There are several layers of bullshit in operation here, so we’ll walk through it all. But keep in mind the only reason this is all being exposed is because Trump administration officials feel they’re more obligated to “own the libs” than actually do their damn jobs.
Last October, “conservative influencer” Nick Sortor was arrested by Portland (Oregon) police after an altercation with anti-ICE protesters. Sortor received preferential treatment from the Trump administration. He was allowed to stand on the roof of the ICE detention center and film protesters during then-DHS head Kristi Noem’s visit to the site.
The DOJ decided to intervene on Sortor’s behalf. It went after the Portland Police Bureau (PPB), demanding it turn over thousands of documents it claimed were evidence of the PPB’s desire to punish certain people for certain kinds of speech.
To do this, it cited a DOJ settlement reached with the PPB back in 2013 — one that said nothing about any PPB attempts to shut down speech the PPB didn’t like. The paragraph cited in its demand for documents said this:
Too frequently, persons who have or are perceived to have mental illness and are in crisis are subjected to unnecessary or excessive force by police officers. The Portland Police Bureau lacks adequate policies to guide officers in these circumstances, or training, supervision and accountability measures necessary to ensure that officers comply with the constitutional rights of people in mental health crisis.
That’s the first layer of bullshit. The DOJ isn’t going after the PPB because it has any genuine concerns about its treatment of people with mental health issues. It’s going after the PPB because it arrested one of theirs and is located in a “liberal” city this administration desires to punish however it can, whenever it can.
The next layer of bullshit is the DOJ pretending any previous settlement over excessive force by local law enforcement is worthy of recognizing. Since Trump’s return to office, the DOJ Civil Rights Division solely exists to further the goals of the administration’s white Christian nationalists. It has already made moves to dissolve or suspend court-ordered consent decrees affecting local law enforcement agencies successfully sued/investigated for pattern-and-practice rights violations because it feels law enforcement shouldn’t have to answer to anyone.
So, it’s entirely hypocritical for this administration to cite a consent decree it would have sought to have removed if it affected a Red State agency in hopes of punishing Portland and its police department for anti-ICE protests.
The government claimed the settlement entitled it to whatever documents it wanted from the PPB. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon decided to shit the bed by being exactly the sort of person you’d expect her to be, given her subservience to Donald Trump. From the ruling [PDF] handed down by federal judge Michael Simon rejecting the government’s bad faith effort to leverage a PPB civil rights settlement for its own vindictive purposes (h/t Gabriel Malor):
On October 3, 2025, the same day that Judge Immergut was holding the hearing on the motion for temporary restraining order requested by the State of Oregon and the City, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, Ms. Harmeet Dhillon, publicly stated that DOJ would conduct a “full investigation” of policing of the protests at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) facility in Portland, Oregon.
She announced this by reposting a social media post from social media personality Nick Sortor, who wrote: “BREAKING: Attorney General Pam Bondi has ORDERED a full investigation, led by Asst. AG Harmeet Dhillon, of the Portland Police Bureau, following my wrongful arrest last night, Bondi confirmed to me. FAFO, @PortlandPolice….” Assistant Attorney General Dhillon also attached to her repost her own comment, which read: “Portland: It’s FO time. Buckle up.” Id. (emphasis added).
This gloating has turned out to be premature. The court says the administration has presented no evidence the PPB is failing to follow the terms of the 2013 settlement. Furthermore, that settlement was tied to the abuse of people with mental health illnesses. There were no allegations in the settlement that the PPB regularly punished people for engaging in protected speech.
This is the first of three indications the government has “unclean hands.” This is a legal term of art that basically means the government’s intentions are impure and enough impurity is on the public record to support this finding. Part of that is Dhillon’s tweet above, which makes it clear the targeting of the PPB was directly related to the arrest of Nick Sortor, rather than anything the administration claimed in its legal filings.
As the court notes here, the government is cheating when it uses a completely unrelated enforcement effort in order to induce compliance.
[T]he United States asserts that it is purporting to investigate whether the Portland Police Bureau has engaged in political viewpoint discrimination in violation of the Agreement in this case. This case, however, has never been about viewpoint discrimination, or even any issues arising under the First Amendment.
Second, there’s the timing. This action was pursued by the administration only after it was sued by the city and state over its commandeering of Oregon’s National Guard units.
Finally, there’s Dhillon’s tweet, which can’t even be charitably be referred to as “ill-advised.”
