Paramount is now threatening California regulators that they’ll be taking their ball and going home (to Texas? Israel?) after California and 11 other states filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company’s unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers.
“Ellison’s confidantes have pushed him to consider moving its corporate headquarters and reallocating much of its $30 billion in planned spending outside the state if California Attorney General Rob Bonta were to sue to stop the merger, according to people familiar with the discussions.”
Much like those NYC billionaires who threatened to leave the city if Mamdani won, then didn’t. Or those Silicon Valley billionaires who threatened to leave California over (insert minor inconvenience or regulatory accountability effort) and head to Texas, then didn’t.
Paramount officials have been telling California that the merger will create vast untold new creative Utopias should it be approved, but few reasonable people believe them. In part because these mergers (especially involving Warner Brothers) never go well for anybody other than they highest echelons of the extraction class. And in part because of the lack of competence everyone is seeing from the likes of Bari Weiss at CBS.
As I’ve discussed at length, the $111 billion merger is going to be an ugly parade of debt, layoffs, higher consumer prices, foreign influence peddling, right wing agitprop, Trump appeasement, product quality declines, negative market health impacts, and overall chaos.
That’s assuming it gets approved. And while the Trump DOJ has unsurprisingly rubber-stamped the media domination dreams of close Trump ally Larry Ellison, a dozen states filed lawsuit last Monday, stating that further media consolidation at this scale would harm competition and violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act.
Oregon’s AG office recently stated Paramount refused to comply with requests for documents related to the merger. Paramount seems particularly cagey about requests for documents about how the company has specifically interacted with the Trump administration to grease the rails for quick and easy merger approval despite ample, obvious problems.
Much like when Paramount claimed opposition to their merger was “antisemitic,” you can sense a certain desperation among execs worried about these potential state antitrust challenges.
Even if the state opposition fails to block the deal outright, the lawsuits could introduce new delays that could be problematic for the debt-riddled transaction and Ellison, who is extremely far out over his skis on AI ahead of a potential bubble burst. Approval or not, history suggests it’s very likely that this all ends with a lot of sad whimpering — one way or another.
I think I’ve extensively explained at this point why the $111 billion merger between Paramount/CBS and Warner Brothers is a gargantuan pile of shit that will indisputably harm labor, consumers, markets, creatives, and potentially even national security. It doesn’t matter the company names; every single major media merger of this type ends badly for everyone but the trust fund brunchlords at the top.
Not only that, every single merger involving this particular company (Time Warner, Warner Brothers) in the last quarter century has resulted in nothing but layoffs, price hikes, shittier product, and a lot of whimpering. And there are ample signs that the Paramount folks are even less competent than past suitors, including the AT&T executives, who quickly got too far out over their skis.
While the Trump DOJ has unsurprisingly rubber stamped Larry Ellison’s clumsy effort to dominate what’s left of U.S. corporate media, states keep hinting at the fact they’ll file a collective antitrust lawsuit.
That’s certainly the case in Oregon, where Attorney General Dan Rayfield is asking for a 60 day pause in deal finalization while his office investigates both the deal — and apparently the Trump cronyism that has helped enable it. Rayfield, for one, accuses Paramount of refusing to adequately respond to state AG requests for information about the deal’s impact:
“We’re not going to let Paramount Skydance play hide the ball so they can rush through their massive merger. Oregonians have a real stake in this deal – in our film industry, in our economy, in the choices they’ll have as consumers. Paramount had every opportunity to hand over records and answer a few basic questions. Instead, it is trying to run out the clock and evade scrutiny. We’re asking the court to make sure Oregonians get the answers they’re owed before this deal closes, not after.”
Rayfield says that Paramount has been particularly cagey when asked for data on its interactions with the Trump administration and Trump DOJ. Including details on a federal government influence campaign Paramount internally calls “project warrior”:
“Paramount has not complied. According to court papers, the company declined to accept service of the request, waited weeks to respond, and ultimately sent objections on the day its documents were due – objections the state dismisses as a baseless tactic to avoid turning over the records. Paramount has told Oregon it does not intend to close the deal before July 16 but has not agreed to hold off any longer while the state’s investigation continues.”
So while the $111 billion deal is abjectly terrible, it’s not quite yet a done deal yet. I’d suspect that a joint antitrust lawsuit featuring the handful of states that still care about such a thing will arrive sometime in the next month or two. While it might not succeed in scuttling the deal, it could extend the timeline in a way that could prove costly for Larry Ellison, David Ellison, and their debt-riddled proposal.
On Techdirt, we often complain about lawyers and bad lawyering and bad cases. But there are times when lawyers are helpful, and my one-sentence summary after spending many days trying to understand a viral dispute about [checks notes] some old Star Wars LEGO sets is that a lot of people should have spoken to competent lawyers before doing… whatever the fuck they decided to do here.
If you haven’t been following the Bricks & Minifigs saga, congratulations on your peaceful existence. It’s a genuinely difficult story to track, partly because you have to watch a bunch of long YouTube videos to piece it together, and partly because almost everyone covering it is pushing a specific angle. Just as a point of reference, Bricks & Minifigs is a company that franchises its concept of stores for buying and selling lego blocks and sets — and, yes, minifigs. They have about 300 stores, most of which are franchised.
The basic summary (and some of this is disputed) is that a local Bricks & Minifigs franchise in Keizer, Oregon made an agreement with a guy named Bryan Mansell to sell a very large collection that his father had put together over many years of collectable unopened Star Wars LEGO sets. The intention of the collection had (we are told) always been to pay for college for Bryan’s children. His father, an 83-year-old man, had agreed to have Bryan sell the sets via the Keizer store on consignment. The collection was advertised, including on the store’s Instagram page where they made it clear that it was “one of the largest, most valuable privately held collections of Star Wars LEGO in the world” and that it was about to go on sale.
Later photos in that post detailed that they believed the collection was “worth well over $200,000” and that the entire collection would be sold through the store. The actual value of the legos in question is disputed, but the lowest number I’ve seen is closer to $60k. The entirety of the Instagram post text reads:
Saturday and Sunday, the 11th and 12th of November, the Bricks and Minifigs store in Salem-Kaiser will display one of the largest, most valuable privately held collections of Star WarsTM LEGO in the world. The event will be open to journalists and the public for photos before the collection goes on sale.
In the early 90s, Ed Mansell predicted Star WarsTM LEGO would be a good investment. Over the next 15 years, he purchased approximately $20,000 of Star WarsTM LEGO and preserved them, sealed, in their original boxes. The investment really paid off. The collection is now estimated to be worth well over $200,000. Multiple sets, including the highly prized, incredibly rare Cloud City set, are now worth more than $10,000 each. Some of the individual minifigs are worth more than $1,300 each. The ten-fold increase in the value of Mansell’s collection is a greater return than if Mansell had put the same amount of money into the stock market in a Dow Jones Index Fund.
When Ed Mansell decided it was time to divest, he turned to his son, Bryan Mansell. Bryan knows more about his father’s comic book and baseball card collection but didn’t feel confident in his knowledge of the LEGO secondary market. He saw the sign for the Bricks and Minifigs store while passing by on North River Road, came in, and asked the store owner, Chrystal Law, if she could help. “I told him, even if we couldn’t sell the collection, I would help him figure out how much it was worth because I didn’t want him to get ripped off. And I think that’s why he trusted me,” Law said. The entire collection will be sold through Law’s store, but first they wanted to put it all on display so the public can see it in its entirety.
The collection will be on display in the store’s party room from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, November 11th, and 11am till 6pm on Sunday. The collection will be available for sale immediately, so the best time for pictures will be Saturday morning. The collection will not be stored on-site after hours for security reasons, and after Sunday the sets will be available for purchase but stored elsewhere. Bricks and Minifigs is located at 3670 River Road in Kaiser.
Apparently, over the course of 2024, various parts of the collection were sold off and Mansell would stop by each month to collect his cut of the sales. There is a dispute over how much of the collection was actually sold before everything went off the rails in late 2024.
In November 2024, as you may have heard, Donald Trump was elected. Chrystal’s partner, Ben Gorman, runs a small publishing company called Not A Pipe Publishing, which (among other things) publishes something called the “Antifa Lit Journal.” Gorman felt like publishing such things in the US under a Trump regime might be problematic and looked into moving out of the country. As part of that, Law contacted corporate Bricks & Minifigs about selling or closing their franchise (exactly what she told them is disputed).
This next part is also disputed. Law & Gorman say corporate told them they had a franchisee who was interested in taking over the franchise. Bricks & Minifigs corporate claims that Law had told them she was shuttering the store and that she wasn’t allowed to do that, so they had to rush to reclaim the store. Almost immediately someone associated with Bricks & Minifigs, Brandon Best, showed up at the store, saying he was taking over the store and demanding the keys and that Law leave immediately. There’s also a dispute over whether or not Law & Gorman were in violation of their franchise agreement (Law & Gorman claim that the breach was due to failures by BAM corporate, which had been worked out months prior, and any claim of ongoing breach is misleading).
There’s a bit that is caught on video where Law tells Brandon and someone from the company on the phone that they have a large collection on consignment and that they owe Mansell money, and Bricks and Minifigs corporate tells Law they’ll “take on the consignment liability.”
Law and Gorman push back on Bricks & Minifigs just taking over the store, but are told by a B&M “official” name Ki McAllister (recorded by Gorman) that if they try to fight this, B&M will make their lives difficult: “If we go the legal route, it’s gonna be a very expensive battle for you and it’s not going to be a good position for you guys to get into. There’s not a whole lot of options for you. If you want to go the legal route, it’s just going to be a mess and it’s gonna be expensive for you.” When Gorman pushes back and asks if McAllister spoke “with” or “at” Crystal, McAllister admits he spoke “at” her and then says: “If you fight this, then you’re putting yourself into a whole lot of shit. It sounds like a threat and I can acknowledge that, because in a way it is.“
From there, it appears corporate Bricks & Minifigs transferred the franchise to two of its partners, Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best (the guy who showed up at the store) and they just… basically denied owing Mansell anything at all or even having his legos. Or sometimes they’d admit it and sometimes they wouldn’t. It became messy. Mansell claims that the people he spoke to store gave an almost identical message to him that Ki McAllister gave to Gorman & Law that it would be too expensive for him to go to court to get back what he’s owed.
Mansell then reached out to YouTubers, some of whom detailed how Bricks & Minifigs appeared to have effectively stolen all these lego sets. But then (according to one of the YouTubers) Bricks & Minifigs threatened to sue them (sense a pattern?) and they took down the videos.
Mansell then contacted another YouTuber named Ben Schneider, who goes by the handle Reckless Ben — best described as a Temu Nathan Fielder. He puts himself in ridiculous situations, goes to equally ridiculous lengths to justify them, and stares blankly into the camera with that specific combination of cluelessness and overconfidence that comes from someone who has talked himself into believing every move he makes is correct.
