The bottom line
A Ninth Circuit panel just ruled 2-1 that President Trump can deploy the Oregon National Guard to Portland, and the legal and political significance of that ruling goes well beyond one city. This is what happens when years of tolerating disorder finally run out of runway.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What the court actually decided
On October 20, 2025, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 that the Trump administration could proceed with deploying federalized Oregon National Guard troops to Portland. The majority was written by Judges Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade, both appointed during Trump’s first term. Judge Susan Graber, a Clinton appointee, dissented.
The majority found that the district court below had made a critical analytical error: it had focused too narrowly on the relatively quiet weeks of September 2025 while ignoring the “violent and disruptive events” that occurred outside the Portland ICE facility in June, July, and August. That framing mattered enormously. The federal government’s authority to act doesn’t get wiped out just because things briefly calmed down while the legal fight was playing out. The conditions that justified the deployment were still very much part of the factual record.
The statutory basis for the deployment was 10 U.S.C. § 12406, which allows the president to call the National Guard into federal service when he cannot execute the laws of the United States with regular forces. The administration argued — and the majority agreed, at least at this preliminary stage — that the ongoing disruptions around the ICE facility and the local government’s demonstrated unwillingness to handle them created exactly that situation. Yes, the statute says orders “shall be issued through the governors of the States,” and Governor Tina Kotek made clear she wanted no part of this. But courts have long recognized that the language is “troublingly ambiguous” on whether gubernatorial consent is actually required, and this was a question the Ninth Circuit majority was willing to let proceed.
The crime question the left refuses to answer honestly
I want to step back from the legal mechanics for a second and talk about something that I think gets missed entirely in the mainstream coverage of this story.
The argument from Portland city officials and the Oregon governor was essentially: things aren’t that bad, you don’t need to do this. And in a narrow, cherry-picked sense, they could point to some numbers. Homicides in Portland were down 51% in the first half of 2025 compared to the prior year. That’s real. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.
But here’s what doesn’t get said. Portland entered 2025 with a violent crime rate of 720 victimizations per 100,000 residents — the highest in the state of Oregon by a significant margin. The city reported more violent crimes in 2024 than any other Oregon jurisdiction. And the specific problem around the ICE facility wasn’t homicides. It was sustained, organized disruption of a federal law enforcement operation, night after night, for months. Portland Police Bureau’s own Assistant Chief Craig Dobson admitted in court that from mid-July through late September, the protests required “routine monitoring” and consumed fewer resources than routine downtown nightlife activity. If that’s your defense — that federal agents needed more help than cops managing bar crowds — you’ve already lost the argument.
The deeper issue here is how crime actually works in big cities, and why the progressive response to it keeps failing. A very small number of people commit a disproportionate share of the crimes. Studies on repeat offending have consistently shown this pattern across cities. The person who breaks your car window is often the same person who broke it last month, and the month before, and who has a long rap sheet that a district attorney chose not to prosecute aggressively. When you remove that person from the equation, the crime rate drops significantly. Not because you solved the underlying social conditions, but because you stopped the specific person doing the specific harm.
California’s legislature figured this out the hard way. Their experiment with Proposition 47, which reclassified most thefts under $950 as misdemeanors and stripped prosecutors of the tools to hold repeat offenders accountable, turned organized retail theft into a low-risk profession. It wasn’t some abstract increase in property crime statistics. It was the same people, over and over again, working the system because the system was explicitly designed not to stop them.
Portland went through a version of the same experiment at a civic level. District attorneys declined to prosecute. Camp clearances were blocked by local ordinance. Police resources were cut after 2020. And then city and state officials turned around and said: see, things are getting better, we handled it. What they actually did was allow conditions to degrade to a floor they were comfortable with and then claim credit for the stabilization.
Why federal authority here is entirely appropriate
Let me address the states’ rights argument directly, because I know it’s coming and I think it’s being used in bad faith in this specific context.
I believe in federalism. I believe states should have real authority over their own affairs. And I generally think the federal government overreaches into local matters far more than it should. But federal authority is not optional when what’s at stake is the federal government’s ability to operate its own facilities and execute its own law enforcement functions. The ICE facility in Portland is a federal building, staffed by federal agents, conducting federally authorized immigration operations. The protests weren’t just people expressing their First Amendment rights on a public sidewalk. They were sustained, months-long operations designed to obstruct federal law enforcement, and local authorities chose not to stop them.
When a state government’s inaction directly prevents the federal government from executing federal law, Section 12406 exists precisely for that scenario. This isn’t about taking over Portland’s police department or overriding Oregon’s laws on anything. It’s about protecting the federal government’s ability to do its own job in its own facility. That’s a line that the Constitution has always recognized.
The Ninth Circuit majority got this right. The district court’s error was real: you don’t get to look at only the most recent month of data and ignore everything that came before it. The totality of circumstances during the summer of 2025 around that ICE facility provided more than adequate grounds for the president to act.
What happens next
I’ll be honest with you: this ruling is temporary. The full Ninth Circuit agreed to rehear the case en banc, and that process is going to take time. By December 31, 2025, Trump had withdrawn the National Guard from Portland as the legal fight continued. So this particular deployment didn’t end up having the immediate dramatic effect some expected.
But the precedent question matters regardless of how this specific deployment ends. The legal fight here is going to produce a record and eventually a ruling that clarifies the boundaries of presidential authority under Section 12406 — specifically whether a governor’s objection is a real veto or just a procedural step. Courts have avoided answering that question directly for a long time. This litigation may force an answer.
And the political argument for the approach is already being made by the results. Washington D.C. saw crime drop measurably after federal intervention. The lesson isn’t complicated. When you actually enforce the law against the people who are actually breaking it, things get better. That’s not a radical proposition. It used to be considered obvious.
The progressive experiment in Portland — and in a lot of these cities — has been running long enough to evaluate. The results are not good. I’m not interested in a debate about whether socioeconomic conditions influence criminal behavior. Of course they do. But conditions don’t commit crimes. People make decisions, and when those decisions face no real consequences, more people make them. That’s not a conservative talking point. It’s just how incentives work.
The Ninth Circuit gave Trump the green light, even if temporarily. The legal road ahead is long. But the underlying argument — that the federal government has both the right and the responsibility to protect its own operations — is correct, and eventually the courts are going to have to say so clearly.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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