As noted, Assistant Attorney General Dhillon preceded her reposting of a Nick Sortor comment with Dhillon’s own comment: “Portland: It’s FO time. Buckle up.” (emphasis added). That is neither language nor tone of a good faith investigation by the United States Department of Justice. Instead, it exhibits all the hallmarks of a threat and attempted intimidation.
And that’s not even the totality of the intimidation tactics engaged in by AAG Dhillon. A footnote points out Dhillon also decided to tweet out a threat targeting the judge that had originally blocked the government from obtaining these documents from the PPB.
In addition, on the same day that Judge Immergut issued her temporary restraining order, relying in part on the testimony of two high-ranking officials from the Portland Police Bureau, Assistant Attorney General Dhillon reposted a comment from another social media personality that read, in part, “Judge Immergut must be impeached.” (emphasis added). This too is threatening conduct by Assistant Attorney General Dhillon.
This is not how a federal agency — especially the one expected to fight for justice, rather than just act like extensions of Trump’s id — is supposed to behave. But Trump himself expressly encourages this behavior and anyone with the least bit of personal/professional restraint has likely been fired and replaced by brainstem operators like AAG Dhillon.
What this means is that the courts no longer trust the DOJ, which makes it all the more difficult for it to secure the wins Trump demands from his underlings. This is a blueprint for perpetual failure. Unfortunately, no one in the administration is willing to learn anything from these experiences because doing so just means educating yourself out of a job.
When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television.
He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” he said, a comment that became an internet meme as some Portland residents juxtaposed it with tranquil images of the city.
Trump didn’t say which channel he watched; he said at one point he saw something “today” and at another “last night.”
The evening before, on Sept. 4, Fox News aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment spotlighting protests outside a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland. Similar footage aired the morning of Trump’s remarks. The president went on to announce Sept. 27 on Truth Social that he would send troops, saying that he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
He later said he’d told Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, that “unless they’re playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down.”
ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed more than 700 video clips posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others in the three months preceding the Sept. 4 broadcast.
The review found that the news network repeatedly provided a misleading picture of what was happening in Portland.
As The Guardian and The Oregonian/OregonLive have reported, Fox News on Sept. 4 used footage from the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd and said it was from 2025. We found two clear cases from that night as well as one that seemed to match a scene filmed at a key site of the 2020 protests. Fox also mislabeled two other dates of actions shown on screen, and one broadcast implied that a protest from elsewhere was happening in Portland.
Fox News chyrons about Portland the week of Trump’s remarks carried phrases like “violent demonstrators,” “protesters riot,” “anti-I.C.E. Portland rioters” and “war-like protests.” One host said protesters were attacking federal officers.
This portrayal of protesters as routinely instigating violence or rioting was also misleading.
As ProPublica reported last week, most clashes between protesters and police before the Fox News segment did not result in any criminal charges or arrests alleging protesters committed violence. What’s more, based on news releases from federal and local authorities, charges and arrests for assault, arson or destruction of property were almost entirely confined to a period that ended the night of July 4.
Videos after that date captured numerous images of federal officers forcefully moving in on protesters without corresponding criminal charges alleging protester violence.
A spokesperson for Fox News did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer requests to comment on its officers’ tactics.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said of action on the ground in Portland: “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.”
Here’s how Fox News’ coverage of the Portland story was misleading.
Fox News Said It Was 2025. It Wasn’t.
Protests in 2020 in the wake of Floyd’s murder by a police officer attracted large, sometimes violent crowds to Portland — along with a federal law enforcement response authorized by Trump.
The protests outside the ICE facility have typically been far smaller. Still, Fox spliced footage from 2020 into its coverage this year and claimed it was from 2025.
The Fox News correspondent in the segment that aired the night Trump was watching TV said: “On this night in late June, police used tear gas.”
A Sept. 4 Fox News segment aired footage from 2020. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
The accompanying image appears to be not from the ICE building but from the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, more than a mile away. A nearly identical scene was shown in a Fox News video five years earlier. Footage that aired Sept. 4, shot at a slightly different angle, blurs out spots where graffiti was visible on the building in Fox’s July 2020 broadcast.
Almost immediately after showing the courthouse scene, the segment cuts to another image as the correspondent says, “federal police used tear gas and flashbangs.”
