A federal judge has railed against her Trump-appointed colleagues after they allowed the president to send troops into Portland, declaring their ruling was beyond absurd.
In a major victory for President Donald Trump, a divided appeals court on Monday gave him the green light to deploy National Guard troops to the Oregon city, days after a federal judge found there was no justification for doing so.
The two-to-one decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was split along partisan lines, with Trump-appointed judges Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade supporting the administration, while Bill Clinton-appointed judge Susan Graber dissented.
In her dissent, Graber denounced the “political theater” of Trump’s push to deploy the Oregon National Guard to quell what he claims is a war zone.
“No legal or factual justification supported the order to federalize and deploy the Oregon National Guard,” she wrote.
“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,” Graber added.
“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. I strenuously dissent.”
The Trump administration has been trying to send troops into Portland for weeks, claiming that they are needed to help protect the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility there, which it says is “the target of actual and threatened violence.”
Oregon officials, however, say that the protests have significantly declined since the summer—an argument that was earlier this month backed by Trump-appointed judge Karin Immergut, who said that Trump’s claims were “untethered” to what was actually happening on the ground.
Immergut issued a temporary restraining order to block the deployment, much to the chagrin of the White House.
However, in their majority ruling, Bade and Nelson disagreed with the order, and cited a number of examples, including a June 8 incident in which “protesters placed wood, rocks, and a traffic barrier apparently to impede operations”; a June 17 incident in which “a man set fire to various materials protesters compiled to barricade a vehicle gate” and a June 14 in which protesters “threw rocks and sticks at the guard shack and fired M80 fireworks at FPS officers.”
“Some of these protests have been peaceful, but many have turned violent, and protesters have threatened federal law enforcement officers and the building,” they wrote.
While Monday’s ruling paved the way for troops to be deployed, lawyers for Oregon and the city of Portland immediately asked the court for what’s known as an “en banc” rehearing: an appeal before the chief circuit judge and 10 randomly selected judges.
But Graber urged her colleagues to vote against the deployment, saying that while “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 rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda.”
Trump has tried numerous times to deploy the National Guard across blue U.S cities.
In June, he took control of the California National Guard to respond to protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles, even though Governor Gavin Newsom objected.
In August, he sent troops to tackle crime in Washington D.C., where crime rates had fallen to their lowest point in 30 years.
Trump has also authorized the deployment of 300 guard members to Chicago following immigration protests, prompting claims by Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker that the president is trying to “manufacture a crisis.”