In this case, that included (not a complete list) trying to get back Mansell’s money and/or remaining legos by going to the store, confronting the employees, confronting the owners (who were difficult to track down), showing up at Bricks & Minifigs corporate, speaking to the CEO, setting up a registered religion in order to run a raffle for the lego sets to try to make this a criminal case to get law enforcement involved (not how any of this works), filing a bunch of small claims cases against the store and the company and the owners of the store, creating a company called We Steal from Old People, setting up a “franchise” structure for We Steal from Old People to use a mirror argument of Bricks & Minifigs that he can’t be held liable for franchisee actions, putting up signs for that store, and much more.
Some of these moves are interesting. Some are genuinely clever. Many are very stupid — particularly agreeing to talk to cops without a lawyer present after being arrested (more on that shortly), and believing that tricking a store employee into signing what she thought was a delivery receipt, but which was actually an unenforceable “contract” against trespassing him, accomplished anything at all. Mostly what all of this does is generate attention, rather than anything legally compelling.
The one potentially legally interesting move in all of this was filing the ten separate small claims cases against the store (I won’t even get into how they were able to structure things to file the ten separate claims even though that’s interesting, because this is freaking long enough, and the details are in some of the videos below). The store refused to show up in the cases, meaning that default judgments were entered in each case. When Schneider went to the store to try to collect, he found that the store had been permanently shuttered the day after the default judgments came down (which looks very, very bad for Bricks & Minifigs and the franchise owners).
The cops get called on Schneider repeatedly through all of this. When he’s in Utah trying to confront both Bricks and Minifigs CEO Ammon McNeff and the supposed franchise owners, Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best. He tries to take Johnson to small claims court and the court tells him he needs to first try to resolve the issue with Johnson, but Johnson (who at one point offers to give Mansell the lego back if Mansell apologizes, but then doesn’t) has blocked Schneider’s phone number and calls the police when he sees Schneider and associates near his house.
At multiple points the police stop cars that Schneider is in (one time after falsely claiming they didn’t stop at a stop sign, even though the dash cam shows they clearly did) and generally appear to be harassing Schneider and his colleagues. In what appears to be a tremendously egregious move, they pull them over and hold them for hours claiming that they believe there are drugs in the car which they search for and are unable to find. Later the cops get a warrant and raid the Airbnb where Schneider and others are staying, arresting them all.
Schneider and some of the others working with him are arrested at various points for stalking and harassment, while Schneider insists he’s just trying to serve Johnson with the papers from the small claims case. There’s also an attempt to claim that the Go Fund Me campaign that Schneider set up at some point violates some law. The whole thing goes off the rails in so many ways.
Schneider also gets access to various bodycam footage, some of which is redacted in places that look sketchy but happens all the time with police body cams. Some of the bodycam footage looks damning against the police (including a couple of admissions that they don’t really think Schneider and his friends have violated the law, even if the police chief later disputes that).
Very stupidly, Schneider and his friends/colleagues repeatedly talk to cops without a lawyer present. This is a very bad thing to do. Multiple people who were arrested later put up their own videos about it, including one (the guy who was arrested for trying to lock his phone when a cop tried to take it), who claims that he’s got a high IQ so was never going to get bested by a cop (this is also a stupid thing to say).
Bricks & Minifigs’ position on all of this appears to be that (1) anything bad that happened was because of the franchise owners and not corporate, both the previous ones and the ones they arranged to take over who appear to be closely associated with corporate Bricks & Minifigs anyway, (2) Law & Gorman violated their franchise agreement in many ways and the takeover of the store was necessary because of that, (3) that Gorman & Law “stole” Mansell’s legos and the new store really didn’t have any, (4) that Gorman & Law weren’t allowed to do consignment deals in the first place (despite evidence to the contrary, including the franchise agreement that lays out that consignment is acceptable), (5) that Ki McAllister is a low level employee and his statements don’t matter (not how it works), (6) that they didn’t know about any consignment deal (clearly untrue given video evidence as well as notifications from both Law and Mansell), (7) that Schneider is only giving a one-sided account (true, but doesn’t deal with many of the factual claims), and (8) that this is all an illegal harassment campaign against them designed to get them to pay out way more money than they owe (if they owe anything at all).
On top of all that we have competing additional civil lawsuits filed in Utah state courts and the various misdemeanor (not felony) charges against Schneider (though he claims he’s also being threatened with felony charges, though as far as I can tell none have been filed yet). Oh and the potential of criminal charges against… someone… in Oregon for the possible theft of Mansell’s collection.
Phew.
Let’s now insert some of the many videos on this. I will say that Bricks & Minifigs corporate (and the replacement franchise owners) come out of this all looking very, very, very sketchy. Ben Schneider comes out of it looking like both a hero for getting a tremendous amount of viral attention to all of this, but also kind of a dumbass for doing a bunch of very stupid things that he thinks helps his cause but don’t, which he could have avoided by… actually talking to a lawyer. Yes, Schneider got a ton of attention on the issue, but also did a ton of things that likely made everything worse for Mansell and himself.
If literally anyone involved had spoken to a lawyer at any point, an awful lot of this mess could have been avoided.
That’s why I’ll start with the most even-handed summary I’ve seen of the whole thing, from the always excellent Lawful Masses with Leonard French, who walks through the legal reality in exhaustive detail. It’s more complicated than any of the other coverage suggests, though yes, Bricks & Minifigs still comes out of it looking like people who took control of collectible legos they had no rights to.
Some of the key points highlighted by French that haven’t made it into most of the other videos I’ve seen:
Mansell should have filed a UCC-1 financing statement with the consignment to protect his property (this is genuinely useful information for anyone ever looking to sell things on consignment) but even if he didn’t do that, he’s probably protected by the “merchant exception” related to the Statute of Frauds. This is far beyond my own legal understanding, but is fascinating.
Mansell sent a termination letter to the new owners of the franchise, putting them on actual notice that the sets were his.
Mansell had a friend go in and purchase one of his sets after he had clearly informed the store not to sell one. As French points out, this is now a pretty clear theft case.
Bricks & Minifigs has some ways that they could (potentially successfully) challenge the small claims default judgments against them in Oregon, but the clock is ticking on that, and if they fail to, those judgments could follow them around.
Then as I was finishing up this already incredibly long article, I saw French has released part II, looking at some of the filed lawsuits that I discuss below and coming to similar conclusions that I do (i.e., no one comes out of any of this looking good).
Then there are some of Schneider’s amusing/cringey videos, starting with him talking about the effort to get back the legos. This is the main video that made this go viral and currently has around 3 million views.
He then published a follow up detailing how the police in American Fork treated him and his friends including stopping them multiple times and eventually raiding their AirBNB and arresting them.
And also a short video reading through and reacting to a leaked letter that Bricks & Minifigs corporate sent to their franchisees about how to deal with the controversy.
Then there are the American Fork police who released this bizarre video showing their side of the story, which appears to be set in… I dunno… heaven? John Oliver’s void? The entirely white background is a freaking choice is all I’m saying. So too is the “I’m reading you a bedtime story” tone of voice from police chief in the video.
The police chief also fails to address the weird redactions in the bodycam footage, and the multiple times his cops are caught effectively admitting that Schneider and his crew weren’t actually breaking the law.
Schneider has released a response video using a similar backdrop and highlighting problems and inconsistencies with the claims in the police video.
Then there’s Bricks & Minifigs CEO Ammon McNeff going on a livestream and doing a poor job of defending the company, including saying a few things that won’t do him any favors in court.
Believe it or not, there’s even more in all these videos that I don’t have time to go into, but we’re at almost 3,000 words already and we haven’t gotten to some of the competing lawsuits.
We have discussed the small claims cases (which have mostly ended in default because BAM folks ignored them) but the bigger deal are the competing lawsuits that have been filed in Utah’s state court and have received less direct attention. While it’s one thing to say things on a one-sided YouTube video, what you say in court can be a bit more serious. And we have two competing cases to look at. The first was filed by Law and Gorman and the LLC they had set up to run the Oregon store, and filed in Utah’s Chancery Court back in March.
It adds some useful details to the whole mess, including saying that the only breach they had regarding their franchise agreement with BAM corporate was… because BAM themselves refused to live up to the requirements of the agreement. Apparently Law had simply managed the store before this, but had approached corporate about taking on the franchise, which they agreed to do. But after working out a deal, the company failed to transfer the lease and the bank account over to Law & Gorman, which caused a bunch of problems regarding payments:
Shortly after the sale closed, BAM failed to fulfill its obligations to properly transfer the store’s bank account and assign the store lease to Plaintiffs’ LLC. These were not minor administrative oversights—they were fundamental obligations without which the franchisee could not operate the business. Without control of the bank account, Plaintiffs could not make the automated payments required under the Franchise Agreement. Without the lease in their name, Plaintiffs had no direct relationship with the landlord and no ability to ensure rent was paid. BAM’s failure to complete these transfers was the first material breach of the Franchise Agreement and the proximate cause of every subsequent “default” BAM later cited as grounds for termination.
BAM did not return the bank’s documentation needed to change account ownership, causing the account to be frozen without Plaintiffs’ knowledge. As a result, automated payments for franchise royalties and for the remaining purchase price were not withdrawn as scheduled.
Similarly, because BAM never assigned the store’s lease to BAMF Salem 1, LLC, the landlord’s notices of bounced ACH rent payments went to BAM as the tenant of record—not to Plaintiffs. BAM did not promptly inform Plaintiffs of these issues, effectively concealing the problem until it had compounded. Plaintiffs thus could not pay rent through no fault of their own: the lease was not in their name, the bank account was frozen, and the party responsible for both failures—BAM—kept Plaintiffs in the dark. BAM’s own Director of Operations later confirmed this failure on a recorded call, admitting that “the lease is technically in our name still.”
That is a pretty bad look. Especially given that, in BAM’s own lawsuit, they claim the reason they repossessed the store and handed its franchise to someone else was… the very things that Law & Gorman say they caused. BAM corporate’s massive lawsuit filed against Ben Schneider, Bryan Mansell, and a bunch of folks working with them (and, of course, claiming civil RICO because why not?) claims that they took back Law & Gorman’s franchise because of breaches to the agreement, such as those that Law & Gorman say were BAM’s fault n the first place (oddly, the BAM lawsuit refers to everyone by their first names, rather than last, which would be more typical).
Despite the foregoing plain requirements, Chrystal and Benjamin materially breached their obligations, as required APA payments were not completed, FA royalty payments became delinquent, the lease and various accounts were never properly transferred and lease amounts were unpaid. Chrystal’s outstanding contractual obligations mounted, eventually exceeding an estimated $175,000….
… Based on the foregoing uncured breaches and anticipatory repudiation, BAM, inter alia, issued a written 11/14/24 Notice of Immediate Termination to Salem LLC pursuant to the FA, exercised its priority rights to the collateral in the Security Agreement, pre-scheduled a repossession with Chrystal and repossessed the Salem LLC store on or after 11/14/24 and assumed the lease, as expressly permitted under the FA and APA, including any and all fixtures, inventory and other assets, and credited an estimated $38,000 paltry value thereof as an offset to the unpaid $175,000 debt.
That’s a pretty big factual dispute that the two courts are going to need to dig into.