On screen at that moment is a U.S. Navy veteran who was pepper-sprayed and repeatedly struck with a baton. But it didn’t happen in September 2025. The video was posted on social media on July 18, 2020.
A Sept. 4 Fox News segment aired a clip originally posted to X on July 16, 2020. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
The Fox News segment about the ICE protests soon shows an American flag burning.
That image was posted on social media July 16, 2020.
The location: the base of a downtown Portland statue more than a mile away from the ICE building where protests are happening in 2025.
After mislabeling 2020 events as 2025, Fox’s Sept. 4 evening broadcast explicitly drew a connection between the two periods.
“The protest chaos, which began with riots aimed at social justice in 2020, has severely damaged Portland’s reputation,” the correspondent said.
Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast explicitly drew a connection between 2025 and the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd. Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
The dramatic footage at this moment shows fires in the street and was broadcast on Fox on Aug. 19, 2020, the day after a crowd smashed through windows and set items on fire in the headquarters for the government of Multnomah County, where Portland is located.
Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast used footage originally broadcast Aug. 19, 2020. Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
We don’t know for certain which broadcast got Trump thinking about Portland. The White House did not respond to questions about what Trump watched. But the president said on Sept. 5 that what he’d seen about Portland on TV was “unbelievable.”
“I didn’t know that was still going on,” he said. “This has been going on for years.”
The reality: Portland’s 2020 social justice protests, which resulted in hundreds of arrests and continued for months, turned sporadic by early 2021. Protests in years since have led to occasional property damage, but nothing in Portland has matched the scale of events that followed Floyd’s death.
Portland police Chief Bob Day said at a Sept. 29 press conference that the city had been inaccurately portrayed through the lens of the protests in 2020 and 2021.
“What’s actually happening, and the response we’re seeing both from Portlanders and from the Portland Police Bureau,” Day said, “is not in line with that national narrative. And it is frustrating.”
A Riot That Wasn’t
In a Sept. 2 segment featuring the video from a day earlier, anchor Bill Hemmer said it shows “riots raging.” Anchor Trace Gallagher teased another Sept. 2 news segment by once again showing the video, saying, “It’s a riot outside a Portland ICE facility.”
On a Sept. 2 segment featuring Katie Daviscourt’s Sept. 1 video, anchor Bill Hemmer describes the Sept. 1 protests as “riots raging.” Videos show the violent moments that happened after federal police advanced on protesters. Fox News
The Sept. 4 segment shows Julie Parrish, an attorney for a neighbor of the ICE facility, accusing Portland police of saying, “Meh, we’re just gonna let violent rioters do this for 80 straight nights.”
The physical behavior of protesters that was captured on the video is not violent. The camera instead shows federal agents advancing on them. In the moments before officers tossed munitions into the crowd, videos show, one protester was blowing bubbles. The Portland police did not declare a riot, a legal designation that allows for an elevated police use of force. (They declared a riot just once, a police spokesperson said, on June 14.)
The Sept. 1 protest had “little to no energy,” according to an internal Portland police summary, before federal officers dispersed the crowd to collect a prop guillotine that had been brought. Katie Daviscourt, a Trump-aligned commentator who filmed the clips, noted on X that protesters were having dance parties and that their main problems were “not leaving restricted areas, burning a flag, and possessing a deadly object (guillotine).”
ProPublica found a similar pattern for the three months before Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast: clashes that on most days and nights had no criminal allegations of protester violence to explain them.
After dozens of arrests and charges were announced in June through July 4, federal prosecutors accused just three people of crimes at the ICE building in the roughly two months leading up to Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast.
During that same two-month time frame, ProPublica’s review found numerous instances of police using force: videos from more than 20 days or nights with federal officers grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling, firing on or using other munitions on protesters.
No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression later asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.
Asked whether Fox News accurately represented her footage, Daviscourt said: “I stand by my four months of accurate reporting.”
Parrish told ProPublica she had collected evidence that “shows ongoing and persistent activity” outside the facility that under statute and police directive “would be considered riotous, unlawful assembly and/or disorderly conduct.” She declined to share this evidence, saying it was privileged as part of her client’s file.
Her lawsuit on behalf of a neighbor living near the ICE facility, which sought to require police to enforce Portland’s noise ordinance, was dismissed.
The Reappearing Neighbor
A Sept. 5 “Fox & Friends” segment showed a neighbor from an apartment building confronting protesters over noise, shouting at protesters: “Turn that (bleep) down, it’s midnight! … We the people need sleep!”
