Appeals Court Allows Trump’s Portland Troop Deployment for Now

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Federal agents stand guard to keep demonstrators away from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in downtown Portland, Oregon.
Federal agents stand guard to keep demonstrators away from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in downtown Portland, Oregon, on Oct. 6, 2025. (Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)

A U.S. appeals court allowed for now President Donald Trump’s plan to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon, to counter protests against his immigration crackdown, a major boost for the administration’s effort to send the military into Democratic-led cities.

A divided court in San Francisco on Monday lifted an order earlier this month that blocked the deployment of 200 Oregon National Guard members to Portland, a city Trump has claimed without evidence is “burning to the ground.”

The 2-1 ruling doesn’t affect a second order issued by the same lower court judge that blocked the deployment of troops from any state, so an immediate deployment may not be possible. But the government has said it will quickly ask the judge to dissolve that order if the appeals court ruled in its favor.

The move by Trump in Portland follows earlier deployments of troops to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, where he claimed crime is out of control and some federal property was in danger from protesters. The president’s recent attempt to send troops to Chicago was temporarily halted Oct. 9 by a judge in that city. A federal appeals court affirmed the order. The Supreme Court may have the final say.

State National Guard troops are under the control of individual governors, but the administration has argued U.S. law permits the president to federalize the troops in the event of a rebellion, a foreign invasion or when the president is unable to execute the laws using regular law enforcement.

In Oregon, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, said there were no facts to support the president’s claims on social media that Portland was ravaged by war and that anarchists and professional agitators were trying to burn down federal property and other buildings. Her first order blocked Trump’s plan to send 200 Oregon guardsmen to the state’s biggest city.

Immergut issued a second temporary order during an emergency hearing the next day, after Trump sought to circumvent her decision by sending troops from California and Texas instead of Oregon. California also joined Oregon’s lawsuit as a result of the move.

During the appeals court hearing on Oct. 9, Oregon faced particularly tough questioning by one of the panel’s two Trump-appointed judges, Ryan D. Nelson, who repeatedly expressed his belief that the state shouldn’t be allowed to second-guess the decision of the president.

The panel majority — Nelson and another Trump-appointed judge, Bridget Bade — rejected Oregon’s argument that Trump’s assessment of the protest situation in Portland was out-of-date and not made in good faith.

“The evidence the president relied on reflects a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment,” the majority said. “We thus conclude that Defendants are likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal.”

The majority also looked at the broader protest situation across the U.S., including a deadly shooting at an ICE facility that left one detainee dead, to support Trump’s troop deployment to protect federal property. Oregon had argued that only the situation in Portland should be taken into account.

Oregon also failed to sway the appeals court to base its decision only on the smaller protests at the Portland ICE facility in the weeks and months before Trump’s deployment. The majority instead looked back to early June, when violence and threats of violence forced the facility to close for nearly three weeks and required a surge in federal personnel from other agencies.

The ruling is temporary in nature but gives an indication of how the appeals court judges view the arguments in the case. A three-day trial on the merits is set to start in Portland on Oct. 29, meaning the appeals court may soon be asked to review the case again.

The case is State of Oregon v. Trump, 25-6268, US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (San Francisco).

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