Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek on Tuesday directed a senior military leader to demobilize and send home the roughly 200 members of Oregon National Guard troops who had been stationed at Camp Rilea, outside of Astoria.
In a letter to Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of the United States Northern Command, the governor said she was calling for the immediate demobilization of both the Oregon National Guard soldiers and the California National Guard soldiers. California’s troops are currently stationed at Camp Withycombe, in Clackamas County.
Kotek wrote the soldiers deserve better than to be “uprooted from their families and careers, only to be mobilized for an illegal mission.”
“Additionally, as you can understand,” the governor wrote to Guillot, “this mission disrupts an already demanding schedule of our National Guard soldiers’ required trainings and lawful deployments currently planned out for the next several years. It also comes with a price tag currently being footed by the American people.”
The state’s National Guard citizen soldiers are at the heart of a dizzying series of back-and-forth decisions over whether President Donald Trump can deploy the troops in Oregon over the objections of the state’s governor. The guard has a dual state and federal mission and members swear an oath to both the president of the United States and the governor of the state where they are based.
The Oregon troops have been “on pause” at the Oregon base, according to Lt. Col. Stephen Bomar, director of public affairs for the Oregon Military Department. Bomar said they were still under “Title 10” on Monday, which means they were operating under federal authority, but they were unable to perform any Title 10 duties, such as training or protecting a federal building, as the fate of the federal troops played out in court. The troops have been at the base since the beginning of October.
Over the weekend, Karin Immergut, a federal judge who was appointed by Trump, prevented the president from deploying members of the Oregon National Guard to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in South Portland. After the judge’s decision, the president turned to the National Guard troops based in California and Texas. The judge responded by also temporarily barring their deployment.
Now, the administration will take the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Kotek was not given a head’s up by Trump when the president decided to send 300 California National Guard members to Oregon. Her office received notice through “unofficial channels” on Saturday night that the California National Guard was arriving in the state. It’s believed they landed at around midnight and more troops arrived on Sunday.
The governor’s office said it has not received a direct explanation from Trump or Secretary of War Pete Hegseth about the deployment of California or Texas troops.
In Immergut’s decision to prevent the president from deploying troops, she said the federal government had not proved that demonstrations outside the ICE facility had disrupted the agency’s ability to function nor that they posed a threat to federal employees.
“This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Immergut wrote in one of her court rulings regarding the Oregon National Guard deployment. “Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of this nation."
This story may be updated.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
