U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to send troops into Chicago and Portland, Oregon, to counter immigration protests was met with mixed reactions in a pair of contentious court hearings Thursday, both of which ended without rulings.
A U.S. judge in Chicago was critical of whether there was legal support for sending troops to the Windy City. At the same time, a federal appeals court in San Francisco appeared to back Trump’s request to overturn a temporary order barring his deployment of the national guard to Portland.
Both cases hinge on whether the president’s determinations about the cities meet the legal standard for bringing national guard troops under federal control. Trump claims the troops are needed to protect federal property and personnel in Democratic-run cities that he says are overrun by crime and violent protests. Oregon and Illinois both argue Trump is wildly exaggerating the situation, particularly in Portland, which Trump has said is “burning to the ground” with “insurrectionists all over the place.”
State and local officials, and the judges hearing the cases, have all disputed Trump’s descriptions of the situation on the ground.
In Illinois, U.S. District Judge April Perry said she was “troubled” by what she described as a disconnect between the official orders from the federal government directing the activities of military troops in Chicago and the public statements made by Trump about what their duties are in the city.
Perry pressed a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice to explain exactly what the hundreds of national guard troops deployed to Chicago have been ordered to do and presented him with numerous hypothetical situations to assess the scope of their duties.
“What I am troubled by, at the moment, is when I try to nail down what of those things that they will do, you don’t really offer a clear answer,” Perry said at a hearing that lasted more than two hours. She said she expected to issue a ruling by the end of the day.
Trump has made sweeping claims about the need for troops to enter Chicago to reduce crime in the city, but the official memorandum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth states that the troops are being called in order to protect immigration officials as they carry out their official duties.
In San Francisco, however, a three-judge appeals panel of appellate court judges was mostly skeptical of the temporary order issued last weekend barring the deployment of troops to Portland. Two of the judges were appointed to the bench by Trump, and one by former President Bill Clinton.
The most forceful line of questioning came from one of the Trump appointees, Ryan D. Nelson, who repeatedly and forcefully pushed back on Oregon’s argument that the president lacked the authority to federalize and deploy 200 Oregon Guard troops to Portland because the situation in the city wasn’t as dire as Trump claimed.
Nelson grilled the state’s lawyer, Stacy Chaffin, about why Oregon and the city of Portland should be able to second guess the president’s determination about the level of disruption the protests were causing.
Nelson said he understood the “slippery slope arguments” being made by Oregon and other states that are concerned about what Trump might do if his deployments are given a green light, adding that it was “clearly something the Founders were concerned about.”
But Nelson said the worst-case scenario envisioned by the states wasn’t happening yet, and that Trump hasn’t ordered the troops to patrol the streets.
It “may well be that the forces are used in an inappropriate way, but we don’t have that yet,” Nelson said.
The orders at issue in both hearings are temporary — usually lasting just a few weeks — but they could still influence how the cases proceed by giving an early indication of how the trial judges and appeals courts are looking at the issue. Regardless of how the hearings pan out, Oregon and Illinois will both be arguing for longer lasting injunctions against the troop deployments in the coming weeks, meaning the issue will be hashed out in the courts again soon.