At the close of the federal trial over whether President Donald Trump can lawfully send National Guard troops to Portland, attorneys posed dueling views of the city’s protests.
The gatherings have been persistent since they began in June and have led to damaged property — and even injuries. But the legal question that both sides confronted in the courtroom was whether the gatherings were so disruptive that they amounted to a rebellion and made it impossible to carry out federal law.
At the close of the federal trial over whether President Donald Trump can lawfully send National Guard troops to Portland, attorneys posed dueling views of the city’s protests.
The gatherings have been persistent since they began in June and have led to damaged property — and even injuries. But the legal question that both sides confronted in the courtroom was whether the gatherings were so disruptive that they amounted to a rebellion and made it impossible to carry out federal law.
But Hamilton pointed to testimony from federal officials who said the sustained conflicts wore on the men and women guarding the building. They highlighted only a couple specific incidents in September, prior to Trump’s first threats to intervene in the city.
One incident saw a person erratically park a car in the driveway and run off, leading to suspicions there was a bomb inside in the vehicle. A Portland police bomb squad later deemed it safe. That was something attorneys for the city and states pointed to as evidence the Portland Police Bureau responded quickly to emergencies at the building.
Protesters had also rolled out a prop guillotine one weekday night. It was mostly made of plywood, but reportedly looked real enough from a distance to scare federal law enforcement inside the building.
“It looked real to the officers,” Hamilton told Immergut.
Hamilton also accused Portland leaders of abetting the hostilities, and noted how the city recently slapped the building with a zoning violation. Hamilton accurately noted that part of the violation involved the plywood covering the windows for security, but omitted the city’s larger point that ICE violated its land use agreement by detaining people longer than 12 hours on several occasions.
“The bottom line: DHS needs help. The Guard is needed,” Hamilton said.
The case for reinforcing the building with National Guard troops partly involved the federal officers’ workload and stress levels. Justice Department attorneys said they were outmanned and that their staffing levels weren’t “sustainable.”
One regional deputy director had testified that officers with the federal protective service, the agency responsible for protecting government property across the country, had surged officers to Portland. Officers were on 30-day rotations initially, Hamilton said, but were so “strained” that rotations dropped to 20 days.
Still, even if Portland police couldn’t handle the crowds, Kennedy with the Oregon DOJ countered, the federal government still had vast, untapped manpower that didn’t require the National Guard. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has roughly 80,000 officers at its fingertips, he said.
Beyond the protests, Kennedy argued, the building was still serving its core functions — meeting with immigrants, detaining undocumented immigrants — as usual.
Cammilla Wamsley, a regional ICE supervisor, testified earlier Friday that this year she set a goal for her officers across Alaska, Oregon and Washington to make 30 immigration arrests per day.
Protests briefly shut the building down in the summer, but Wamsley was unable to say under cross-examination how that impacted the arrest goal. Government data reviewed by OPB earlier this month showed that immigration arrests barely slowed down, if at all, at the Portland offices.
Near the end of his closing argument, Kennedy noted to Immergut that the ICE building is covered with security cameras. Yet the Justice Department never submitted photo or video evidence to bolster their claims.
“There should be powerful video in defendant’s possession that would illustrate the urgency of at least some of those situations,” he said. “But defendants have not put a single video or image into the record.”
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.