The BAM lawsuit also claims that they had no notice of Mansell’s consignment, which is plainly bullshit given the video clip that shows up in basically all of the videos above:
Excepting only respecting the foregoing unpaid lease, BAM did so as a bona fide purchaser, without notice of any third party claims or liens of any kind, including Chrystal and Benjamin’s undisclosed and alleged 11/22/23 Consignment Agreement with Brian, referenced infra.
Prior to and at the time of repossession, BAM’s representative, Brandon, conducted an informal and video inventory of the Salem LLC fixtures and inventory. While he did not locate or identify any product that was identified as consigned or not owned by Salem LLC, he concluded that the maximum value of any residual inventory was less than $38,000. Less than $5,000 worth of Star Wars LEGO product could be located and identified in the entire residual Salem LLC onsite inventory.
This is quite a claim to make given the video evidence to the contrary, which had already gone viral by the time this lawsuit was filed last week.
There are other claims in the BAM lawsuit that seem problematic including this:
Bryan showed up later that day and began yelling at personnel and holding up purported consignment paperwork demanding the immediate return thereof or payment of $80,000. Josh interceded and asked to review it and briefly did so and pointed out that neither BAM (nor Josh and Brandon) were a party to this purported arrangement.
Again, taking over the store also meant taking over the consignment liability, which they had already been made aware of and which they admitted they were taking over (as recorded in the security camera video). That they hadn’t personally been a party to the arrangement doesn’t matter, because when they took over the franchise they also took over that agreement.
The complaint then says that Johnson and Best tried to find the alleged sets owned by Mansell but were unable to do so, concluding that they were all gone. This is, obviously, contested by Mansell and others who have pointed to evidence that the sets were still in the store, including Mansell having someone go in and purchase one of the sets after he had demanded them back in a written notification.
The complaint also claims that it was only in late 2025 and early 2026 that Best was able to dig into the old franchise’s accounting system to find details of sales of what were likely many of Mansell’s legos. The complaint argues that it appears most, if not all, were sold by Law prior to the takeover and if Mansell is owed money, it’s from Law and Gorman.
Many months later in the fall of 2025, and only after Baker Salem had entered its 3/27/25 Business and Asset Purchase Agreement, Brandon gained access to Salem LLC’s archived and incomplete POS accounting system, which he discovered identified Star Wars “lot sets” from Star Wars regular “lots” inventory sales. This inventory sale distinction was unclear to Brandon and Josh, and Chrystal had never explained the significance, if any, to anyone, but Brandon much later in 2026 discovered that approximately 367 purchases of lot sets (for an estimated retail value of $46,000) and 336 purchase of lots (for an estimated retail value of $12,600) had occurred after 2023. He still could not, however, confirm the specific products sold (and whether they had been consigned or not).
Then we get the RICO claims. The supposed “conspiracy”:
Upon information and belief, though they had no legitimate legal recourse or evidence upon which to file a claim, Chrystal, Benjamin and Bryan conspired to, inter alia, threaten, intimidate, extort and defraud Plaintiffs anyway possible, as detailed herein, including the formation of an Enterprise to engage in wrongful activities.
As an initial step, Salem LLC caused a 12/24/24 legal demand letter to be sent to BAM, variously alleging it had been damaged based on the termination of its FA, which was a private business matter between Chrystal and Salem LLC. On 1/10/25, BAM responded, denying the allegations and providing support for its termination. Neither Salem LLC, nor Chrystal or Benjamin, thereafter pursued any claim in the letter further with BAM until 1/2/26, when a separate legal demand letter was sent, as discussed infra.
Instead, upon information and belief and in furtherance of such threats, Chrystal, Benjamin and/or Bryan learned of Schneider and communicated with him, whereby they provided information regarding their unsupported claims against Baker Salem and/or BAM, ignoring and excluding Salem LLC and/or Chrystal’s sole obligation regarding any private consignment agreement with Bryan. In connection therewith, they, together with others (i.e., DOES 1-15) conspired to intentionally, maliciously, fraudulently and illegally threaten, extort, harass, profiteer, interfere with and damage Plaintiffs in furtherance of the Enterprise, including based on the unlawful activities described herein.
Upon information and belief, Schneider and the Schneider Group acquired a direct or indirect financial interest in Bryan, Chrystal, Benjamin and/or Salem LLC’s unsupported claims against Plaintiffs, whereby co-Defendants (with Bryan, Chrystal, Benjamin and/or Salem LLC’s assistance and support) organized and established the Enterprise that would launch a campaign of deception, disinformation and destruction intended to cause Plaintiffs injury and damage, to extort a demand of over $200,000, to deceive and manipulate Plaintiffs, to interfere with Plaintiffs economic and family relations, to harass Plaintiffs, to cause private and public nuisances, to trespass and to otherwise engage in a pattern of unlawful activities, as described herein.
They then claim that this “enterprise” engaged in numerous “unlawful activities” in support of the supposed conspiracy:
Commencing after Baker Salem began operations as a new franchisee and continuing to date, Schneider and the Schneider Group (with the support of Bryan and Chrystal) waged a malicious and intentional campaign of extortion and destruction through independent episodes of unlawful activities against Plaintiffs. Such included periodic harassment through phone calls, numerous disruptive store or office visits, repeated instances of trespass, deceptively staged events (i.e., disingenuous coronation, rally, raffle, store front table promotion, a fictitious Lego Club rally, manufactured and frivolous complaints to police, private and public nuisances, threatening phone calls, numerous deceptive live and telephonic impersonations, in person and remote threats (and via proxies), frivolous sham lawsuits (splitting claims in multiple ineffective small claims actions), etc.), issuing the Publications of defamatory and disparaging images and content, all in furtherance of the Enterprise.
The complaint quotes Schneider’s viral video in ways that… Schneider himself made easy for them to quote. The “we have to do something illegal” is not a great line for Schneider and the other defendants in this case. They also highlight this bit, which is also not a great fact for Schneider:
5/21/26 YouTube Video, Minute 12:46 through 14:46 (Schneider attempted extortion and directly threatened Ammon by stating that, “if you just want to give it back now, it’s going to be a lot easier for you guys. You know, I think you guys would prefer the easy way” or “the hard way. I don’t think you guys are really going to like it”. An implied depiction of the threatened violence associated with the “hard way” is an explosion at BAM’s corporate headquarters).
Of course it’s a bit rich for them to complain about the “easy or hard way” complaint when they apparently made similar statements to Law & Gorman as well as Mansell.
Once again, so so so much of all of this could have been avoided if either side had competent lawyers and listened to them.
Johnson and Best also claim that they tried to settle with Mansell and he rejected their offer, which they claim is evidence that “the enterprise” was seeking more than they were legitimately entitled to:
In late 2025 and based on co-Defendants’ ongoing harassment, Brandon and Josh further investigated the Baker Salem store inventory, and though they still could not reliably identify any product that appeared to belong to Bryan, they located a few (approximately 20) Star Wars LEGO sets in a back office lockable cupboard, on which they noticed stickers not previously recognized. As a precaution only, but still without knowledge that Bryan in fact had any right thereto, they directed that such not be sold from Baker Salem’s inventory and remain locked up pending completion of their ongoing investigation and receipt of reliable evidence of ownership and other conditions.
On or about 12/3/25, in a text exchange between Josh and Bryan (deceptively orchestrated by Schneider) and after sustaining incredible business disruption and harm, Josh discussed a possible settlement scenario under economic duress. Purely as an accommodation (and without any legal obligation to do so), Josh discussed a possible settlement scenario to allow Bryan to retrieve the few sets that had been provisionally identified as merely Star Wars related product in the back office (i.e., described above, though not necessarily belonging to Bryan), which as a precautionary matter, Josh had set aside pending receipt of ownership documentation from Bryan. Josh indicated a written apology and other concessions would need to be made and the harassment must stop. Bryan rejected this proposal outright and responded, “Unless you are going to make us whole on the whole Lego collection, I don’t see where we have anything to discuss.” This confirmed the Enterprise’s interest. Referring to the sets he had identified, Josh replied, “We can give you what was left when [presumably Chrystal] left. We can’t and aren’t responsible for what she sold the two years yall were working together. If you want what she left let me know.” Bryan refused this offer. This exchange further evidenced Bryan’s objectives were not about recovering a LEGO collection, but rather about extorting payment for the Enterprise beyond any legitimate claim.
That argument may sound good to the BAM folks, but I’m pretty sure they’re wrong when they claim they’re not responsible for what Law sold prior to them taking over, because (again) when they took over the store they took on any liabilities with the store. And that would be one of them. Also, there appears to be some evidence in the videos that some of the times they offered to return Mansell’s legos and then… didn’t.
Believe it or not, the 5,000+ words I’ve already written here barely scratches the surface.
Strip it all back and the core of this is pretty simple: an 83-year-old man’s carefully assembled lego collection — built over 15 years, meant to fund his grandkids’ college — appears to have been taken (at least in part) by people who calculated that it would cost more to fight them than to walk away. That bet almost paid off. The only reason this became a national story is that Bryan Mansell found someone willing to be very, very extremely online about it.
But “going viral” is not a legal strategy. And Schneider’s willingness to do basically anything for content — including things that are genuinely legally stupid, like talking to cops without a lawyer present, or making statements on camera that now appear in a civil RICO complaint — may have made things considerably worse for Mansell in the long run, even as it made things considerably more uncomfortable for Bricks & Minifigs in the short run. If Schneider had talked to a lawyer before doing half of what he did, he might have accomplished more with less collateral damage.
Though it might not have made such “good content.”
Meanwhile, if Bricks & Minifigs had talked to a lawyer — a good one, not just whoever is filing these complaints — they might have been advised that explicitly threatening people on recorded calls, taking over a store while explicitly acknowledging a consignment liability on video, and then denying that consignment existed in court filings, was not a sequence of events that tends to end well. And that shuttering the store the day after default judgments came down looks, to put it diplomatically, quite bad.
The deeper structural problem here — one that Leonard French articulates better than I can — is that the US legal system has a genuine dead zone around mid-five-figure disputes. Too big for small claims (even with Schneider’s claim splitting exploit), too small to justify the cost of a full civil suit, it’s exactly the range where a well-resourced defendant can make a calculated bet that the other side will run out of money or patience before getting justice. That’s a feature of the system Bricks & Minifigs happened to exploit, but is not unique to them.
The answer to that structural problem shouldn’t be “find a YouTuber willing to go to ridiculous lengths to get attention on this issue.” Though in 2026, that does appear to be working better than most alternatives — at least in the court of public opinion, where the verdict has already come in decisively on the side of Mansell and Schneider. That’s a real problem for Bricks & Minifigs and every one of their ~300 franchisees, regardless of how the legal cases resolve. You don’t get to un-become the lego store that allegedly stole an old man’s retirement collection. That story is going to follow this brand around for a long time.
None of this had to go this way. A competent lawyer on either side, at almost any point in this saga, probably changes the outcome significantly. Instead, both sides made calculated bets — Bricks & Minifigs that the costs of fighting would deter anyone from trying, and Schneider that going maximally viral would substitute for having an actual legal strategy. The first bet nearly worked. The second is still being litigated, in multiple senses of that word.
