The federal government could be in contempt of court for defying a U.S. District Court judge’s order blocking National Guard deployment to Portland.
U.S. Department of Justice attorney Jean Lin on Wednesday admitted to Judge Karin Immergut that Oregon National Guard troops were briefly sent to Portland despite Immergut’s order blocking such a deployment.
The revelation came shortly before the opening of Oregon’s three-day trial against President Donald Trump and the federal government over Trump’s attempts to deploy troops to federal property in the city.
Before opening arguments, Immergut asked Lin whether her order had been defied. Lin told Immergut that between 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 4 and 12 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 5 members of the Oregon National Guard were sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland where protests were ongoing. Court documents show nine members were sent, and they left eight hours after Immergut issued the first of two temporary restraining orders blocking their deployment.
“We’ll discuss later whether that’s contempt and a direct violation of my TRO,” Immergut told Lin.
In their lawsuit, lawyers for the state of Oregon and the city of Portland allege Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, as well as the agencies Noem and Hegseth lead, violated several laws and the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by attempting to deploy Guard troops to Portland over the objections of state and local elected leaders.
Each of these issues deals with the balance of state and federal power — particularly related to authority over policing within states — and the extent of presidential power over the U.S. military.
The state of California is also a party to the lawsuit, and lawyers for California asked Immergut that she determine in her final order that the roughly 200 California Guard that have been federalized and sent to Oregon, but blocked from deployment, be sent home. Those troops are waiting at Camp Withycombe in Happy Valley.
Trump federalized and attempted to deploy National Guard Oregon, then California, then Texas National Guard troops to protect the Portland ICE facility in late September claiming in a social media post that the city was “war ravaged” and that they were needed to protect federal property from protestors.
Second federal admission
The potential violation of Immergut’s court order is the second misstep federal lawyers have admitted to in recent days.
Late last week, the state of Oregon asked a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to throw out a decision they made granting Trump the power to deploy Guard to Portland because they found testimony submitted by federal lawyers painting a picture of law enforcement woes at the ICE facility were inaccurate.
Federal lawyers had previously told the 9th Circuit judges that a “surge” of 115 Federal Protective Service officers were sent to work 24/7 since June to protect the Portland ICE facility from what Trump administration officials have tried to characterize as chaos and violence by protestors at the building.
But data that Oregon’s lawyers received as part of requests for evidence showed that no more than 31 federal police were present at the facility during any one-month period since June, and that during the three weeks around Trump’s orders to federalize National Guard troops, a low of 20 federal police officers were at the Portland ICE facility.
On Monday, the federal lawyers had to admit to the 9th Circuit that they had misrepresented the number of federal police that were sent to the ICE facility throughout the summer.
Trial day one
Leaders from the Portland Police Bureau and Oregon State Police gave testimony for hours on Wednesday that largely centered around the ability of both forces to provide enough law enforcement to the ICE facility to keep the peace throughout the summer and in moments of heightened protest activity.
Portland Police Commander Franz Schoening and Oregon State Police Captain Cameron Bailey were both asked by Immergut to compare protests from the summer of 2020 to those outside the ICE facility in 2025. In 2020, then-Gov. Kate Brown called roughly 50 National Guard troops to downtown Portland to respond to protests outside the federal courthouse.
Schoening and Bailey said unequivocally there was no comparison and that the 2020 protests were far more disorderly and violent.
Schoening in his testimony detailed multiple incidents in recent weeks when federal officers at the Portland ICE facility shot tear gas and smoke munitions at protestors unprovoked, and even accidentally shot munitions at themselves and at Portland Police officers.
Types and amounts of force used by federal officers is “disproportionate” to the conduct of protestors there, Schoening said.