Fox said it happened Tuesday, which would have been Sept. 2. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, “This has been going on for months now, but a lot of this since Labor Day,” as the video shown on screen sandwiches footage of the neighbor between other scenes from the Labor Day protest.
“This is a chaotic city,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said.
Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
The next day, the clip of the neighbor appeared again on Fox News. This time, the network said the footage was from Wednesday, or Sept. 3.
Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
In reality, the confrontation was captured on video months before. Daviscourt published the video on June 29 on X.
On the two September nights that Fox said the neighbor’s confrontation happened, ProPublica’s review found no videos of violent clashes posted on social media, and federal authorities announced no arrests.
For example, according to a Portland police email from 11:22 p.m. on Sept. 3: “There are still about 20 people hanging around but only 4 were even on the sidewalk in front of the building.”
Misrepresentations Continue After Trump’s Guard Order
On Sept. 28, the day Trump’s order was implemented, a Fox News broadcast played a clip of Kotek saying that Guard troops were not needed in Portland, then immediately cut to a clip of a hectic scene of protesters clashing with police.
“Wish she could see some of those images,” the anchor said. Sarcastically, as a co-anchor chuckled, she added: “Look at that. Just a peaceful protest.”
A small box on the screen showed the footage wasn’t from Oregon.
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.
This administration is so comfortable with its power and so self-assured in its actions that it can’t even be bothered to engage in basic operational security. This dates all the way back to Trump’s first term, when the president casually (and unofficially) declassified information by posting it to Twitter, routinely refused to attend national security briefings, and said stuff during interviews that had administration officials scrambling to prepare for inevitably awful outcomes of the president allowing any momentary burst of synapses to be converted immediately into words he can’t seem to prevent himself from uttering out loud.
The second Trump term has somehow managed to convert Trump’s conceited sloppiness into a communicable disease. Not once but twice have ostensible “war plans” been shared with civilians — the first time being an accidental e-vite to a Signal chat room extended to a journalist and the second being former Fox News also-ran Pete Hegseth being so self-involved he just had to share war chats with his immediate family and (checks notes] their lawyer.
ICE has done the same thing, as has the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Kristi Noem’s thirst for self-congratulatory photo ops has seen her expose ICE operations that were still underway because she thought she looked kind of badass boarding a vehicle before the sun came up.
This latest blunder — reported first by Andy Mannix for the Minnesota Star-Tribune — also involves Signal. But that’s not an indictment of Signal, which is still the best option for encrypted communications. End-to-end encryption can do a lot of things. But it can’t prevent you from adding someone you didn’t mean to to a group chat or prevent others in the chat from sharing their messages with others. And it definitely can’t protect you from shoulder surfing, because literally no service exists that can do that. That’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to be aware of when discussing sensitive information. And this government is showing, yet again, that it can’t be bothered to take the sort of protective steps even ordinary office workers are expected to.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth considered sending an elite U.S. Army strike force to Portland, Ore., to quell protests that President Donald Trump has characterized as “lawless mayhem,” according to images of messages provided to the Minnesota Star Tribune.
The messages, casually exchanged last weekend in a crowded, public space, show high-level officials in the Trump administration discussing the deployment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, an infantry division that has been deployed to combat zones in both world wars, Vietnam and Afghanistan. If the administration were to send in the Army division, it would almost certainly be challenged in court under federal laws limiting how the military can be used domestically.
Ask yourself: does this sound like something Pete Hegseth would consider green-lighting? And then ask yourself this: would another Trump official feel comfortable discussing this while in a “crowded, public space?” I think you have your answers. Here’s the person who’s the latest example of this administration’s inability (or unwillingness) [or both!] to treat their positions with the respect they’re supposed to deserve, much less do the sorts of things people would expect these office-holders to do when being entrusted with that amount of power.
Anthony Salisbury, a deputy to White House top policy adviser Stephen Miller, sent the texts over the private messaging app Signal while traveling in Minnesota and in clear view of others. Troubled by seeing sensitive military planning discussed so openly, a source contacted the Star Tribune and allowed a reporter to review images of the texts.
Salibury’s presence and engagement in these text messages was verified by other photos sent by the Star Tribune’s source. And his presence in Minnesota was verified by White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who presented his carelessness as extreme devotion to his duties as, um, Stephen Miller’s deputy whateverthefuck.