It’s not that arrest and ticket quotas don’t exist. They do. They always have. They always will. It’s that they’re illegal. Courts have repeatedly criticized quotas because they create incentives so perverse they’d make /b/ board denizens uncomfortable.
Since they’re presumptively illegal, most law enforcement agencies will use any word but “quota” to describe these. They’ll toss around words like “performance goals” or “metrics” or just simply refuse to discuss them at all until they’re forced to.
The Trump administration — in this case personified by advisor Stephen Miller — also doesn’t use the word “quota.” Miller has stated he wants to see 3,000 migrant arrests daily. He’s also made it clear that this is the minimum expected of the government’s anti-migrant storm troopers.
Trump expects the same thing. “Surges” exclusively targeting cities and states Trump lost in the last two elections have generated enough backlash that Trump has had second thoughts about leaning heavily on the first word in the phrase “brutal efficiency.” Those were swiftly replaced by Trump’s third thoughts because that’s just how his goldfish brain operates.
A few sidelinings aside, it’s business as usual in the Trump administration’s war on non-white people. Litigation was always the inevitable outcome of programs that relied on routine rights violations to accomplish the lofty goals set by Stephen Miller.
In Oregon, plenty of federal occupation activity has already occurred. Portland’s residents appear to have won, but there’s still the matter of ongoing lawsuits seeking compensation for violated rights and/or seeking injunctions forbidding any future rights violations.
While it’s true that federal officers like to lie about stuff they’ve done or will do, these lies are almost always exposed once they submit evidence or testify under oath. In an ongoing class action lawsuit being spearheaded by Innovation Law Lab, ICE officers are delivering testimony that not only exposes some aspects of its always-on surveillance efforts, but the lies told by the DHS about the supposed nonexistence of arrest quotas.
Details about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ surveillance tools and arrest goals in the state have come to light in a federal lawsuit that compelled officers to answer questions under oath, offering a rare window into opaque, internal strategies that are generally kept secret and have been driving mass detentions and chaotic raids.
[…]
Testimony in a December hearing in the case provided a remarkable acknowledgment by an ICE officer of how daily target arrest numbers played out at the local level, and appeared to contradict the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials’ repeated claims that officers didn’t have quotas. Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly said the administration’s target was 3,000 daily arrests. The hearing also appeared to be the first time that ICE disclosed in court its use of an app called Elite for operations.
The testimony was delivered last year, but the transcript [PDF] was only recently published by the court. What hasn’t been revealed is the testifying officer’s name. He’s only known as “JB,” but he did say several concerning things during his testimony, including stating that his team was given a “verbal order to target eight arrests per day.” The government’s lawyer objected to the term “quota” (when it was used by the plaintiff’s lawyer), but the judge overrode the objection.
In addition, JB stated that his team relied on an app called Elite to find supposed illegal immigrants.
JB explained that Elite was a “newer app” given to ICE agents. The app, he said, is “kind of like Google Maps” and shows how many individuals with an “immigration nexus” are believed to be in a certain area. Another officer testified that a “nexus” could mean any history of contact with immigration officials, which could include a naturalized US citizen.
[…]
JB acknowledged information generated by Elite could be inaccurate: “The app could say 100%, and it’s wrong. The person doesn’t live there. And so it’s not accurate. It’s a tool that we use that gives you probability, but there’s … no such thing as 100%.”
There’s a lot that’s unknown about this app. Even those relying on it don’t even know what sources it uses to make these determinations, although officers appear to realize it’s far from perfect. Not that it stops them from using it as an excuse to raid neighborhoods or engage in unlawful stops.
This case centers around an unlawful stop and detention, one aided and abetted not by fallible tech, but by the officers shrugging off indeterminate search results and lying about what happened in the arrest paperwork.
MJMA had entered the US with a valid temporary visa last year. Still, JB’s team wrote in their arrest records – inaccurately – that the farm worker entered the US unlawfully. The report also inaccurately described the stop of the van as “consensual”, the judge noted.
All of this has led to an injunction against federal immigration agencies, with the court saying this in the order [PDF] it handed down two weeks ago:
There is no telling how many people would have sought counsel, or would have benefited from it. It is clear that there are countless more people who have been rounded up, and who either remain in detention or have “voluntarily” deported than those, like M-J-M-A-, who were fortunate enough to find counsel at the eleventh hour. Defendants benefit from this blitz approach to immigration enforcement that takes advantage of navigating outside of the boundaries of conducting lawful arrests. For the one detainee who has the audacity to challenge the legality of her detention and gains release, several more remain detained or succumb to the threat of lengthy detention, and then instead “voluntarily” deport. Defendants win the numbers game at the cost of debasing the rule of law.
All of that adds up, now that we can read the transcript. “Debasing the law?” It’s all there, from the quotas to reliance on sketchy mass surveillance apps to the falsification of the narrative by officers hoping to lie their way into constitutionality. This is the administration, personified by a pseudonymous federal agents who are expected to make Trump’s warped dreams a reality. In the middle of all of this are thousands of people and a half-dozen civil liberties, all of which can only hope to survive the next couple of years.
ICE has been telling itself all it needs to do is write its own paperwork and it can do whatever it wants. Memos — passed around secretively and publicly acknowledged by no one but whistleblowers — told ICE agents they don’t need judicial warrants to arrest people or enter people’s homes.
All they need — according to acting director Todd Lyons, who issued the memos — is paperwork they could create and authorize without any need to seek the approval of anyone else. ICE calls them warrants but they’re just self-issued paperwork in which the officer says a person needs to be arrested and then signs it. That’s it. The review process begins and ends at the same desk. If the agent swears it to be true, he’s only swearing it to himself, which means every finger can be crossed and every “fact” can be fiction.
Courts aren’t having it. ICE’s internal memos may claim there’s no need for the Constitution to come between them and their mass deportation efforts, but that doesn’t mean the Constitution agrees to be sidelined. The courts are stepping in with increasing frequency to protect constitutional rights. A lot of activity in recent months has focused on the due process rights being denied to detainees.
More recent activity is focusing on the Fourth Amendment which, if violated, naturally lends itself to other rights violations. Via Kyle Cheney of Politico (who has been tracking these cases since Trump’s most recent election) comes another case where a federal judge refuses to play along with ICE’s unconstitutional game of charades.
The opening paragraph of this opinion [PDF] lays out the facts. And they are ugly.
ICE officers are casting dragnets over Oregon towns they believe to be home to agricultural workers, calling them “target rich.” Landing in those communities, officers surveil apartment complexes in the early morning hours, scan license plates for details about the vehicles’ owners, and wait for them to get into their vehicles. Officers then stop, arrest, detain and transport people out of the District of Oregon to the Northwest ICE Processing Center (“NWIPC”), 144 miles away in Tacoma, Washington, before ultimately deporting them. Sworn testimony and substantial evidence before this Court show that ICE officers ask few questions and allow little time before shattering windows, handcuffing people, and detaining them at an ICE facility in another state.
There’s no “worst of the worst” going on here. These are the actions of masked opportunists who know the only way to make the boss happy is to value quantity over quality. Untargeted dragnets cannot possibly rely on probable cause, even considering Justice Kavanaugh’s blessing of racial profiling. Given this — and the administration’s desire to see 3,000 arrests per day — immigration officers can’t even be bothered to issue administrative warrants, much less secure judicial warrants, before performing arrests.
The Oregon courts drives home the point in the next paragraph (emphasis in the original):
The law on this issue is clear and undisputed. An ICE officer may arrest someone if the officer obtains in advance a warrant for their arrest. If the officer does not have a warrant, they cannot arrest someone unless they have probable cause to believe that both (1) the individual is in the United States unlawfully and (2) they are “likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.”
The government’s response to this could be generously called “implausible.” It’s more accurately “risible” and backed by absolutely nothing that can’t be immediately contradicted by literally everything everywhere, as the court points out.
Plaintiffs challenge ICE’s practice of abusing its arrest power by failing to meet those criteria before arresting, detaining, and deporting people. Defendants do not—and could not— argue that this practice is lawful. Rather, they argue that there is no such practice, and that the myriad cases presented to this Court are mere coincidence.
But there is “such practice.” It’s impossible to deny it, even though the government tried to. The court isn’t interested in the government’s deflections and straight-up lies. It’s here to compare the facts to the law. Here are the facts:
[T]he overwhelming evidence in this record confirms that ICE officers targeted Woodburn and other cities in Oregon because of the large number of agricultural workers living in those areas. Officer testimony regarding human smuggling serves only as an inappropriate pretextual reason for developing reasonable suspicion for a stop. That officer also testified that he believed the van was suspicious because it had tinted windows and did not have any commercial markings.
When asked what gave the officers “reasonable suspicion that there may have been a crime afoot or that the folks in the van may not have had legal status,” the officer noted that the registered owner of the van had an immigration history, and that “[p]eople are being — going into a van early in the morning.” The officers did not have the identities of anyone in the van and they were not pursuing any known targets.The officers did not have a warrant for M-J-M-A-’s arrest.
Here’s more:
The evidence also demonstrates ICE’s practice of fabricating warrants after arrests were made. Tr. 306 (if an officer “encountered a file that did not have a warrant for arrest, an I-200,” he would create one); Tr. 356 (officer affirming that “for any case” involving a warrantless arrest, he would “create a warrant for the arrest after” individuals were detained at ICE field offices). This practice of creating warrants after the fact is highly probative of ICE’s failure to make individualized determinations of one’s escape risk prior to arresting them. That is especially true where, as in M-J-M-A-’s case, the encounter narratives for arrestees were exactly “the same.” Tr. 401.
Heading towards the granting of requested restraining order, the court makes it explicitly clear that federal immigration officers are routinely violating constitutional rights:
The Court finds that ample evidence in this case demonstrates a high likelihood—if not a certainty—that Defendants are engaging in a pattern and practice of unlawful conduct in Oregon…
And if it’s unlawful in Oregon, it’s illegal everywhere in the United States. Nothing in this order relies on Oregon’s state Constitution. Everything here falls under the minimum standard set by the US Constitution and its amendments.
The order ends with a stark warning — one that makes it clear what’s happening now is not only extremely abnormal, but a threat to the Republic itself.
It is clear that there are countless more people who have been rounded up, and who either remain in detention or have “voluntarily” deported than those, like M-J-M-A-, who were fortunate enough to find counsel at the eleventh hour. Defendants benefit from this blitz approach to immigration enforcement that takes advantage of navigating outside of the boundaries of conducting lawful arrests. For the one detainee who has the audacity to challenge the legality of her detention and gains release, several more remain detained or succumb to the threat of lengthy detention, and then instead “voluntarily” deport. Defendants win the numbers game at the cost of debasing the rule of law.
Finally, this Court has previously described ICE officers’ field enforcement conduct as brutal and violent. The practices are intended to strike fear across large numbers of people throughout Oregon. The persistent intensity of regular ICE immigration enforcement operations may very well have the intended effect of normalizing this level of violence. If this normalization continues, then even greater harm will be inflicted.
