Changing The Facts May Change The Outcome

 I got this from Schooley:

“Am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening?”

Turns out it was a real thing.

During a Sunday morning phone interview with NBC White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, though, Trump made some remarks that seemed to indicate he might be backing off his military plan for Portland. Trump referenced a weekend conversation with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and he alluded to being told by Kotek that the reality in Portland is different from what's being portrayed to him.

"I spoke to the governor, she was very nice," Trump said. "But I said, 'Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening? My people tell me different.' They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place...it looks like terrible."

Trump is stuck on the events in Portland from his first Administration. Which, if not a sign of dementia, is certainly a sign of obsession.

Kotek said she told Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Saturday morning that troops are not needed, and she believes Trump does not have the authority to deploy the military to Portland.

"We can manage our own local public safety needs," Kotek said. "There is no insurrection, there is no threat to national security."

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said the 'necessary' number of troops needed that Trump referred to in his social media post is "zero."

It could also be Trump is watching the wrong news station:

Sept. 4: Fox News airs a report about the Labor Day protest with footage of 2025 protests outside ICE. Mixed in misleadingly are clips from 2020 protests. One shows a federal officer pepper spraying a person in downtown Portland. Another shows protesters burning the base of the Thompson Elk Fountain.

As we will see, protesters have been arrested, starting in June and continuing until the present; but there hasn’t been the violence seen there in 2020.

Trump has backed down from "military" to National Guard. If past is prologue, the soldiers will be raking leaves and picking up trash.

Portland and the state of Oregon have filed suit against the deployment. Unless there has been damage to federal buildings, I’m not sure protesting an ICE facility constitutes grounds to deploy the NG by POTUS. 

Oregon is in the 9th Circuit, along with California. In the Los Angeles challenge, a panel of the 9th Circuit upheld an injunction against California based, in part, on:

Defendants presented evidence of protesters’ interference with the ability of federal officers to execute the laws, including evidence that protesters threw objects at Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles, “pinned down”several Federal Protective Service officers defending federal property by throwing “concrete chunks, bottles of liquid, and other objects,” and used “large rolling commercial dumpsters as a battering ram” in an attempt to breach the parking garage of a federal building. Plaintiffs’ own submissions stated that some protesters threw objects, including Molotov cocktails, and vandalized property. According to the declarations submitted by defendants, these activities significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute the laws. Under a highly deferential standard of review, defendants presented facts that permitted the panel to conclude that the President had a colorable basis for invoking § 12406(3).

There have been protests and arrests in Portland, but where the protesters in LA burned cars and blocked ICE vehicles, in Portland the people who blocked one ICE vehicle, were quickly arrested.

July 4: A large protest outside the ICE facility leads to four more arrests on federal charges, bringing the number of people federal authorities have arrested to 22. Portland police monitor the protest from an airplane and bike officers remind protesters they can’t set off fireworks but don’t make any arrests as federal officers and protesters clash.

July 8: Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan name-checks Portland, pledging that immigration agents would be “doubling down, tripling down” on enforcement. “I’m going to Portland,” Homan said. “I’m going out there. They are not going to bully us.”

July 11: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says anarchists and antifa-affiliated groups in Portland were publishing names, photos and personal addresses of ICE officers.

July 19: Around 60 people gathered at the ICE building and several called 911 dispatchers about an altercation with a counterprotester armed with a pepperball gun, according to 911 call records. The crowd dwindled to about 30 by around midnight. “The groups were low energy and seated quietly,” a police sergeant wrote in an email to his superiors, records show.

July 25: The first hearing begins in Multnomah County Circuit Court for a lawsuit seeking to force the city to enforce noise ordinances around the ICE building. Assistant Chief Craig Dobson testifies that federal officers are “actually instigating and causing some of the ruckus that’s occurring down there.”

Aug. 14: Multnomah County Senior Judge Ellen Rosenblum, a former Oregon attorney general, rules police aren’t required to enforce noise rules at protests outside the ICE facility.

Aug. 20: Homan visits Portland’s ICE facility. In a message posted to social media platform X, Homan says he visited to let agents “know that President Trump and I have their six” — a reference to having someone’s back.

Aug 21: A protester who was shoved from behind and tackled by federal authorities notifies the Department of Homeland Security he plans to sue, according to a copy of his tort claim notice. The protester, Daryn Herzberg, claimed that federal officers pinned him down during a protest Aug. 13 and “held him in teargas” for several minutes. Officers tackled him again three days later, he claimed, with one of them repeatedly hitting Herzberg’s face into the ground.

Aug. 26: Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer tells Trump, “I hope you will come to Portland, Oregon and crack down.”

Sept. 1: Following a large protest downtown, over 100 people march from a nearby park to the ICE building. Some protesters bring a makeshift guillotine. Federal officers deploy chemical gas and pepperballs at the crowd.

Whether these facts amount to “significantly impeding the ability of federal officers to execute the laws” may yield a different outcome without the violence reported in California. Change the facts, change the outcome, and this is not the record in California. Here, federal officers have made arrests, and controlled crowds, and executed federal law for three months, much longer than the protests lasted in LA.

But what an appellate court panel sees, depends on that panel.

Oregon AG Rayfield: If you really wanted public safety, you wouldn’t threaten to send the United States military into any city.

What you’d do is pick up the phone and work toward collaboration—finding out what resources a community actually needs.

I know for a fact, from… pic.twitter.com/ndaJRlxP0g

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2025

I know for a fact, from talking to cities across Oregon and across the country, that if you pick up the phone and ask, “What do you need? What could be helpful?” the answer would not be the United States military.