Trump Troop Plans Get Mixed Response at High-Stakes Hearings (1)

President Donald Trump’s effort to send troops into Chicago and Portland, Oregon, to counter immigration protests was met with mixed reactions in a pair of contentious court hearings Thursday, both of which ended without rulings.

A US judge in Chicago was critical of whether there was legal support for sending troops to the Windy City. At the same time, a federal appeals court in San Francisco appeared to back Trump’s request to overturn a temporary order barring his deployment of the National Guard to Portland.

The hearings are the latest fights over Trump’s attempts to send troops to a multitude of cities, primarily run by Democrats. The National Guard has already been deployed to Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Memphis, prompting numerous legal skirmishes as local officials seek to challenge the deployments.

In Illinois, US District Judge April Perry said she was “troubled” by what she described as a disconnect between the official orders from the federal government directing the activities of military troops in Chicago and the public statements made by Trump about what their duties are in the city.

Perry pressed a lawyer for the US Department of Justice to explain exactly what the hundreds of National Guard troops deployed to Chicago have been ordered to do and presented him with numerous hypothetical situations to assess the scope of their duties.

“What I am troubled by, at the moment, is when I try to nail down what of those things that they will do, you don’t really offer a clear answer,” Perry said at a hearing that lasted more than two hours. She said she expected to issue a ruling by the end of the day.

Members of the Texas National Guard stand guard at an army reserve training facility in Elwood, Illinois on Oct. 7

Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Trump has made sweeping claims about the need for troops to enter Chicago to reduce crime in the city, but the official memorandum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth states that the troops are being called in order to protect immigration officials as they carry out their official duties.

In San Francisco, however, a three-judge appeals panel of appellate court judges was mostly skeptical of the temporary order issued last weekend barring the deployment of troops to Portland. Two of the judges were appointed to the bench by Trump, and one by former President Bill Clinton.

Read More: Trump Gets Fresh Chance to Fight Judge He Picked in Oregon

The most forceful line of questioning came from one of the Trump appointees, Ryan D. Nelson, who repeatedly and forcefully pushed back on Oregon’s argument that the president lacked the authority to federalize and deploy 200 Oregon Guard troops to Portland because the situation in the city wasn’t as dire as Trump claimed.

Nelson grilled the state’s lawyer, Stacy Chaffin, about why Oregon and the City of Portland should be able to second guess the president’s determination about the level of disruption the protests were causing.

Nelson said he understood the “slippery slope arguments” being made by Oregon and other states that are concerned about what Trump might do if his deployments are given a green light, adding that it was “clearly something the Founders were concerned about.”

But Nelson said the worst-case scenario envisioned by the states wasn’t happening yet, and that Trump hasn’t ordered the troops to patrol the streets.

It “may well be that the forces are used in an inappropriate way, but we don’t have that yet,” Nelson said.

Both cases hinge on whether the president’s determinations about the cities meet the legal standard for bringing National Guard troops under federal control. Trump claims the troops are needed to protect federal property and personnel in Democratic-run cities that he says are overrun by crime and violent protests. Oregon and Illinois both argue Trump is wildly exaggerating the situation, particularly in Portland, which Trump has said is “burning to the ground” with “insurrectionists all over the place.”

State and local officials, and the judges hearing the cases, have all disputed Trump’s descriptions of the situation on the ground.

‘Carrie Underwood Song’

In Chicago, Perry was almost dismissive of the government’s descriptions of violence that included slashed tires and keyed cars, saying, “frankly some of this sounds like a Carrie Underwood song.”

Eric Hamilton, the DOJ lawyer, said that the comparison to the country singer was inappropriate.

“We have over 30 officers that have been harmed,” said Hamilton, who also appeared in the Oregon case earlier this month.

The orders at issue in both hearings are temporary — usually lasting just a few weeks — but they could still influence how the cases proceed by giving an early indication of how the trial judges and appeals courts are looking at the issue. Regardless of how the hearings pan out, Oregon and Illinois will both be arguing for longer lasting injunctions against the troop deployments in the coming weeks, meaning the issue will be hashed out in the courts again soon.

(Adds details on violence in 17th paragraph)

To contact the reporters on this story:
Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net;
Madlin Mekelburg in Austin at mmekelburg@bloomberg.net;
Miranda Davis in Chicago at mdavis537@bloomberg.net

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

Anthony Aarons, Steve Stroth

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