Trump Gets Fresh Chance to Fight Judge He Picked in Oregon (1)

The federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump who temporarily blocked his plan to send troops to Portland, Oregon, has triggered his fury and a legal battle that’s testing the limits on using the military in American cities.

Karin Immergut, 64, ruled Oct. 4 that Trump’s purported justification for summoning Oregon’s National Guard to protect a “war-ravaged” Portland is “simply untethered to the facts.” A day later, she issued a broader order that temporarily blocked Trump’s revised plan to send hundreds of troops from California and Texas to Portland — a move that she said was an apparent effort to circumvent her earlier order.

The US has appealed Immergut’s decision that Trump exceeded his legal authority in sending troops to counter protests against his immigration crackdown. On Thursday, a three-judge panel, including two appointed by the president, will review her ruling.

Karin Immergut during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2018.

Photographer: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Bloomberg

Oregon’s high-stakes lawsuit has made Immergut a central figure in a widening battle over the president’s authority to deploy the military to Democratic-run cities and states that Trump has long criticized as crime-ridden and out of control, including Los Angeles and Washington. The appeals court hearing over the Portland deployment comes after another federal judge, April Perry, declined to immediately rule on Illinois’ request for a two-week halt to the use of troops in Chicago.

After her first ruling, Trump said Immergut should be “ashamed” of herself. When she ruled against Trump for the second time, his advisor Stephen Miller wrote in a social-media post a judge “has no conceivable authority, whatsoever, to restrict the President and Commander-in-Chief from dispatching members of the US military to defend federal lives and property.”

Miller called it “one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen.”

Immergut ruled that Oregon is likely to succeed as the litigation progresses in arguing that the deployment violates the law outlining when National Guard troops can be federalized and a constitutional provision that protects state sovereignty. She set an Oct. 29 hearing to consider a longer-lasting injunction.

During an unusual Sunday night hearing, Immergut repeatedly expressed frustration with the Justice Department’s lawyer, Eric Hamilton, saying he was “missing the point” of her earlier order.

“Mr. Hamilton, you’re an officer of the court,” she said. “Aren’t defendants simply circumventing my order, which relies on the conditions in Portland? And nothing has changed. There’s nothing in my order that has changed.”

Portland lawyers who have observed her career — as a federal prosecutor, a state court judge, and now a federal judge — depict her as a law-and-order jurist with no partisan bent. When Immergut was a state judge, attorney Russell Barnett appeared before her in the case of a man who had faced the death penalty for killing two people.

“Even though she’s a former career prosecutor, that did not come out in her rulings,” Barnett said. “She is very steady, very even-tempered.”

Immergut graduated from Amherst College and the University of California, Berkeley’s law school before working for six years as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and five in the Multnomah County district attorney’s office in Portland.

In 1998, she took a leave to work with Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr on the investigation of President Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Immergut interviewed Lewinsky several times, including before a grand jury.

“My feeling is it wasn’t a case about sex, it was a case about lying and obstruction,” she told the Oregonian newspaper that year.

In the Chicago case, Perry was one of the last group of federal judges appointed by President Joe Biden to be sworn in before Trump took office in January. She had been Biden’s pick to be US Attorney in Chicago before her nomination was stalled by JD Vance,then a senator from Ohio. Starting in 2023, Vance blocked Biden’s Justice Department nominees to protest what he called politically motivated criminal cases against Trump.

Immergut got the Portland case at the last minute, after her colleague, Judge Michael Simon, removed himself at the Justice Department’s request because his wife is a Democratic member of Congress, Suzanne Bonamici.

250 Trials

Immergut joined the US Attorney’s Office in Oregon in 2001, and President George W. Bush appointed her as the top prosecutor two years later. She became a state circuit court judge in 2009, presiding over about 250 trials before Trump appointed her to the federal bench.

S. Amanda Marshall followed Immergut as US attorney after her nomination by President Barack Obama and a bruising two-year confirmation battle.

“She was incredibly supportive, both personally and professionally, during that time,” Marshall said. “She exemplified the kind of fairness, kindness, ethics and professionalism that we would hope that our judges would possess.” Immergut, she said, served as a “strong mentor” to female federal prosecutors.

Before the National Guard case, Immergut backed the Trump administration in an immigration dispute. On Aug. 23, she ruled that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had legally detained a Guatemalan man in a van of farmworkers as they traveled to harvest blueberries.

But in her initial National Guard decision, Immergut ruled that the Trump administration had not adequately shown that Portland was undergoing the sort of disorder that justifies sending in federal troops.

“The protests in Portland were not ‘a rebellion’ and did not pose a ‘danger of a rebellion,’ especially in the days leading up to the federalization,” Immergut wrote Saturday. The government, she said, had offered no evidence demonstrating that some “episodes of violence were part of an organized attempt to overthrow the government as a whole.”

Another defense attorney, Michael Levine, said he has appeared before Immergut in several cases and met with her as the US attorney. He praised her rulings in the National Guard case despite the abuse directed at her.

“She’s a conservative Republican and she deserves credit,” Levine said. “It makes me proud and gives me hope that there are judges like Karin Immergut who will issue rulings without fear. It takes courage to issue this ruling.”

(Updates with hearing scheduled by judge.)

To contact the reporters on this story:
David Voreacos in New York at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net;
Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net

Anthony Aarons

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