“Despite dealing with grief from the loss of a family member, Tony continued his important work on behalf of the American people,” Jackson said in a written statement. “Nothing in these private conversations, that are shamefully being reported on by morally bankrupt reporters, is new or classified information.”
LOL OK. But no one has reported the military (in the form of hard-drinking Petey H.) considered, however briefly, parachuting the 82nd Airborne into allegedly war-torn Portland, Oregon, USA. And we’ll just allow the moral bankruptcy court to declare the winners and losers in cases like these, which always feature gobsmacked Americans being greeted by administration defensiveness every time Trump & Assoc. fuck something up.
Then there’s this statement about the potential Oregon invasion plans witnessed by Citizen Shoulder Surfer, which is even more nonsensical than the White House’s “moral bankruptcy” speculations:
“The Department of War is a planning organization and does not speculate on potential future operations,” Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.
wat.
So, the planning organization does not discuss plans, even plans that may not even be part of the official plans, because it is a planning organization that actually doesn’t plan anything and just rolls into action with all eventualities included in its load out.
Bullshit, as fucking everyone says. Planning involves discussing plans, which necessarily involves speculation because there’s no other way to discuss future plans. Unless the administration is in possession of a time machine (which is contradicted by the evidence that this administration exists), some speculation must occur before formal plans are, well, formalized.
Just because no one but Hegseth and Trump wants to invade a US city with an elite division of the US military doesn’t mean he didn’t think it was a good idea worth discussing with a guy who works for Stephen Miller and who doesn’t have the situational awareness to not participate in this discussion while surrounded by people he doesn’t actually know.
The Trump administration will, of course, shrug this off as nothing more than evidence of the press working to destroy America before Trump can get around to doing that himself. But it’s the other thing: It’s an administration stuffed to brim with under-qualified glory hounds, opportunists, gladhanders, sycophants, conspiracy theorist podcasters, Fox News commentators, and glamour dolls aging their way to irrelevance — all of them failing to do the things that would demonstrate extremely basic levels of professional competence.
That question became terrifyingly urgent this weekend when the President of the United States admitted he was preparing to send US military forces into an American city based entirely on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors.
Tim Cushing had a story yesterday about Trump’s bizarre declaration of war on Portland, threatening to deploy the US military against a city experiencing nothing more than a few tame protests. But the most alarming detail emerged later: in a conversation with Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, Trump admitted he had no idea what was actually happening in Portland:
“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”
Read that again. The President of the United States—who has access to better intelligence than anyone on Earth—is moving to deploy military forces against American citizens based on what he saw on TV and what his “people” told him, without bothering to verify whether any of it was real.
Trump made his pledge to send troops to Portland on Saturday morning. On Friday, Fox News had several segments in which purported violence in the city was shown.
One featured Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security official who often appears on cable shows. As she was discussing an executive order Trump signed, the channel showed b-roll of events in Portland.
Sept. 26, 2025. (Internet Archive)
You will notice, though, that the footage was not timestamped for any date in September. Instead, they showed an encounter apparently involving tear gas that occurred back in June … andfootage from protests in July 2020.
In the next hour, they ran the same playbook. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on, talking about how dangerous the left was next to footage of Portland violence from July 2020.
Sept. 26, 2025. (Internet Archive)
If this is what Trump was seeing, one can see how he might have been confused about the timeline (particularly ifhe wasn’t wearing his glasses). You can also see how the average Fox News viewer might be under the impression that Portland is a violent hellscape.
There’s a lot more in Bump’s piece about how the White House seems to be living in a fantasy world of their own making.
Dan Froomkin at Press Watch notes that it probably wasn’t just the Friday coverage that caused Trump to do this, because Fox News has been playing similar b-roll clips for weeks now, and Trump seems obsessed with these five-year-old videos that keep replaying, thinking that they’re live.
And yet ever since Trump watched a Sept. 4 segment on Fox News’s “Special Report with Bret Baier,” he’s been spouting outrageous fever dreams about the place.
But Trump fell for it bigly – and then ran with it. (The Guardian’sRobert Mackey, to his credit, reported it at the time.)
Here’s what Trump said. I’m quoting him at length because the White House no longer posts transcripts of his comments:
Trump:But I will say this, I watched today and I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable. What’s going on in Portland, the destruction of the city.
Q.Are you going into Portland?