This is all much larger than the individuals who have somehow managed to challenge this administration’s deportation activities. This is only where it begins. If the courts can’t get this shut down, this rot will be deliberately spread to cover anyone who isn’t sufficiently deferential to the authoritarians ensconced in the GOP.
I made the mistake of opening up X yesterday to look something up, and the very first post that appeared in my feed was a perfect, almost pedagogical example of how the game of “disinformation telephone” gets played. Let’s walk through it, because understanding how this works is important.
The game works like this: Someone takes a factual but largely unremarkable story, gives it a slight spin, and passes it along. The next person picks it up, adds another layer of spin, and passes that along. By the time it reaches someone with a massive audience—say, the richest man in the world—the original mundane fact has been transformed into a full-blown conspiracy theory. And that final, mangled version is what millions of people see and believe.
So let’s trace this particular game of telephone from start to finish.
Oregon’s Secretary of State, Tobias Read, recently announced that the state would be purging “inactive voters” from its rolls. This is routine voter roll maintenance that happens in every state. In Oregon’s case, “inactive voters” are generally voters whose mail-in ballots were returned as undeliverable—in other words, people who moved and didn’t update their registration.
This is important: these people did not vote. They could not vote. Oregon is a mail-in ballot state. If you’re marked “inactive,” you don’t get a ballot. No ballot, no vote. The system worked exactly as designed. The state identified people who had moved, marked them inactive so they couldn’t accidentally vote from an old address, and is now cleaning up the rolls by removing those inactive entries:
About 800,000 more voters’ registration status is inactive because their mail, including ballots or official notices, from county elections offices has been returned undelivered.
Active voters get ballots; inactive voters, Read emphasizes, do not.
All of this is actually a sign of how well the system works. If you mail-in ballot bounces back, Oregon makes you ineligible to vote until you re-register with a valid address. It’s evidence not of “fake voters,” but rather a system that makes sure only valid voters are active on the voter rolls.
The reason there are so many—reportedly around 800,000—is because Oregon stopped doing this routine maintenance about a decade ago and is only now getting back to it. So you have a decade or so of accumulated returned ballots marked as inactive. You can complain that they should have been on top of this earlier, but there’s nothing nefarious here. It’s bureaucratic backlog, not fraud.
And there are reasons to keep inactive voters (marked as inactive) on the rolls: mainly for if they ever get around to reregistering to vote so they can vote in future elections.
Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch, saw an opportunity. His organization had filed a lawsuit against Oregon over voter roll maintenance back in the fall of 2024, so he quickly claimed credit for the purge. But here’s the thing: that lawsuit is still ongoing and has nothing to do with this routine removal of inactive voters. Also, that lawsuit isn’t going very well as the judge dismissed most of the key claims, leaving just one left and only for one party (not Judicial Watch, who was found not to have standing).
But, nonetheless, Fitton, who loves attention, took credit for Read’s announcement:
His tweet:
HUGE: After @JudicialWatch lawsuit, Oregon Secretary of State announces he will now clean 800,000 names from voter rolls.
Notice his careful wording in his post. He doesn’t actually say his lawsuit caused the change. He just notes, temporally, that Oregon announced the cleanup after his lawsuit was filed. It’s a classic “correlation implies causation” move, designed to let his followers draw the conclusion he wants without him having to actually claim something false.
Sneaky, but still within the bounds of “technically not lying.” The story at this point is still basically accurate, just with some self-serving framing.
Then some rando X account called “Upstate Federalist” quote-tweeted Fitton’s post. And here’s where the telephone game really kicks in.
This account claimed that the purge of these inactive voters meant 20% of Oregon’s registered voters were “fake.”
Hold on. Oregon’s population is only 4.25M…. 20% of their registered voters were fake?
This is wrong on multiple levels.
First, these weren’t “fake” voters. They were real people who had previously registered to vote, then moved, and whose registration information became outdated. That’s not “fake.” That’s just… people moving.
Second, they weren’t voters at all in any meaningful sense. They were marked inactive precisely because the system identified that they had moved. Their unfilled out ballots had been returned to the state. They weren’t sent future ballots. They couldn’t vote. The system prevented them from voting.
Third, the “20%” framing is designed to make it sound like Oregon’s elections were riddled with fraud. But again: these people did not vote. The number of inactive registrations on a voter roll has nothing to do with the integrity of actual votes cast and it’s only that high because Oregon neglected to clean up the inactive list for a decade.
(For what it’s worth, some people tried to point this out to “Upstate Federalist” and he mocked them as “leftists.”)
And then Elon Musk, with his hundreds of millions of followers, saw the quote tweet of the quote tweet and amplified it, claiming “That’s a lot of fake voters…”
Except it’s not. It’s the opposite of “fake” voters. It’s Oregon’s safeguards working.
Did he click through to understand the original story? No.
Did he ask any of the countless experts who would take his call? No.
Did he ask experts on his own platform, X, to explain what was happening in Oregon? No.
Did he even ask his own AI, Grok, which actually would have told him the truth? No.
(Incredibly, despite on tons of posts it being common to see someone somewhere reply to any claim with “@grok is this true?” either those are being hidden under Elon’s posts, or none of his rabid followers care. It took many, many, many scrolls before I found one person not asking if it was true, but to explain it, and Grok, properly told him that it was about accounts that had their addresses changed, not fraud. At the time I looked at that Grok post, it had… 16 total views, including mine):
Either way, Elon just saw something that fit the narrative he’s been pushing about election fraud, and he amplified it to his massive audience as if it had to be true. The original mundane story about routine voter roll maintenance had now become, through the magic of disinfo telephone, “evidence” that Oregon had 800,000 fake voters, that they had to be forced to purge from the voter rolls.
Here’s the thing: I guarantee we’ll be hearing from MAGA folks for years that Oregon had 800,000 fake voters on the rolls. This “fact” will get cited in arguments about election integrity. It will show up in lawsuits. It will be used to justify restrictive voting laws. It will absolutely be a talking point on podcasts and Fox News.
And never, not once, will anyone confront Elon over spreading this bullshit. Nor will he admit he passed along blatant misinformation that was trivially easy to debunk if he’d spent thirty seconds checking, as I did.
This is how the information environment gets polluted. Not through some grand conspiracy, but through a series of small distortions, each building on the last, until a mundane truth becomes an inflammatory lie. And when the person at the end of the telephone chain has the largest megaphone on the planet and zero interest in accuracy, that lie reaches millions of people who will never see any correction.
The richest man in the world, with effectively unlimited resources to verify information, chose instead to just… not. Because the lie was more useful to him than the truth.
We’ll see where this goes from here, but for the moment, this order [PDF], issued by federal judge Karin Immergut still stands:
For the above reasons, this Court concludes that Plaintiffs have demonstrated that Defendants violated 10 U.S.C. § 12406 and the Tenth Amendment and satisfy the requirements for a permanent injunction. Therefore, this Court PERMANENTLY ENJOINS Defendants Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Department of Defense, Kristi Noem, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from […] federalizing and deploying members of the National Guard in Oregon
This has already happened once. And, for reasons that went mostly unexplained by two of three judges ruling in favor of the administration, a stay was issued that allowed it to continue exploring its martial law options in a city Trump has already admitted he might have been lied to about in terms of civil unrest.
The judges blocking the injunction basically said we have to trust the government, even when it’s obviously lying to us — something pointed out in the sharp dissent written by the third judge in the case (Susan Graber). Her dissent noted that most of the protest involved people wearing inflatable animal costumes (and, memorably, nothing at all). It also noted the absolute dearth of calls from law enforcement for backup when dealing with Portland’s (non-threatening) protesters. Her dissent also pointed out how none of this could possibly add up to the clear and present danger the administration has used to justify the deployment of National Guard troops.
Judge Immergut makes many of the same points: there’s no real threat, the protests have been almost exclusively peaceful, and the government has lied so often it should not be granted judicial deference. The 106-page order practically dares the Ninth Circuit to again ignore the facts on the ground when it is inevitably appealed by the federal government.
For example, here’s the judge taking the government down a few notches (and suggesting contempt findings are perhaps just as inevitable as the administration’s routine disregard for legal precedent) for pretending it didn’t have time to comply with the first order while it simultaneously scrambled troops from out-of-state in an attempt to skirt the expected restraining order:
Ordinarily, this Court would be inclined to accept Defendants’ explanation for their violation of the First TRO [temporary restraining order] given that “the first shift” at the Portland ICE facility commenced prior to this Court’s issuance of the First TRO. However, in light of the following facts, this Court is deeply troubled by Defendants’ continued deployment of Oregon National Guardsmen at the Portland ICE facility in violation of the First TRO. In the seven hours that Defendants took to “convey the message” of the First TRO “to people on the ground,” Defendants simultaneously “convey[ed] the message” to the U.S. Army Northern Command to send 200 of the federalized California National Guard personnel in Los Angeles to Portland. In other words, Defendants had time to order and coordinate the transport of federalized California National Guardsmen from Los Angeles to Portland but needed more time to communicate with the Oregon National Guardsmen at the Portland ICE facility.
The dissent to the Ninth Circuit opinion — combined with the administration’s attempt to circumvent the court order blocking deployment of Oregon National Guard troops by sending in a bunch of troops from other states — has resulted in a successful petition for an en banc hearing by Judge Susan Graber. That means the government is far less likely to see its bluster, outright lies, and end around plays entertained by a far more representative group of Ninth Circuit judges.
Furthermore, the alleged “escalation” cited by the Trump administration is simply a lie, as those who’ve been on the ground (Portland Police Bureau officials) have already (credibly, according to the court) testified:
Any riotous activity affecting the Portland ICE building peaked in June and had subsided for months before the President’s September 27, 2025 callout of the National Guard to Oregon. Regarding the nature of the crowd and its behavior, this Court finds the following. First, the size of the crowds decreased dramatically from June to September. Second, the number of officers briefly increased in response to the peak activity in mid-June, but it quickly subsided and remained at a low steady state until September 27, 2025. Third, the crowd was not directed by an organized group. Fourth, members of the crowd were rarely armed. Fifth and finally, the crowd’s shift in focus from the ICE building and the federal personnel in June to counter protester disputes in September demonstrates that much of the activity since mid-June had little to no effect on the ICE building and federal operations.
And these are things that were happening most of time, according to local law enforcement leaders:
From September 19 to September 28, immediately before the National Guard callout, there was “[n]othing much” going on outside the ICE building. Throughout the protests, PPB Commander Schoening testified that protesters wore “inflatable costumes.” Similarly, PPB Assistant Chief Dobson described “folks in costumes” at the ICE Facility, as well as “other almost festive-type events going on down there,” including “dance parties.”
Also: the government — the federal government, that is — can’t seem to stop lying:
To the extent that it lacks corroboration from other sources of evidence, the Court does not find reliable ICE/ERO Field Office Director Wamsley’s characterization of the damage to the Portland ICE Facility, which suggested damage was more extensive than that which is reflected in the rest of the record.
