When President Trump’s plan to deploy national guard troops in Portland hit a major hook over the weekend, he did it in the hands of one of his judicial candidates, judge Karin Immergut of the Federal District Court for the Oregon district.
“This is a nation of constitutional law, and not of martial law,” wrote judge Immergut, 64, in an order on Saturday rejecting the allegations of the administration according to which it needed military support to protect federal goods and enforce the Immigration Act, which it called an “extraordinary measure”.
The arguments put forward by the Ministry of Justice of Mr. Trump, she continued, “risks blurring the border between the civil and military federal power-to the detriment of this nation”.
A few hours earlier, after a Friday hearing before the Immerture judge, Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff of the White House who is Mr. Trump’s architect to deploy American soldiers on their own soil, said the problem was elsewhere. “The far left democrats,” he said, “said the administration’s attempt to” dismantle terrorism and terrorist networks “.
But Judge Immergute is anything but an extreme left judge. When Mr. Trump named it for the first time on the federal bench in 2018, she arrived with strong conservative diplomas, and her career shows a desire to continue the cases, whatever the party’s beef. As a lawyer in the 1990s, she served under Ken Starr during her investigation into President Bill Clinton.
She personally questioned Monica Lewinsky about the details of her affair with Mr. Clinton in front of a large jury, successfully arranging details at the end of their sexual meetings that criticism would later call salate when they appeared in Mr. Starr’s report.
Over the following two decades, she built a career as a federal prosecutor, first in California and then in Oregon. She continued white collar fraudsters, silver launders and drug traffickers. In 2003, she was chosen by President George W. Bush to be the American lawyer in the Oregon district, supervising dozens of prosecutors and supervising the cases of high -level terrorism.
As a prosecutor, judge Immergut was “incredibly worker” and “apolitical in his approach,” said Billy J. Williams, who has known her since the 1990s and also led the Oregon’s American lawyer’s office, first under President Obama, and then continue Mr. Trump’s first mandate. “When she is on the bench, she is an incredible listener who is not afraid, for the moment, to make a statement or ask deeper questions. She is still prepared.”
Scott Asphaug, who also worked under the judge immersed during his time as the main federal prosecutor of Oregon, said that she had told her team to “do the right thing, for the right reason”.
“Our job was not just winning,” he said. “Our job was to act in a wise and fair way.”
On Sunday evening, during an emergency hearing, Judge Immergut clarified his prohibition order, with the exception of the administration to send troops from the National Guard of any other state. Having already ruled that President Trump had no legal basis for sending the army, she warned that the administration could be “direct root” of his order, citing information that troops from Texas and California could soon be on the way.
“Do the defendants not simply bypass my order?” She asked. “Why is it suitable?”
Like judge Immergut, Mr. Williams worked on the courthouse of Mark O. Hatfield in downtown Portland in the summer of 2020. It was at this point that the Attorney General Bill Barr sent federal agents to Portland to cope with crowds that had gathered around the courthouse to protest the death of George Floyd in the hands of the police.
Williams said that if some parts of the city center of Portland looked like a “war zone” in 2020, the circumstances of the current demonstrations, which are smaller and concentrated around an ice building in South Portland, were “very different”.
“I don’t blame the ice of doing their job,” he said. “I believe in the law and the order. And people can protest it, as long as it is done legal. It is a meticulous balance. “
The decision of Judge Immergute, he said, “was based on the facts of 2025, not 2020; What is going on now is nothing like what happened then. ”
The judge has not yet rendered the final decision on the merits of the case. His temporary ban prescription will expire later this month and a trial is planned in Portland for the morning of October 29.
The Trump administration appealed the initial decision of the Immergue judge at the American Court of Appeal for the ninth circuit. And on social networks, Mr. Miller does not leave the conservative history of judge Immertine interfere with his attacks against the legitimacy of his decisions. His order, he wrote, was an attempt to “cancel the 2024 elections by Fiat”. On Monday, he called him “judge of the district court without imaginable authority, anything, to restrict the president” and an “Oregon judge”.
Trump on Sunday, Trump addressed his selection of the Imgut judge more directly, telling journalists that “if they put judges like that, I was not well served by the people who chose judges”.
But when he seemed to be aware of the fact that one of his candidates had reigned against him, his conscience did not extend to the genre of this judge. Mr. Trump has repeatedly referred to judge immerged as “him” and “him”.
“This judge should be ashamed of himself,” he said.
Shawn Hubler Contributed reports.
