Judge blocks Trump from sending California, Texas National Guard to Portland; Illinois sues over deployment to Chicago: Get the latest

The Trump administration spent the weekend scrambling to send out-of-state National Guard troops into Chicago and Portland, Ore., despite the objections of four Democratic governors and a Trump-appointed federal judge, who called an emergency hearing Sunday night to block the move in Oregon.

On Monday, the state of Illinois sued to stop the administration from deploying federalized forces there as well.

“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” the Illinois attorney general’s office wrote in the filing.

As he did with Los Angeles earlier this year, President Trump has claimed that “federal protection missions” to Portland and Chicago are necessary to quell protests against his administration’s ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

But in a ruling Saturday that prohibited Trump from federalizing 200 members of the Oregon National Guard, Judge Karin Immergut rejected that rationale, writing that the president’s assessment was “untethered to facts” because the protests “were not significantly violent or disruptive.”

In response, Trump told reporters at the White House that his appointee “ought to be ashamed of himself.” (Immergut is a woman.)

“Portland is burning to the ground,” the president insisted. “All you have to do is look at the TV and read your newspapers.”

On Sunday, the administration tried to sidestep Immergut by ordering 200 members of the California National Guard to Portland while also mobilizing as many as 400 Texas National Guard troops for missions in multiple Democratic-run cities, including Chicago.

Of the governors involved, only Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, backed the deployment. (Governors are in charge of each state’s National Guard, and federal law prohibits the president from deploying the armed forces to participate in domestic law enforcement operations unless he declares that an insurrection is underway.)

“You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it,” Abbott wrote on social media.

The rest of the affected governors — all Democrats — blasted Trump’s maneuver.

“This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power by the President of the United States,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X. “America is on the brink of martial law. Do not be silent.”

“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said in a statement.

During an emergency hearing late Sunday night, Immergut declared that Trump’s attempt to mobilize the California and Texas Guard was ”in direct contravention” of her earlier order. She then broadened that order to forbid “the relocation, federalization or deployment of members of the National Guard of any state or the District of Columbia in the state of Oregon.”

What’s happening in Portland and Chicago

Since June, protesters have been gathering outside the ICE facility about two miles south of downtown Portland.

“Most of the time, the protesters stand behind a blue line imprinted with the words FEDERAL PROPERTY DO NOT CROSS and hurl insults at agents they spot beyond the gate or on the roof of the building,” the Atlantic reported last week. But sporadic clashes have occurred, and “more than two dozen people have been charged with federal offenses” over the last four months, “including assaulting federal officers and creating a hazard on government property.”

The total number of protesters typically numbers “a few dozen,” according to the Atlantic, and the atmosphere is generally “more like a carnival than combat.” Reports from the Portland Police Bureau show that the size and intensity of the city’s nightly ICE protests ebbed in August and September.

Regardless, on Sept. 27, Trump directed his “Secretary of War” — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — to marshal troops against the “domestic terrorists” outside Portland’s ICE facility, encouraging the use of full force in a city he likened to a war zone.

Trump later told a summit of all U.S. military brass that he was weighing using Democratic-controlled cities as “training grounds” for recruits in order to fight the “enemy within.” Administration officials such as Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and top immigration adviser, have repeatedly pointed to the Portland protests as evidence of “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country” that must be “dismantled” with “state power.”

Over the weekend, federal immigration officers in Portland who had previously confined their crowd dispersal efforts to the driveway and street immediately outside the building “extended their efforts by several blocks, using gas, pepper balls and flash-bang grenades to send demonstrators scattering,” the New York Times reported.

“This is an aggressive approach trying to inflame a situation that has otherwise been peaceful,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson told the Times.

Meanwhile, ICE agents in Chicago have intensified their push to round up and deport unauthorized immigrants in recent weeks, sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest city.

Around 1 a.m. last Tuesday morning, unmarked trucks and a helicopter surrounded a five-story apartment building in Chicago’s largely Black South Shore neighborhood. Agents then reportedly “rappelled” from the choppers and went door to door, awaking residents — including children — and using zip ties to restrain them.

“They was terrified,” one resident told the local ABC affiliate. “The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other.”

The Department of Homeland Security announced that it arrested 37 individuals during the operation, all of whom were “involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators.”

But amid Tuesday’s raid and other recent ICE incidents — deploying chemical agents near a public school; handcuffing a Chicago City Council member at a hospital; shooting and wounding a motorist on Saturday morning — Pritzker questioned the Trump administration’s motives and tactics.

“They are the ones that are making it a war zone,” Pritzker told CNN on Sunday. “They need to get out of Chicago if they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the president said they were going to do.”

Pritzker accused the administration of deliberately inflaming tensions “so they can send in even more troops” and said he had directed state agencies to investigate Tuesday’s apartment building raid. Citing reports of “children who were zip-tied and held, some of them nearly naked” and “elderly people being thrown into a U-Haul for three hours and detained,” the governor alleged that ICE agents were “just picking up people who are brown and Black and then checking their credentials.”