Trump touts Oregon National Guard ruling as Supreme Court weighs deployment to Chicago

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump is leaning on a new appeals court ruling that endorsed his deployment of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, as he urges the Supreme Court to let his administration carry out a similar effort in Chicago.

Describing those protesting the administration in Chicago as “rioters” who are leading a “violent resistance,” the Trump administration told the justices Tuesday that its decision to deploy the National Guard is unreviewable by courts or – at the very least – is entitled to great deference.

“If the president’s determination is reviewable at all, such review must be extremely deferential,” the administration told the Supreme Court, pointing to recent decisions from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that endorsed “the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles and Portland to address similar violent resistance to federal immigration enforcement.”

In one of the most significant emergency cases involving the second Trump administration to reach the Supreme Court so far, the justices are reviewing whether lower federal courts were correct to block Trump from deploying hundreds of guard members to an ICE facility in Chicago’s suburbs.

The Supreme Court is likely to hand down a decision in the Chicago case quickly, potentially within a few days.

Trump’s broader campaign to deploy the guard on US soil was buoyed this week when a divided three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit said the president was entitled to deference when making decisions about when such deployments are necessary.

The full 9th Circuit is weighing whether to reconsider that decision.

Though the case before the Supreme Court is focused on Chicago, the decision will almost certainly spill over into other litigation playing out as Trump seeks to send the National Guard to multiple US cities. In its latest filing, the Department of Justice framed Trump’s decision to send the Guard into Illinois as a response to what it described as a broader national threat.

“As the Ninth Circuit recognized, ‘the president can, and should, consider the totality of the circumstances,’ and it is error for courts to ‘discount evidence they deem less relevant,’” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court. “That is especially so where, as here, the events in Chicago are not occurring in a vacuum, as violent riots have occurred in Los Angeles and Portland, a shooter tried to murder federal agents in Dallas, and Mexican cartels are offering bounties on DHS personnel.”

The states fighting Trump have scoffed at the idea that protests merit sending in the troops. When she temporarily blocked the deployment in Illinois earlier this month, US District Court Judge April Perry disputed the administration’s description of what has been happening on the ground at the ICE facility in Broadview. Perry, nominated by former President Joe Biden, pointed to what she described as a “troubling trend” of the administration of “equating protests with riots.”

The Chicago-based 7th Circuit largely upheld Perry’s temporary order.

To make its case for the deployments, the Department of Justice has relied on a Supreme Court decision from 1827 – Martin v. Mott. The case dealt with Jacob Mott, a member of the New York militia who disobeyed President James Madison’s order to mobilize during the War of 1812. The Supreme Court rejected Mott’s argument that Madison had misjudged the danger and wrote that “the authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen belongs exclusively to the president.”

Chicago officials have balked at the notion that the protests against ICE agents are akin to an invading foreign army.

“State and local law enforcement officers have handled isolated protest activities in Illinois, and there is no credible evidence to the contrary,” Illinois officials told the Supreme Court in their own set of written arguments this week.

“The War of 1812,” they wrote, “entailed ‘vastly different’ facts than the record below.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.