Live updates: Trump threatens to use emergency powers to bypass courts and deploy troops

The arguments put forward by Mr. Trump’s Justice Department, she continued, “risk blurring the line between civilian and military federal power – to the detriment of this nation.”

Hours earlier, after a hearing Friday before Judge Immergut, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s push to deploy American troops on home soil, said the problem lay elsewhere. “Far-left Democratic judges,” he said, were obstructing the administration’s attempt to “dismantle terrorism and terrorist networks.”

But Judge Immergut is anything but a far-left judge. When Mr. Trump first nominated her to the federal bench in 2018, she arrived with strong conservative credentials, and her career shows a willingness to get on with business no matter whose party beef is gored. As a lawyer in the 1990s, she worked under Ken Starr during his investigation of President Bill Clinton.

She personally questioned Monica Lewinsky about the details of her affair with Mr. Clinton before a grand jury, managing to elicit specific details about their sexual relationship that critics would later call salacious when they appeared in Mr. Starr’s report.

Over the next two decades, she built a career as a federal prosecutor, first in California and then in Oregon. She prosecuted white-collar fraudsters, money launderers and drug traffickers. In 2003, she was selected by President George W. Bush to serve as United States Attorney for the District of Oregon, overseeing dozens of prosecutors and overseeing high-profile terrorism cases.

As a prosecutor, Judge Immergut was “incredibly hardworking” and “apolitical in her approach,” said Billy J. Williams, who has known her since the 1990s and who also led the U.S. attorney’s office in Oregon, first under President Obama and then during Mr. Trump’s first term. “When she’s on the bench, she’s an incredible listener who’s not afraid, in the moment, to make a statement or ask deeper questions. She’s always ready.”

Scott Asphaug, who also worked under Judge Immergut when she was Oregon’s chief federal prosecutor, said she told her team to “do the right thing, for the right reason.”

“Our job wasn’t just to win,” he said. “Our job was to act wisely and fairly. »

At an emergency hearing Sunday evening, Judge Immergut clarified her restraining order, prohibiting the administration from sending National Guard troops from any other state. Having already ruled that President Trump had no legal basis to send the military, she warned that the administration could “directly violate” her order, citing reports that troops from Texas and California could soon arrive.

“Aren’t the defendants simply circumventing my order? she asked. “Why is this appropriate?”

Like Judge Immergut, Mr. Williams was working at the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse in downtown Portland in the summer of 2020. That’s when Attorney General Bill Barr sent federal agents to Portland to deal with crowds that had gathered around the courthouse to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.

Mr. Williams said that while parts of downtown Portland resembled a “war zone” in 2020, the circumstances of the current protests, which are smaller in scale and concentrated around an ICE building in South Portland, were “very different.”

“I don’t blame ICE for doing its job,” he said. “I believe in law and order. And people can protest, as long as it’s done legally. It’s a delicate balance.”

Judge Immergut’s decision, he said, “was based on the facts of 2025, not 2020; what’s happening now has nothing to do with what happened then.”

The judge has not yet ruled definitively on the merits of the case. His temporary restraining order will expire later this month and a trial is scheduled in Portland on the morning of October 29.

The Trump administration appealed Judge Immergut’s initial ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. And on social media, Mr. Miller doesn’t let Judge Immergut’s conservative background interfere with his attacks on the legitimacy of her decisions. His order, he wrote, amounted to an attempt “to cancel the 2024 elections by decree.” On Monday, he called her “a district court judge with no conceivable authority whatsoever to restrain the president” and a “judge from Oregon.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump spoke more directly about Judge Immergut’s selection, telling reporters that “if they were appointing judges like that, I was not being well served by the people who chose the judges.”

But if he seemed aware of the fact that one of his candidates had ruled against him, his awareness did not extend to the gender of this judge. Mr. Trump repeatedly referred to Judge Immergut as “him” and “him.”

“This judge should be ashamed of himself,” he said.

Shawn Hubler reports contributed.