Trump:Well I’m gonna look at it now because I didn’t know that was still going on. This has been going on for years. So we’ll be able to stop that very easily, we’ll be able to stop, but you know, that was not on my list, Portland, but when I watched television last night, this has been going on –you wouldn’t be standing, if you were the mayor, you wouldn’t be, can you imagine what they’re doing? They’re walking and throwing smoke bombs into stores. These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators, these are profess — I watched that last night. I’m very good at this stuff — these are paid agitators.”…
These are paid agitators and they’re very dangerous for our country, and when we go there, if we go to Portland, we’re gonna wipe ’em out. They’re gonna be gone and they’re gonna be gone fast — they won’t even stand to fight. They will not stay there. They’ve ruined that city. I have people that used to live in Portland, they’ve left, most of them have left, but what they’ve done to that place is just, it’s like living in hell.
On September 25,he was at it again, this time with vice president JD Vance nodding along:
Trump:When you go out to Portland and you see what’s happening in Portland, this is like —
Vance:Crazy.
Trump:— nobody’s ever seen anything like it every night and this has gone on for years. They just burned the place down and, you know, the shop owners, most of them have left. But the few shops that are open, they just use plywood and just like, three quarter inch plywood. They don’t put storefronts up because they know it’s going to be burned down. These are professional agitators.
Vance:That’s right.
So this started a few weeks ago due to Fox News playing b-roll from years ago, Trump thinks it’s live shots… and no one ever bothers to correct him, because no one corrects the mad king.
Even if the conversation with the governor made him think twice, he still moved to mobilize 200 National Guard members to go to Portland to fight a domestic war that doesn’t exist. Oregon quickly filed for an injunction blocking this nonsense, and it also suggests that Trump appears to making decisions based on believing that Fox News’ background b-roll from five years ago is happening now:
Nonetheless, on September 5, 2025, Fox News aired a report on Portland ICE protests that included misleading clips from Portland protests in 2020
Shortly thereafter, President Trump appeared to reference events in the same misleading FoxNews report when speaking to the press. A reporter asked which city President Trump planned to send troops to next, and he said he was considering targeting Portland because of news coverage the night before. President Trump alleged that “paid terrorists” and “paid agitators” were making the city unlivable, further stating “[a]nd when we go there, if we go to Portland, we’re gonna wipe them out. They’re going to be gone and they’re going to be gone fast. They won’t even stand the fight.”
President Trump later designated Antifa a terrorist organization on September 19, 2025. Afterward, he described a plan to insert federal personnel in cities such as Chicago, Memphis, and Portland. He stated “Have you seen Portland at all? You take a look what’s happening in Portland. It’s uh I mean, this has been going on for years. It’s just people out of control. Crazy. We’re going to stop that very soon.”
While answering questions from the press on September 25, 2025, the President baselessly insisted people had “just burned the place down.”
So half of this story is that we have a mad king who will fall for anything he sees on Fox News without bothering to first find out whether it’s true or not.
That’s terrifying!
But the other part is that his “people” around him are clearly abusing the senile President to take advantage of the situation to play out their own violent fantasies. Greg Sargent at the New Republic has a story about a back-and-forth he had with Steve Bannon, who flat out tells Sargent that all of this is Trump deputy chief-of-staff Stephen Miller’s doing:
I asked Bannon if he thinks Miller’s tweet means federal law enforcement should and will now criminally investigate groups who describe ICE as “authoritarian.”
“Yes,” Bannon replied. “Stephen Miller is correct—more importantly he’s in charge.”
Miller’s long-standing hunger for using federal force against those he views as domestic opponents now has the perfect vehicle: a president so detached from reality that he can be manipulated into military action by old Fox News clips and whispered lies from advisors who know exactly which buttons to push.
All of this is fucking terrifying. The institutions designed to prevent exactly this kind of abuse—Congress, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court—have either abdicated their responsibilities or actively enabled this moment.
But there’s a more immediate question: if the President can be manipulated into deploying military force by Fox News b-roll and vengeful advisors, what else might they convince him to do? Yesterday it was AI deepfakes of himself promoting fake medical devices. Today it’s military deployments based on five-year-old footage. Tomorrow?
Should the United States survive this, there is going to need to be a serious reckoning over how we fix our institutions to protect against such horrifying abuses.
