US Judge temporarily blocks Trump administration from deploying troops in Portland

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00:00Hi, Doug. The administration famously does not take very well to judicial checks on its power.

00:06How are they responding this time?

00:07Yeah, well, first of all, it is significant. It is a first significant legal setback.

00:11And I say setback because it's not definitive.

00:13This is a restraining order, an injunction against that mobilizing of federal forces,

00:19of, in this case, Oregon's National Guard, federalizing it basically against these nightly protests

00:26that we have been seeing in Portland.

00:28Look, this is a move that will face a lot of appeals from the Trump administration.

00:35But as you said, the lawyers who basically argued for this injunction, and I will note,

00:39and it's important to note, that the judge who issued this injunction is a Trump-appointed,

00:43a Donald Trump-appointed judge.

00:46So this is a judge who came down for legal reasons and not political reasons, presumably,

00:52basically saying that Trump had specifically exceeded his executive authority

00:57in using federal or trying to use federal troops, as we call it, federalizing National

01:04Guard troops in a situation where local officials, state officials, say they are simply not needed.

01:12Donald Trump's administration has used these troops, and specifically we're talking about

01:18National Guard troops.

01:19Each state has its own National Guard reserve, but they are considered U.S. troops.

01:24And he has justified this in the broad name of, as he says, combating crime and protecting

01:30immigration enforcement officials.

01:33State officials say that it is completely out of hand in the sense that they don't need the help

01:38of the feds, that they completely have these situations under control.

01:42In the case of Portland, there had presumably been a lot of back-and-forth coordination even between state

01:47and local officials and federal officials, and that there was a sort of understanding up until

01:53very recently that, no, you really didn't have to call in the army, so to speak, that federal

01:59state officials were doing a perfectly fine job of containing and enforcing the law, as is their

02:04duty.

02:05So they see this as a dangerous, transcending, an overstepping of executive authority.

02:11They see this not as what I said Trump says it is, combating crime, protecting immigration,

02:16i.e. ICE officials, right, Customs and Enforcement Administration officials.

02:20They don't see it as that.

02:21They see this as something masquerading, as it's really political theater masquerading as

02:26crime enforcement protecting immigration enforcement.

02:30Political theater in one aim, with one objective, and that is to do Trump's bidding.

02:35And Donald Trump's bidding, as they see it in this case, is to exact political retribution

02:41against cities, and there's a short list of them right now.

02:45They've been deployed to L.A., to Washington, Portland right now, with the restraining order,

02:50and Chicago is poised right now.

02:52And it's basically political theater.

02:54Donald Trump taking retribution against Democratic-led states that he sees as woke and doing the bidding

03:00of far-left radical Democrats.

03:02Now, you mentioned Chicago there, Doug.

03:05Federal troops poised to deploy there as of this weekend, and this is coming against the

03:09wishes of the governor and other local officials.

03:11Once again, in Chicago, what's happened there is there was an incident in which a woman in

03:17a car was shot.

03:18She wasn't killed.

03:19It wasn't a fatal shooting by officials who, after they had said that she had rammed a law

03:24enforcement in ICE vehicle at the scene, there was apparently another car involved with

03:29a man who was taken into custody.

03:32Obviously, the details at this point are unclear of exactly what happened, what motives were,

03:37if there were motives, what exactly transpired.

03:39But what this does seem to suggest is that exactly what a lot of the critics of these types

03:45of federalization of the army of troops moving them into cities where officials say they're

03:50not needed.

03:51In the case of Chicago, where I think 300 federal troops are poised to deploy there.

03:56They haven't been deployed yet, but there's a threat that they will imminently be deployed.

04:00The fear is that it will actually lead to greater violence because it's setting up a situation

04:06where you've had, in the face of these deployments, civil protests, as you have in American democracy

04:12time and again.

04:13People have a right to turn out and protest against what they see as over exceeding authority,

04:20the overuse of force, pushing back against these ICE officials that they think have no business

04:24being there. They say that it sets up a real tinderbox situation and it becomes a vicious circle.

04:30The ICE officials are there. You have protests against them. The protests set up a scenario

04:33where there can be violence and the violence then creates further justification from the

04:37administration's point of view for deploying or keeping those guards there.

04:41So it's very volatile. It is, like I said, it's a powder keg. It's a tinderbox.

04:45And ultimately, Doug, do you see this as a showdown about federal versus states, right?

04:50Or is it something completely different?

04:52It's a little bit of everything here, right? Well, clearly, it is raising the questions of

04:57federal versus state rights. What I mean is under, you know, the violation of the Tenth Amendment

05:03of the Constitution that basically allows for the states to have certain prerogatives over

05:10the federal government. And what's interesting here is that the lines have never been clear.

05:16There are always those more in favor of state rights, those more in favor of federal rights.

05:19But what a lot of the detractors and the critics, and there are a lot of forceful critics against

05:24these policies, are saying that they are unnecessary right now. And that it seems that Donald Trump

05:31is enlisting the military, which is supposed to be obviously a nonpartisan, the most nonpartisan

05:38of American institutions there to protect Americans from threats from abroad, using it and deploying

05:44it in a sense against its own citizens on U.S. soil, which is not completely unprecedented.

05:50We've seen deployments, obviously, during the U.S. civil rights movement. It's happened in American

05:53history. So this isn't breaking, breaking news in that sense. But what it is, is we are seeing it

05:58right now very concentrated in a certain very, very concentrated period of time by a president who

06:03has clearly and explicitly laid out an agenda of going after what he sees as, he quotes,

06:09the enemy within and using the military against the enemy within. So setting up a context, a scenario

06:15in which U.S. soldiers can be potentially deployed against U.S. citizens because there are civil

06:21disturbances that Donald Trump doesn't agree with, doesn't like, and doesn't think should happen.

06:26Therefore, the military, he thinks, is justified in seeing off that threat. It's not that it's

06:31unprecedented, but we're seeing a lot more of it. And it's raising a lot of hackles in a lot of places

06:35in America right now. Douglas Herbert, thank you very much, as always, for that very detailed roundup.

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