[…]
There is no credible evidence, however, that all the doors and windows of the ICE facility were broken. No other witness described damage to this degree, including Commander W.T., who was at the Portland ICE Facility every other week the entire summer. Additionally, Director Wamsley testified that she did not know whether there would be any photos of this damage or whether there was any documentation of the repair estimates.
It does it all the time, even when it has to know its lies will be exposed:
Furthermore, PPB reporting from June 14 show additional inconsistencies in the federal government’s version of events. PPB Captain Schoening’s activity log documented: “ICE calling saying they are barricaded in the building and fire lit. Difficult to get accurate information from them. What they say is happening is frequently contradicted by video feeds and subsequent activity. Air 1 shows no fire.” Also, shortly after they reported being barricaded, PPB observed an FPS employee exit a door and noted that FPS “ha[d] been using th[at] door regularly for employee ingress/egress. Th[at] door was reported earlier to be barricaded.”
You think that’s bad? Get ready for this one:
FPS [Federal Protective Services] reported a fire to PPB, but the “fire” turned out to be candles lit for a vigil set up by demonstrators.
In fact, most of the “violence” observed by federal officers was either unprovoked attacks by officers against protesters or instigated by Trump fans who rolled up on peaceful protests in hopes of picking a fight.
This Court finds that many reported disturbances at the ICE Facility after July 4 did not involve law enforcement at all. This Court also received evidence regarding disruptive behavior between individuals within the vicinity of the ICE building since June. Specifically, this Court received evidence regarding altercations between protesters and counter-protesters. Based on that evidence, this Court finds the following: Violence between protesters and counter-protesters occurred outside the Portland ICE building from June to September 27, 2025, but had, at most, a minimal effect on federal law enforcement’s protection of the building and federal personnel.
106 pages. Read it all. Lie after lie after lie from the administration and the small team of DOJ lawyers still willing to appease Trump, rather than seek justice:
As related to the time period immediately before the President’s callout of the National Guard, this Court heard testimony from FPS officers that PPB does not respond to their requests and that FPS stopped calling PPB altogether. The Court does not find this testimony to be credible.
[…]
The Court finds that there is no credible evidence that protest activities at the ICE facility created more than a minimal interference with Defendants’ ability to enforce Title 8 immigration laws in Portland. Director Wamsley testified herself that “altercations between protesters” do not “inhibit the execution of federal immigration law.”
There’s no “rebellion” happening here, the judge says, quoting the same law the administration is now abusing on a regular basis. There’s no concerted effort to seize control of federal property. There are no persistent attacks on federal or local law enforcement. There’s no organized group hoping to seize power. This is exactly the sort of thing this particular administration is incapable of handing: a persistent display of opposition that rarely, if ever, engages in the sort of behavior that might justify the deployment of military troops. The protesters are a fly the government can’t swat, whose mere existence is annoying enough the Commander-in-Chief and his immediate underlings have to constantly lie about to salvage their unconstitutional acts. And, despite all of their power, they’re losing this battle. Let’s see if the Ninth Circuit is willing to make this loss permanent.
President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege.
But a ProPublica review found a wide gap between the reality on the ground and the characterizations by the president and the Department of Homeland Security, which said ICE facilities like Portland’s were under “coordinated assault by violent groups.”
We reviewed federal prosecutions and local arrests, internal protest summaries by the Portland Police Bureau, sworn testimony from local and federal officials as well as more than 700 video clips containing hours of footage posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others. We focused on the three months before Sept. 5, when Trump made his first remarks about sending troops to Portland.
The evidence shows officers and protesters were indeed involved in incidents with varying levels of intensity on a little more than half the days. Protesters and counterprotesters exchanged blows at times. With some frequency, smoke and tear gas filled the air and shots from less-lethal police weapons could be heard.
There was no evidence of what could be termed a coordinated assault.
On most of the days or nights when officers and protesters clashed, local police and federal prosecutors ended up announcing no criminal arrests or charges — even though any number of crimes can be cited if someone commits violence against federal officers or property.
In addition, while protests continued across the summer, most of the alleged action by protesters that resulted in federal prosecution or local arrests ended two months before Trump said troops were needed in Portland.
While federal judges decide whether Portland protesters’ behavior constitutes a rebellion, ProPublica set out to examine the degree to which they were inciting unrest and the role that federal officers played. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
A federal judge has temporarily blocked Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland, saying that his administration had not proven that the protests can be fairly characterized as a rebellion, a risk of rebellion or an ongoing lack of order that prevents government officials from carrying out their duties.
Last week, the Justice Department argued in federal court that the last of these three categories — a breakdown of public order so severe that ICE officials can’t do their jobs — is what unfolded in Portland, justifying the president’s decision to federalize Oregon’s National Guard.
The judge is expected to issue a final ruling this week, and the case is expected to continue before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the courts go against Trump, he has another tool that could bring troops: the federal Insurrection Act, which experts say has a lower bar to being used and could involve active-duty military.
While the courts deliberate, ProPublica set out to examine the degree to which protesters were fomenting unrest and the role that federal officers themselves played.
Two policing experts who reviewed videos said federal officers at times used force inappropriately, echoing a Portland police official who testified in court that federal officers were instigating the chaos night after night.
Brian Higgins, former police chief in Bergen County, New Jersey, and a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said some of what federal officers did in the video clips was not typical.
“My question would be, ‘If you used force, why did you not follow through with an arrest?’” Higgins said.
For instance, on Sept. 1, masked officers in combat gear responded to protesters who placed a prop guillotine on the sidewalk in front of the ICE building. The officers chased away the protesters with tear gas, smoke and other less-lethal weapons, grabbed the guillotine and hauled it inside. No criminal charges were announced.
“If there was nothing else to justify the officers coming out and doing this, you’ve got to scratch your head,” Higgins said.
Justice Department attorneys said in a court filing that the presence of the mock guillotine required federal officers “to exert physical force to keep order.” Videos show a protester blowing bubbles in the moment before federal police advanced on the crowd.
The scene of protesters dispersing and officers giving chase became the centerpiece of a Fox News broadcast on Sept. 4, the night before Trump said Portland’s protests had drawn his attention.
Our review showed that the force used against demonstrators had clearer provocation in initial protests. From the start of June to July 4, Portland police arrested 28 people, while federal prosecutors said they charged 22 with criminal offenses including arson and assault.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told ProPublica in a statement that the arson and assault charges show “this isn’t a peaceful protest that’s under control, like many on the Left have claimed, it’s radical violence.”
“President Trump is taking lawful action to protect federal law enforcement officers and address the out-of-control violence that local residents have complained about and Democrat leaders have failed to stop,” Jackson said.
But from July 5 through Sept. 4, the violence appeared to slow significantly. Portland police announced no arrests of protesters during this time, and federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against just three.
Only one was accused of a violent offense: felony assault for allegedly spitting in an officer’s face after an arrest for flying a drone around the building. The person pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drone offense; the assault charge did not move forward. Another person’s misdemeanor charge, alleging failure to obey an officer, was also dropped. The case against the third person, another misdemeanor allegation of failing to obey, is proceeding.
In legal filings supporting the use of troops, federal officials described a handful of additional violent incidents from July 5 through Sept. 4. They said that protesters hit an officer with a stick on July 20, threw screws on the ICE facility’s driveway on July 24, pounded fists on vehicles on Aug. 9 and 11, threw rocks and a firework over the building’s fence on Aug. 16, injured two officers in an attack on Aug. 25 and provided directions online to an officer’s home on Aug. 28. No criminal charges were announced in these cases.
Source: Federal data represents criminal charges from news releases from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Portland police data shows arrests announced by the Portland Police Bureau. Note: Incidents shown by week.
During the roughly two months leading up to Trump’s Sept. 5 remarks, videos from more than 20 days or nights show federal officers firing on, grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling or using other munitions on protesters. They deployed hissing cans of tear gas, sometimes sending clouds of the chemical irritant floating toward a nearby low-income apartment building.
No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of the dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.
In most cases, videos from these events show masked federal officers using aggressive tactics that lack a clear reason.
On Aug. 13, an officer tackled a protester from behind. Rhein Amacher via Matthew Adams on X. Redaction in original video.
One federal officer runs and tackles an unsuspecting protester from behind on Aug. 13, causing what the man said in a legal filing was a head injury and concussion. The person was not charged with any crime.
In a clip from Sept. 6, the day after Trump’s remarks about Portland, a federal officer walking back into the ICE building turns, walks out of his way toward a protester and pushes the man so hard he falls to the ground and rolls over backward. The officer then continues inside the building.
On Sept. 6, an officer walked out of his way to push a protester so hard the person fell to the ground and rolled over. Rhein Amacher via X
Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies policing, reviewed videos from the protests at ProPublica’s request and said some of the federal officers’ uses of force looked “gratuitous.”
“Going out of your way to shove someone while you’re on the way back from arresting someone serves no purpose other than intimidation,” he said, “and intimidation is not a lawful government objective.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to emails requesting comment on its officers’ tactics.
Allegations of Protester Violence Subsided Over Time
There’s no doubt that the summertime protests were often confrontational, emotional and loud. Protesters, some dressed in black, often wore gas masks and shouted profanities at federal personnel. In June, some were also violent.
Five people faced arson charges after separate events on June 11 and 12 in which prosecutors said fires were set. One was in a trash can against the ICE building, while in another instance prosecutors said a protester used a flare to set fire to wood stacked against the front gate.
Videos from June 14 show a protester striking an officer in the head with a wooden stake that holds a protest sign. Another clip shows protesters using a stop sign as a battering ram on the front door of the ICE building.
On June 14, protesters rammed a stop sign into the ICE building’s front door. Throughout the month, protesters outside the facility were at times violent. Velly Ray via YouTube
Portland police declared a riot and made two arrests that day; federal prosecutors also said they charged three people with assault.
On June 24, a video shows someone waving a large knife at officers, being tased while running away and falling face first onto the sidewalk. Federal prosecutors filed charges against three people from that night’s protest: the person accused of wielding the knife, another accused of shining a laser pointer in an officer’s eye and one accused of hurling a gas canister back at officers, hitting one.
In addition, a Homeland Security news release from July 11 shows photos — without providing dates — of what the agency said were flyers posted in federal officers’ neighborhoods showing their names, images and addresses. The release said such information was also posted online.
Federal authorities have said protests led them to close the ICE building and work out of temporary office space from June 13 until July 7, after which the facility reopened. An analysis by Oregon Public Broadcasting found that immigration bookings continued, albeit at a slightly slower pace than average for Trump’s second term.
But violence initiated by protesters mostly subsided after July 4, based on charges or arrests announced by authorities and video reviewed by ProPublica.
The summer’s last criminal allegation of protester-on-officer violence — at least for anything other than spitting — came from a large Independence Day protest that led to federal criminal charges being filed against four people. They were individually accused of kicking an officer, throwing an incendiary device at officers, graffitiing the building and destroying fiber optic cables at the facility.
Evidence of protester violence for the rest of the summer is limited beyond the two misdemeanors and one felony charge announced by prosecutors.