One of the few, small things the US press could do is stop pretending this administration is normal. It isn’t. It’s motivated solely by cruelty and revenge, in service of imposing its will and white Christian nationalist imperatives on the nation, which is nothing less than fascism. So, when President Trump says he’s sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon to quell an alleged rebellion, the very least the press could do is not bury the lede.
Here’s what Matthew (sorry, that’s all the information I have) pointed out on Bluesky in regards to press coverage of Trump’s latest revenge invasion of a US city:
# of paragraphs for news orgs to mention there’s no discernable need to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon
The Guardian: 1st paragraph BBC: 4th paragraph AP: 5th paragraph Time: 6th paragraph Politico: 8th paragraph NPR: 9th paragraph CNN: 10th paragraph NBC: 12th paragraph Fox News: never mentions
Donald Trump said on Saturday he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon, “authorizing Full Force, if necessary”, ignoring pleas from local officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who suggested that the president was misinformed or lying about the nature and scale of a single, small protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.
Trump made the announcement on social media, where he claimed that the deployment was necessary “to protect War ravaged Portland,” and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities he said were “under siege by antifascists “and other domestic terrorists”.
Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, rejected the president’s characterization. “In my conversations directly with president Trump and secretary Noem, I have been abundantly clear that Portland and the State of Oregon believe in the rule of law and can manage our own local public safety needs,” Kotek said at a news conference in Portland on Saturday. “There is no insurrection. There is no threat to national security and there is no need for military troops in our major city.”
At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
The Secretary of War [SoW] (a.k.a. the day-drinking boss of the US Defense Department) is going to send war troops into “War ravaged Portland” to defend against a “siege” by “Antifa.” Meanwhile, in Portland, this is how things actually look:
A visit by the Guardian to downtown Portland on Saturday morning confirmed that the city is placid, the farmers’ market was packed and the protest against immigration enforcement in an outlying residential neighborhood remained small. There were just four protesters on the sidewalk near the Ice field office Trump claimed was “under siege”. One, wearing a chicken costume and draped in an American flag, held up a sign that read: “Portland Will Outlive Him.” Passing motorists honked in appreciation.
The Trump-loving NY Post claimed “protestors clashed with ICE agents” as Trump’s military/federal officer posse rolled into Portland. And yet, it couldn’t even drum up any photos of the “clash” it declared in its headline, having to settle for pics of the most clash-less protest I’ve ever seen:
The only description of said “clash” involved ICE attacking protesters, rather than the other way around:
Given all of this, it’s extremely irresponsible for US press outlets to write sentences like this when covering truly alarming government actions, like sending the military into US cities for the sole purpose of stifling dissent. This is CNN doing Trump’s work for him by pretending these martial law-esque efforts are meant to address societal problems, rather than being the politically motivated attacks they actually are:
It’s the latest example of Trump’s willingness to use the military in extraordinary ways as part of his push to reduce crime in American cities.
The order was the latest instance of Mr. Trump’s use of the American military on the nation’s streets, after federal troops were sent to Washington last month in an effort to crack down on crime. Federal agents will start arriving in Memphis as early as next week, after the president authorized the use of the National Guard there as part of a similar crackdown.
This has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with Trump expanding his power and taking control of cities simply because they’re run by members of the Democratic party. No similar moves have been made in Republican-run cities, no matter how high their crime rates are.
While I understand some journalists think it’s not their duty to speculate about politicians’ motivations, it doesn’t take much to add sentences into the mix that make it clear there is no factual basis to support this mobilization of the military, while also pointing out that Trump has exclusively targeted Democratic party-run cities with these deployments.
And, for the love of all that is fucking holy, the press could help itself out quite a bit by pointing out that these vengeful acts by the Trump administration target protected First Amendment expression — the ongoing protests of ICE and its actions by residents of cities now swarming with federal officers and National Guard troops. Trump’s going to hate you anyway. The least you can do is fully earn it.
Protests ignited by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of an unarmed black man (George Floyd) spread across the nation following that horrific event. And these protests against police violence went on for months, prompting a federal response from an irked president, who declared Portland, Oregon one of many “anarchy jurisdictions.”
The Portland police had their own problems dealing with demonstrators and journalists. The arrival of federal officers compounded the problems. Litigation ensued, resulting in court orders forbidding federal officers (as well as local cops) from violating rights of journalists, lawyers, and legal observers who were there to ensure the protests were documented and (shocker!) rights weren’t violated by the government.
