Hundreds of National Guard troops are being returned from federal service to their respective states, U.S. Northern Command announced Tuesday.
The troops spread across Oregon, southern California and Illinois were called into federal service to support the agencies carrying out President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. The guard members were federalized over the objections of all three governors.
“All Title 10 troops in Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago are conducting demobilizing activities,” U.S. Northern Command stated. “They will return to their home units once their demobilization is complete.”
That process requires troops to travel to Fort Bliss, Texas, before returning home.
“While I am relieved that all our troops will finally return home, it does not make up for the personal sacrifices of more than 100 days, including holidays, spent in limbo,” Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said in a statement Tuesday.
This latest development comes after months of legal back and forth over the guard deployment. After a three-day trial in late October, U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut issued a permanent injunction, saying the Trump administration “did not have a lawful basis to federalize the National Guard.”
That ruling was appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. At the time, that court said it would wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on a case out of Illinois, challenging the deployment there, before taking up Oregon’s.
In November, the Trump administration demobilized some of the Oregon National Guard members under federal control, but retained 100 while the legal case continued to play out.
On Dec. 23, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration in the Illinois case. The high court declined to overturn a ruling from a district court judge, who blocked the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago.
That decision put Oregon’s case “in a very favorable position because the federal government was relying on the same statute in both places to try and federalize the guard,” said Dustin Buehler, special counsel to Oregon’s Attorney General, who helped oversee the National Guard litigation.
“When in the Illinois case the Supreme Court says ‘you didn’t do it right, in that case’ it almost certainly means they didn’t do it right here either.”
Days later, Trump then announced on social media that he would pause his effort to deploy the National Guard in Oregon, Illinois, and California for now, but said he could change his mind in the future. That same day, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Trump administration to return control of federalized California National Guard members back to the state.
“We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again — Only a question of time!” the president wrote on social media.
He echoed the same sentiment Sunday. While speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump specifically called out crime in Portland.
“We got it down to almost no crime,” he said. “But we pulled it out. We had a Supreme Court decision.”
But the president asserted that they would return to the city “at the appropriate time” and that crime would “soon start cause now they know that we’re out.”
“The most powerful thing we have, we haven’t used: the Insurrection Act,” Trump said. “I’ve always considered it, but we haven’t needed it anywhere.”
Despite these developments, Oregon’s case remains before the 9th Circuit. The U.S. Department of Justice is still challenging Judge Immergut’s ruling that blocked the troop deployment in Portland.
“In the course of normal litigation, litigation can go for months and years,” Buehler said.
