Portland is bracing for the deployment of 200 national guard troops as Donald Trump moves ahead with plans to bring the US military into another Democratic-run city.
Oregon filed a lawsuit to block the deployment, which the state has warned will escalate tensions and lead to unrest when there is “no need or legal justification” to bring federal troops into Portland.
Trump on Saturday claimed Portland is “war ravaged” and that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities there are under attack, but there is no evidence of that and protests outside Ice sites have been small.
It is the latest development in Trump’s years-long fixation on the Pacific north-west city of 635,000 that extended through the president’s first term in the White House. The president has frequently sought to paint the city as out of control and, as he described in September, like “living in hell”.
During the first Trump administration, Portland was the site of major rightwing gatherings, counterprotests and clashes between both groups, and in 2020 it became a hotspot for the racial justice protests that swept the US in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.
In response to the large racial justice protests, the president sent federal agents, including an elite border patrol unit, which teargassed crowds and arrested protesters off the streets into unmarked vehicles.
Earlier this month, the president suggested he would send troops to Portland after watching a TV news report that showed footage from a 2020 protest, which was incorrectly said to have taken place over the summer.
Trump’s announcement on Saturday that he will send federal forces to Portland follow his administration’s moves of deploying federal troops to Los Angeles after protests over immigration raids and Washington DC to address crime (although violent crime in the Capitol is at a 30-year low).
Trump has also threatened to send troops to other Democratic-run cities including Chicago and Memphis.
During a phone call over the weekend, Tina Kotek, Oregon’s governor, urged the president not to deploy troops, telling him that there was no insurrection or threat to national security in the city, she said.
“What I said to the president is: ‘I don’t understand what information you have.’ When he says to me that the federal courthouse is under attack, that is absolutely not true,” Kotek said.
“Some demonstrations happening at one federal facility, that are being managed on a regular basis by local law enforcement, if that is the only issue he’s bringing up, he has been given bad information,” Kotek said.
Trump on Sunday appeared less set on the deployment, telling NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor he had spoken to Kotek. “I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said: ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place . ..it looks like terrible.”
Still, a department of defense memo received by state leaders later on Sunday said the administration was federalizing 200 Oregon national guard troops, who will be tasked with protecting Ice officers and federal facilities for up to two months.
Oregon leaders argue the deployment would be unlawful, and that the president, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, have “infringed on Oregon’s sovereign power to manage its own law enforcement activity”.
“Far from promoting public safety, Defendants’ provocative and arbitrary actions threaten to undermine public safety by inciting a public outcry,” the lawsuit states.