In addition to the instances asserted by the government in court filings but not charged criminally, the FBI recently issued statistics that suggest dozens of people may have received citations. In the federal system, these are similar to traffic tickets and are generally issued for minor offenses. But when asked for details by ProPublica, the agency would not specify how many were issued or during what time frame.
Meanwhile, the use of force by federal officers continued.
Violence Without Violent Provocation
In most of the cases where videos captured police using crowd control tactics or other elements of force on protesters, there were neither announcements of criminal charges that followed nor allegations of protester violence made in the administration’s case for sending troops.
An official with the Federal Protective Service, which polices federal buildings, testified in court last week that federal officers use a loudspeaker to warn large groups to move. If they don’t, he said, officers physically move them.
Stoughton, the University of South Carolina law professor, said officers should use tear gas and other heavy chemical munitions sparingly when dispersing a crowd.
He added that many city police departments would be very hesitant to use these munitions “if it’s going to have this completely predictable environmental contamination on people who are utterly uninvolved with the protest.” In Portland, there’s an apartment building across the street from the ICE facility.
In addition, Stoughton said, police managing crowds ordinarily would first take time to engage people verbally, face to face, to try to get them to step aside.
“You typically don’t just want to jump right to higher levels of force,” Stoughton said, “because the point is to limit the potential for escalation.”
On two occasions shown on video, aggressive moves by officers appeared to be intended at least in part to allow them to seize protest symbols: a burned American flag that officers bagged and took indoors and the Sept. 1 display of a mock guillotine, an implement that 18th-century French revolutionaries used to decapitate royalty.
Video from the event captures someone playing a song by the Oakland hip-hop group The Coup with the chorus, “We got the guillotine, you better run.” An American flag can be seen burning at the guillotine’s base.
Stoughton said municipal police departments like those in Portland know they have to balance protesters’ First Amendment rights with public safety. “There is no more protected First Amendment interest than the ability to protest government action, to criticize the government,” he said.
A guillotine “can be purely symbolic,” he said. “That can be purely expressive.”
The Federal Protective Service incident commander that night, Will Turner, said in court that agents did not know the guillotine was a prop and thought it was real at the time. “We took it as an actual threat,” he said.
Objects like the guillotine or statements from protesters telling ICE agents to kill themselves appear to be protected speech, said Timothy Zick, a law professor at William & Mary Law School who studies public protest and the First Amendment, because they do not pose a true threat to officers.
It is “likely the sort of political hyperbole and heated rhetoric the Supreme Court has treated as protected speech,” Zick said. “The statements are likely to be considered part of a political protest.”
Notably, officers were sometimes able to clear crowds without aggressive tactics.
Footage on those occasions shows vehicles leaving the ICE compound without incident. Officers move out and onto the sidewalk, and protesters stay out of the way of the vehicles.
In one of those nonevents, as officers return to the ICE compound and the gates start to close, the thin crowd chants: “DHS — doesn’t have sex.”
A federal officer brings his hand to his mouth on the video.
He appears to blow a kiss.
What Happens Next
Trump’s order remains tied up in the courts.
Federal District Judge Karin Immergut blocked the deployment once, then again on Sunday, saying the Trump administration had “commandeered” the National Guard to quell protests that do not constitute a rebellion and had eased after a “high watermark of violence and unlawful activity” in June.
“The trial testimony produced no credible evidence of any significant damage to the ICE facility in the months before the President’s callout and no credible evidence that ICE was unable to execute immigration laws,” the judge wrote. “Protesters frequently blocked the driveway of the ICE building, but the evidence also showed that federal law enforcement officers were able to clear the driveway.”
Immergut said the deployment violated the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not given to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to states. The judge said Trump “had no lawful basis to federalize these Oregon National Guardsmen.”
Earlier in the appeals process, two appellate judges who upheld Trump’s decision said protester violence from earlier in June was a relevant concern that must be considered in the case.
A panel of judges from the 9th Circuit is expected to hear arguments from both sides next.
Two Trump-appointed federal judges just decided that facts don’t matter when the President wants to send the military into American cities.
Donald Trump declared Portland a “war-ravaged” city requiring military intervention based on a few anti-ICE protests and imagery from five years ago on Fox News that he apparently thought was happening now. The actual threat? Police reports from the days before his deployment order show “approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE. Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.” One officer noted the protesters had “low energy” and “minimal activity.”
So Trump ordered military deployment against people in lawn chairs based on old Fox News footage. A Trump-appointed district court judge quickly issued an injunction, calling out the absolute insanity of military deployment based on complete fiction. She noted that Trump’s legal justification—that he was “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”—was “simply untethered to the facts.”
But two judges on the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court just dissolved that injunction, effectively ruling that the President gets to define his own reality when deploying troops against American citizens. And a third judge, Susan Graber, is calling out her colleagues in scathing terms for abandoning core constitutional principles.
While the district court cited this highly deferential standard, Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *9, it erred by failing to apply it. Instead, the district court substituted its own assessment of the facts for the President’s assessment of the facts. This is the opposite of the significantly deferential standard of review that applies to the President’s decision to invoke § 12406(3) and federalize members of the National Guard.
The majority goes through a longer list of basically every time the small group of protesters got too loud or annoying for ICE, without bothering to explore if any of those protests violated the law, or actually got in the way of the execution of the law. It also dinged the (again, Trump-appointed) district court judge for actually paying attention to what Donald Trump was lying about on social media in making her determination:
Second, the district court erred by placing too much weight on statements the President made on social media. Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *11. The district court interpreted President Trump characterizing Portland as “War ravaged,” as the equivalent of the President “ignoring the facts on the ground.” Id. As such, the district court relied on these statements to disregard other facts that do “reflect[] a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment.”
The majority, made up of two Trump-appointed Ninth Circuit judges: Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade, insist that Trump’s lies should simply outweigh what anyone can plainly see with their own two eyes. It’s somewhat ridiculous.
And the third judge on the panel, Susan Graber, calls out the bullshit of her colleagues, in pretty strong language, while suggesting the rest of her colleagues on the Ninth Circuit should do an en banc review as soon as possible:
In the weeks preceding the President’s September 27 social media post proclaiming that Portland was “War ravaged” and authorizing Secretary Hegseth to deploy federalized Oregon National Guard members, demonstrations in Portland were non-disruptive and small. Notwithstanding the turbulent events that had occurred several months earlier, the record contains no evidence whatsoever that, on September 27, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) was unable either to protect its Portland facility or to execute the immigration laws it is charged with enforcing. But, in the statute invoked here, Congress has authorized the President to call up the National Guard only to repel a foreign invasion, quell a rebellion, or overcome an inability to execute the laws. Consequently, no legal or factual justification supported the order to federalize and deploy the Oregon National Guard.Given Portland protesters’ well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing their disagreement with the methods employed by ICE, observers may be tempted to view the majority’s ruling, which accepts the government’s characterization of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd. But today’s decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights to assemble and to object to the government’s policies and actions.
She’s exactly right. The ruling is an all-out attack on multiple things that have been considered settled US legal issues. The idea that the President gets to call out the National Guard to shut down some political protests is absolutely insane. The district court called it out, as does Judge Graber.
As she notes, it’s both obvious and important that there is no fucking “war zone” in Portland:
The district court’s factual findings, which the government does not challenge on appeal, and which are not clearly erroneous in any event, fully resolve this issue. In the two weeks leading up to the President’s September 27 social media post, there had not been a single incident of protesters’ disrupting the execution of the laws. Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *10. I repeat: not a single incident for two weeks. Here are summaries from police reports for the five days preceding the President’s social media post.
September 22: Approx. 7-10 people. No calls.
September 23: Few people. No activity.
September 24: Approx. 10 people. No calls.
September 25: Approx. 20 people. No calls.
September 26: Approx. 15 people. Energy low, minimal activity. No incidents.
A police officer’s report from September 26 stated: “Throughout the day we observed approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE. Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.”
It is hard to understand how a tiny protest causing no disruptions could possibly satisfy the standard that the President is unable to execute the laws. The facts at issue in Newsom—significant, violent protests by hundreds of people in several locations the day before and the day of the President’s invocation of the statute—could not be further from the facts here—small gatherings in one location with “no activity” or “minimal activity,” low energy, and no calls for assistance for weeks.
While the majority called out random incidents of one or two protestors getting rowdy, Judge Graber says (1) those happened months ago and (2) none of them appeared to get in the way of ICE continuing to do its job. As she notes:
The legal basis for this argument is unclear.The trigger for federalizing the National Guard is an inability to execute the laws, not staffing difficulties that fall short of demonstrably resulting in an inability to execute the laws. The government has not explained how its purported staffing troubles were causing an inability to execute the laws on September 27. As explained above, the protests themselves—small, uneventful, low-energy—were not preventing execution of the laws at that time.The most that can be said is that, because FPS officers were stretched thin, if protests were to flare up in the future and if staffing woes were to lead to insufficient staffing, then an inability to execute the laws might arise at some hypothetical future time. But, as also explained above, subsection three of the statute requires a present-day inability to execute the laws; fear of a future inability is not enough. Nor could staffing difficulties alone support an inability to execute the laws; otherwise, the President could direct scores of FPS officers to a location with minimal security issues and then claim authority to call up the National Guard because those officers are needed elsewhere. In assessing whether the President had a colorable basis for concluding that the statutory requirements were met, we must consider the actual situation being addressed by the FPS officers.
She also dings her colleagues in the majority for being so desperate to help out Donald Trump that they made up an argument the DOJ never actually made:
The majority’s order spells out an argument that the government does not make, presumably because the government recognizes the lack of factual support. The argument in the majority’s order proceeds as follows. FPS has 776 officers, but only 497 officers are trained to protect federal buildings. Robert Cantu, the regional FPS director, asserted that, from June through September, “115 FPS officers have had to deploy to Portland.” The majority’s order first assumes that all 115 officers—nearly a quarter of the agency’s officers with relevant training— were stationed in Portland in late September. The majority’s order next reasons that such a diversion supports an inference that Portland is a significant source of staffing woes.
But that argument impermissibly adds facts to Director Cantu’s vague, carefully worded assertion. Crediting his assertion, we know that a total of 115 officers from elsewhere were deployed in Portland during the preceding four months. The record contains no information about how many officers were in Portland at any given time. For all we know, FPS sent a different 8 officers to Portland every week for 14 or 15 weeks, meaning that Portland’s drain on FPS’s staff from elsewhere on any particular day was 8 people, not 115. Indeed, the only description in the record of a “[s]urge” in officers was the deployment of 8 officers. The fact that there were 26 FPS officers on duty on September 6, as the majority’s order emphasizes, Order at 27 n.13, says nothing about whether any or all of those individuals were from somewhere other than Portland. The record does not reveal the number of local FPS officers
Even if we assume that FPS deployed all 115 officers in June, it strains credulity to assume that all 115 of them remained in Portland for four months. What were they doing during the month of August, for example, when there was only a single incident at the ICE facility during the entire month? The record does not tell us. Indeed, the record does not shine light on the most pertinent information: in the days leading up to September 27, how many FPS officers from elsewhere were in Portland? The only hint in the record is a reference to some officers from elsewhere leaving Portland and returning to their home stations.