These court orders were routinely disobeyed. And police responding to anti-police violence protests routinely proved protesters’ points by engaging in violence. More litigation ensued.
The city of Portland is trying to talk its way out of being held at least partially responsible for rights violations and violence perpetrated by its employees, a.k.a. Portland police officers. A lawsuit filed by Portland resident Meghan Opbroek alleges she was severely injured by a flashbang grenade fired by Portland PD officers.
The city’s lawyers have asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed. It won’t be, but the way the city asked is particularly novel, if not more than a little insulting to the intelligence of the court, never mind the injured plaintiff. (via Willamette Week)
The federal court quotes heavily from the magistrate judge’s Findings and Recommendations (F&R). And the city of Portland quotes one particular clause of the state’s tort laws — one it hoped would allow it to avoid this lawsuit altogether. One almost has to admire the chutzpah needed to lob this into court with hopes that it would stick. From the decision [PDF]:
The F&R begins with a statutory interpretation of ORS § 30.265(6)(e). This section provides an exception to the Oregon Tort Claims Act’s (OTCA) waiver of immunity—that is, this section preserves immunity—for “[a]ny claim arising out of riot, civil commotion or mob action or out of any act or omission in connection with the prevention of any of the foregoing.” Id. Neither federal nor state courts have thoroughly analyzed this statutory provision. This provision determines whether sovereign immunity shields the City from Opbroek’s state law claims in this case. The City argues that ORS § 30.265(6)(e) offers expansive protection against liability in circumstances of civil disobedience. According to the City, this immunity protects against any claim either arising out of a riot, civil commotion, or mob action, or based on any act or omission that the City undertook to prevent the same. This Court would thus lack subject matter jurisdiction over Opbroek’s state law claims against the City under this interpretation.
That’s the legal theory: the city claims it is immune from any lawsuit dealing with anything happening in any riot, no matter what. But, as the court points out, this loophole in the state Tort Claims Act isn’t meant to be interpreted as blanket immunity. Instead, the loophole is there to ensure the city can actually obtain insurance.
The F&R, however, agrees with Opbroek that the text, context, and legislative history of ORS § 30.265(6)(e) suggest a different reading. According to Opbroek, the Oregon state legislature intended this provision to help public bodies get liability insurance by providing immunity when third parties suffer damages as a result of a riot, civil commotion, or mob action that the public body allegedly causes or fails to prevent.
It’s not to shield the city from lawsuits alleging harms caused by its employees. It’s meant to prevent the city from being held directly responsible for harms caused to third parties by other third parties. Nothing in the law suggests otherwise. And neither does anything said by lawmakers back in 1969, when this loophole was first created.
See H.B. 1515, 1969 Leg., House Judiciary Comm. Minutes (Or. 1969) (“[This section] does not bar claims for torts committed by public employees during the course of civil disturbances but would preclude claims based on a theory that a public body caused or failed to prevent a civil disturbance. Liability insurance policies commonly exclude coverage of this risk.”)
That’s pretty much the final word on the subject. Legislators clearly never intended this loophole to be used to raise an immunity defense in court and the court sees nothing in the law or the intent that supports the city’s creative interpretation.
On top of that, the court takes issue with the city’s representation of the event in which the plaintiff was injured as a “riot.”
Even if the Court were to adopt the City’s interpretation of ORS § 30.265(6)(e)—which it does not—the Court still would need to determine whether the gathering at issue was a “riot, civil commotion or mob action.” These terms are not defined by the statute. To draw the line between protest and riot, the Court would need to consider, for example, facts related to the reasonableness of and danger presented by the participants’ actions. Such a determination would also necessarily tread on questions relevant to the merits of Opbroek’s claims that the City assaulted, battered, and acted negligently towards her by deploying a flashbang grenade that caused severe injury. Accordingly, the “resolution of the jurisdictional question is dependent on factual issues going to the merits” and the two thus intertwine. Rosales v. United States, 824 F.2d 799, 803 (9th Cir. 1987). Making a jurisdictional finding would therefore be inappropriate at this stage even under the City’s statutory analysis.
The lawsuit continues. And the city’s lawyers will have to spend a bit more time digging into the state statutes to find another way to score an early exit from this lawsuit. It’s unlikely such an outlet exists. But for now, someone injured by police violence at an anti-police violence protest still has a shot at holding the city accountable for being unable to control its cops.
