our guard members, sitting in federal facilities, making sure they’re protected from vandalism and break-ins.”
Gibson agreed. “That is the bulk of the mission as we understand it,” he said.
The Oregon National Guard based its estimate for the cost of the deployment by averaging the salary of 200 guard members for 80 days — enough of a bumper to allow for training and demobilization before and after the mission, Gibson said.
The $3.8 million estimate does not include meals and lodging.
The fate of the National Guard deployment may hinge on a court hearing scheduled for Friday, when lawyers with Oregon and the city of Portland will try to convince a federal judge to block Trump’s order from taking effect.