She also mocks the idea that the National Guard deployment can be justified in response to “a rebellion”—an argument the majority decision didn’t even grapple with, saying they didn’t need to, given Trump can win with or without rebellion by just pointing (without evidence) to his supposed inability to execute the laws. But the lying about the rebellion kinda matters:
As an initial matter, the record contains no evidence that the sporadic violent events occurring over a handful of days during four months of otherwise peaceful protests were in any way organized. For example, there is no evidence of leadership, organizational structure, premeditation, or an overarching plan.
Even putting aside that deficiency, nothing in the record suggests that, on September 27, there was a rebellion or a danger of one. The same reasons given in Part I-A-1, above, apply here. In the two weeks leading up to September 27, there was not a single incident of “force and arms” against ICE’s personnel or facility. And going back more than two months, the record contains only “evidence of sporadic violence against federal officers and property damage to a federal building.”
Even considering all four months, the events as a whole did not rise to the level of an “unusual and extreme exigenc[y]” constituting a “rebellion.” Newsom, 141 F.4th at 1051. On almost every day during the four months preceding September 27, the record discloses ordinary political protests in Portland. Ordinary protests—quintessential First Amendment activity—obviously do not constitute a rebellion. See Illinois, 2025 WL 2937065, at *6 (“Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable daylight between protected speech and rebellion.”)
And while the majority tried to suggest that small rebellions like the Whiskey Rebellion, Shay’s Rebellion, or Fries’s Rebellion mean it’s fine to call the protests a rebellion, Judge Graber calls bullshit:
Those rebellions shared several salient characteristics, including a large number of participants relative to the population and to available law enforcement, a wide geographic scope, evident organization and leadership, widespread use of arms, intense ferocity, and the creation of extreme difficulty restoring control by means of ordinary law enforcement.
What occurred in Portland differed in every dimension. As already noted, there is no evidence of organization or leadership, widespread use of arms, ferocity, or difficulty exerting control by ordinary means. In addition, the population of the Portland metropolitan area exceeds two and a half million, spread across nearly 6,700 square miles. U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2024; U.S. Census Bureau, State and Metropolitan Area Data Book: 2010, at 110. At their height, the protests in Portland have involved 200 people, or about 0.008% of the population. And they have taken place exclusively around a single city block, or approximately 0.00002% of the Portland metro area. The few people who did commit sporadic acts of violence have been arrested, processed, and charged by regular law enforcement forces.
Finally, she points out that the government hasn’t shown what injury it will incur if its invasion is not stayed while the courts consider further evidence, while there is pretty fucking clear evidence that the people of Portland will be harmed by an invasion of the US military.
Plaintiff City of Portland has a strong interest in preserving the peace. As the district court found, the deployment of troops in Portland is likely (if not certain) to aggravate the situation at the ICE building. Id. Finally, nearby businesses have economic interests that are likely to be harmed by the deployment of troops.
Judge Graber, who is not someone prone to hyperbole, closes by calling out how fucking anti-American all of this is:
The Founders recognized the inherent dangers of allowing the federal executive to wrest command of the State militia from the States. Congress authorized the President to deploy the National Guard only in true emergencies— to repel an invasion, to suppress a rebellion, or to overcome an inability to execute the laws. 10 U.S.C. § 12406. Congress did not authorize deployment in merely inconvenient circumstances, and Congress unquestionably did not authorize deployment for political purposes. Article III commands that we enforce those limits. The majority’s order abdicates our judicial responsibility, permitting the President to invoke emergency authority in a situation far divorced from an enumerated emergency.
And she rightly calls on “partisans” to imagine how they would feel if a future President rolled out the National Guard over other issues. She knows, we know, and they all know, that the MAGA crowd would totally freak the fuck out if a Democratic President sought to federalize the National Guard and invade American cities and towns in any other circumstance.
Today’s President seeks to bring troops into one set of States to enforce one set of laws; a future President may seek to bring troops into a different set of States to enforce a different set of laws. Partisans who cheer this President’s use of troops to protect personnel who are enforcing federal immigration laws would do well to consider whether they would be equally pleased if a future President uses troops to protect personnel who are enforcing laws that they vehemently dislike. Cf. Greer v. Spock, 424 U.S. 828, 839 (1976) (noting “the American constitutional tradition of a politically neutral military establishment under civilian control”).
We don’t even have to speculate. For years, the MAGA world has spread a nonsense, debunked conspiracy theory about how a standard military training exercise was actually a plan to invade Texas and take away guns. Judge Graber is just pointing out that now that this is actually happening, it’s pretty fucking crazy that MAGA supports it.
Bunch of hypocrites.
Judge Graber calls on her colleagues to gather to overturn the majority’s ruling and issues a stark plea to those dismayed by this ridiculous result:
We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth. By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda. I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur. Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.
And it appears that at least one of her colleagues has already accepted the challenge. An unnamed judge on the Ninth Circuit has already requested a vote for an en banc rehearing before Portland or Oregon even asked for one. The court has already asked the parties to file briefs on this by tomorrow at midnight. (As a reminder, because the Ninth Circuit is ridiculously large and no one has the political will to break it up into multiple circuits, unlike other circuits where “en banc” means all the judges, in the Ninth it’s a random set of 10 judges, so it can be a bit of a crap shoot).
Either way, this is yet another fast-moving case in which the Trump administration and its DOJ are demanding crazy things, and (mostly Trump-appointed) judges are pretending it’s normal. Hopefully, the court agrees to do a quick en banc hearing and shuts this nonsense down.
It seems like years ago, but the Trump administration got itself sued earlier this very year by the state of California for commandeering California’s National Guard to shut down anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. Trump justified this by declaring the city to be under siege, even though (1) most violence was being committed by law enforcement, (2) most of the protest activity was limited to a few blocks in the downtown LA area, and (3) even Los Angeles law enforcement officials stated no help was needed because whatever imagined problem there was, they already had under control.
The law prevents the Executive Branch from commandeering the National Guard. It’s federalism, which is a concept the Trump administration likes when it’s triggering a bunch of state-level anti-abortion laws following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but doesn’t when it allows states to reject help they never asked for — especially when that “help” looks more like a martial law soft launch.
The law prevents the federal government from doing this for obvious reasons — reasons made much more obvious when Trump insisted on doing it anyway, for exactly the reasons legislators built in a safety valve that should prevent presidents from using the National Guard as a vehicle for revenge.
Well, Trump wants to do the same thing in Portland, Oregon. Given the chain of events, it appears Trump was convinced by Fox News programming (yeah, in the other sense of the word) that Portland — and especially the ICE depot — was under constant, flaming, violent attack by protesters. That’s because the Fox broadcasts decided (deliberately) to include footage of protests and riots in that city in response to a heinous murder committed by Minnesota police officer, Derek Chauvin.
Trump briefly reconsidered this move, suspecting people might be using his obvious stupidity and comprehensive malleability against him to “invade” Portland. This moment of clarity was brief, swiftly replaced by Trump’s overriding desire to inflict pain on any place that’s not loaded up with loyalists.
So, the administration (after Trump and Hegseth stroked each other off by calling military officials “fat” and stating that going to war with their fellow citizens was part of the master plan) said it was going to commandeer Oregon’s National Guard to shut down anti-ICE protests that have mostly been no more violent than the hip-thrusting of an inflatable frog, which somehow managed to force heavily armed federal officers to retreat.
Well, Trump and his DOJ already knew what to expect, given California’s response to the administration’s illegal use of National Guard troops. Oregon sued immediately, raising the same arguments, and raising the specter of an immediate injunction blocking the administration from violating the law yet again.
Things got truly stupid and scary during the government’s arguments in the emergency hearing prior to a federal judge’s second successive temporary restraining order [PDF].
The government wanted two things. First, it wanted no restraining order at all. Second, it wanted the almost-inevitable restraining order stayed while it appealed its case.
While the second thing is relatively normal, the tactics the government used to secure its preferred option would be hilarious if both versions of the Trump administration hadn’t made it clear it exists only to beat this country into submission while steamrolling every check or balance that stands in its way.
Joshua Friedman listened to the emergency hearing. His report — contained in a Bluesky thread you’ll definitely want to read all the way through — shows the government doing the sorts of things you wouldn’t normally expect a democratic republic to do.
HAPPENING NOW: Judge Karin Immergut hears emergency arguments as California and Oregon seek to block President Trump's deployment of federalized California National Guard troops to Portland. 🧵
And by that I mean acting like the worst, most disingenuous commenters in any heated comment thread.
I am not even kidding. Since the government knew it wasn’t allowed to take control of Oregon’s National Guard (something made clear by the restraining order it was hit with the day before), it decided to do this instead:
Judge: How could bringing in [National Guard] from CA not be in direct contravention of [temporary restraining order] I issued yesterday?
DOJ: TRO related only to Oregon NG
Judge: You are an officer of the court. Aren’t defendants clearly circumventing my order?
Yeah, that’s what this administration thinks it can use as an end-around: it’s going to send California National Guard members to Oregon because it believes the court can’t stop it from moving the goalposts. In its clouded mind, a restraining order forbidding the federalization of Oregon National Guard troops can easily be avoided by sending in troops from another state… which will apparently also free it of any restraints currently in place in California.
But that’s not all! Perhaps sensing reshuffling California National Guard troops might be a legal headache, especially while still engaged in a lawsuit filed by the state of California, the Trump administration prepared a back-up plan.
DOJ: If the court enters a second TRO, we move for a stay pending appeal. We respectfully request that the court note this in any order it issues.
Judge: Response, Mr. Kennedy?
Oregon: I want to note new info about impending transfer of [Texas National Guard] members. We received at 6:36 p.m., so apologies.
Pure psychopathy. It’s one thing to be so completely stupid that you think this might work. It’s another thing to represent the federal government and the Trump administration and engage in actions that strongly suggest you think federal court judges are even stupider than you are.
Judge: Based on the conduct of the defendants and now seeing TX National Guard called up, I am going to grant alternative TRO requested. Let me ask plaintiffs—I’d prefer not to modify original TRO, but I am troubled to hear of CA and TX NG being sent to OR, in apparent violation of my order.
[…]
Judge: That’s what I’ll do. Prohibit federalization or deployment of any NG troops into Oregon. For all reasons in prior opinion. Deployment of federalized military is ultra vires and contrary to law, violating Title 10, section 12406. I also find it’s likely that defendants violate 10th Amendment.
The government will have to take its Calvinball elsewhere. Unfortunately, it’s still got home field advantage at the Supreme Court. But this is exactly the sort of dipshit fuckery that defines Trump and his administration. The problem is that doing it often enough occasionally allows it to rack up unearned wins. When the wins stop rolling in, then we’ll see what this administration is willing to do to impose its will on this country. Chances are, it’s going to be a whole lot more of what we’ve seen already, only without the friction we’ve long assumed would be more than enough to prevent this country from sliding downhill into outright authoritarianism.
