Portland and Chicago troops litigation: Court reckonings slated today
The Ninth Circuit paused a lower court judge's order, but the facts on the ground haven't changed.
At 4 p.m. Eastern Time today, I will be appearing on a panel discussion titled “Do the Courts Matter? The Trump Administration Tests the Limits of Immigration Law” at the 22nd Annual Immigration Law & Policy Conference at Georgetown Law.
This newsletter’s answer, of course, is yes. Find out why.
Donald Trump’s plans to deploy troops in two Democratic-led cities face two key legal battles on Thursday, one in an appellate court in San Francisco and another inside a federal court in Chicago.
Here’s what you need to know.
Ninth Circuit reckoning on Portland
On the West Coast, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments over a lower court’s order to keep the National Guard out of Portland, Ore., in oral arguments slated for 9 a.m. Pacific Time (noon Eastern Time). That hearing will be broadcast on the court’s YouTube page below.
The three-judge panel hearing the case includes U.S. Circuit Judges Susan Graber, Ryan Nelson, and Bridget Bade. Graber is a Bill Clinton appointee, and Nelson and Bade were appointed by Trump.
They are reviewing a decision by Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut who found that the basis for sending the military to supposedly “war-ravaged” Portland was “untethered to the facts.”
In a scorching decision, Immergut said that the legal issue goes to the “heart of what it means to live under the rule of law in the United States,” quoting James Madison in warning against the armed forces becoming “instruments of tyranny” on domestic soil.
“This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Immergut wrote.
On the eve of the hearing, the Ninth Circuit paused Immergut’s ruling without changing the facts on the ground. The panel’s order allows Trump to federalize, but not deploy, the National Guard in Portland. The order goes out of its way to note that its provisions have no bearing on the final outcome.
“Given its limited nature, an administrative stay ‘does not constitute in any way a decision as to the merits of the motion for a stay pending appeal,’” the unsigned order states.
For a preview of today’s hearing, watch my interview with
.‘Trump’s invasion’ of Chicago goes to court
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) has described the spectacle of federal agents, mostly from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, swarming around Chicago shooting tear-gas canisters and pepper balls, as “Trump’s invasion.”
A courtroom battle today will determine whether the National Guard will be added to the mix.
At 11 a.m. Central Time (noon Eastern), U.S. District Judge April Perry will consider whether to issue an order blocking the National Guard’s deployment in Chicago. She declined to issue such an order earlier this week in order to supplement the record before issuing a decision, but she urged the Trump administration to hold off on any deployment until after her ruling.
Since that time, the government has sent the Texas National Guard into Illinois without fully deploying the troops.
If deployed, the National Guard will defend ICE, which just lost a legal battle in the same court. On Tuesday, a federal judge extended a consent decree limiting ICE’s ability to conduct warrantless arrests.
The scathing, 52-page order from U.S. District Judge Jeffrey I. Cummings denounced ICE’s raid of a residential building in Chicago in a footnote.
“Case in point: at approximately 1:00 a.m. on September 30, 2025, roughly three hundred ICE officers and personnel from other law enforcement agencies with support by Black Hawk helicopters conducted an immigration enforcement action at an apartment building in the predominately African-American South Shore neighborhood in Chicago,” Cummings wrote.
In the name of arresting two suspected gang members, Black Hawk helicopters descended upon a five-story residential building and armed agents pulled “men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked,” according to a CNN report. The incident, which the Department of Homeland Security boasted about in a glossy propaganda video, renewed discussion of so-called “Kavanaugh raids,” referring to a recent Supreme Court decision in Perdomo allowing immigration agents to engage in racial profiling.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion in that order minimizing the detention by saying ICE could “briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status.”
The South Shore raid went far beyond that, Judge Cummings noted.
“Many details of the raid (such as the number of warrantless, collateral arrests that were made and whether any individuals targeted in advance of the raid were arrested) remain unknown,” Cummings wrote. “However, one thing seems clear: ICE rousted American citizens from their apartments during the middle of the night and detained them—in zip ties no less—for far longer than the ‘brief’ period authorized by the operative regulation […] and envisioned by the Perdomo concurrence.”
Read that order in full here.
how can they pause an order to preserve peace?The violence and disorder is from the incitement by the President. The order to keep the trump's troopers out of our cities is in line with the Constitution and what used to be America before the Republicans gained the power to destroy it.
I listened to part of that 9th circuit hearing. Thanks for the link! I was really bothered by the posture of the man on the panel, but I also thought the lawyer for Portland didn't have very good responses. The judge seemed to keep declaring that no one can review the President's decisions, no matter how baseless or stupid or against the wishes of the states it may be. The lawyer didn't seem prepared to do more than repeat the district judges decision. How do people engage in this conversation and emerge from it with anything but a sense that the calling in of the military is a wildly ridiculous overreaction to normal protests with normal incidents that normal law enforcement can handle? That we don't have laws that allow militarization for normal situations? I see the judge asking for where the line gets drawn, but I think the statute says the line is about actually meeting its terms and definitions, not about drawing dates around hypothetical situations.