Over the weekend, President Donald Trump tried repeatedly to send the U.S. military into two more American cities—including to Portland, Oregon, “in direct contravention” of a judge’s order on Saturday—and against the wishes or requests of both states’ elected governors.
The state of Oregon sued the White House last week over Trump’s decision to send 200 Oregon National Guard troops to Portland following the president’s claim that the city is “ravaged” by war, with “ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” The troops were scheduled to begin arriving in Portland early this week, prompting U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut to issue a ruling on the lawsuit Saturday.
“The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts,” wrote Immergut, who was appointed by Trump. “There is not a legal basis to bring federalized National Guard members into Oregon,” she told the administration’s lawyers, stressing, “You have to have a colorable claim that Oregon conditions require it, but you don’t.”
“This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Immergut said in her ruling. She added, “Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.”
So on Sunday, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth ordered 300 California National Guard troops to Oregon, which prompted California to join Oregon’s lawsuit against the administration’s alleged abuse of power. Hegseth’s decision to use California troops in this instance “is the legal equivalent of a child kicking a sibling after his mother says ‘violence is never acceptable, so I order you to stop hitting your brother,’” observed Liza Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice. “If any other litigant pulled a stunt like this, they (and their lawyers) might well be facing sanctions.”
After an emergency hearing later Sunday, Immergut again froze the deployment of National Guard troops to Oregon for two weeks, and extended her freeze to cover all 50 states.
Then Sunday evening, Trump ordered the Texas National Guard to “Illinois, Oregon, and other [unspecified] locations throughout the United States,” for 60 days (PDF), including “up to 400 members of the Texas National Guard for deployment in Portland, Chicago, and elsewhere, under Title 10, section 12406.” That is the same legal justification the White House used in June to order troops to protect immigration-enforcement officers in California.
Notable: Last month, District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the June order violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the military from conducting civilian law enforcement unless authorized by Congress—and that’s just what the troops were doing as they tagged along for patrols and carried out riot response as well as traffic and crowd control. “The ruling is historic, as it is the first time a court has issued an injunction to stop a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878,” wrote Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice. However, the White House appealed Breyer’s ruling, which put a hold on his decision.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker: “No officials from the federal government called me directly to discuss or coordinate” the 400 Guardsmen from Texas. “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” he wrote on social media Sunday night. “It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.”
“I call on Governor Abbott to immediately withdraw any support for this decision and refuse to coordinate,” Pritzker said. “There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation,” he added, and said, “The brave men and women who serve in our national guards must not be used as political props. This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”
But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is all in, responding to Pritzker on social media: “I fully authorized the President to call up 400 members of the Texas National Guard to ensure safety for federal officials. You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it. No Guard can match the training, skill, and expertise of the Texas National Guard. They defend our country with pride. America must also know that Texas still has thousands of National Guard assisting with the Border security.”
Reminder: Just four years ago, Abbott argued the federal government had practically no authority over his National Guard when it came to enforcing COVID vaccinations.
The state of Illinois is now suing the White House over this latest National Guard order, Gov. Pritzker announced today on social media.
Legal reax: “We are watching the adjudication of some of the most important constitutional issues of federalism, executive discretion, and judicial review since the 19th c[entury],” argues Lindsay Cohn of the U.S. Naval War College. She lists a series of possibly-applicable judicial precedents going back to 1827, and finds that the related matters “haven’t been adjudicated in a long time, and there is at least room in the jurisprudence to find that the earlier precedents are quite narrow.”
Second opinion: “Texas proudly invading Illinois. It’s hard to describe the level of potential constitutional crisis here,” Bradley Moss said on social media.
One more thing: “Reuters took a closer look at violent crime in D.C. after President Trump began a show of force” in August, Brad Heath of Reuters reports. “Despite the big investment of federal resources, it’s really hard at this point to see any dramatic changes.” Story and data, here.
Extra reading:
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1884, the U.S. founded the Naval War College in Rhode Island.
Around the Defense Department
Hegseth says the U.S. military has blown up a fourth alleged drug-hauling boat. On Friday, the SecDef tweeted that “four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel” were killed “in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela.”
“Our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics,” Hegseth wrote, offering no evidence. You can read his tweet and watch a video clip of an explosion, here.
Reax: “If one man alone decides when and where America fights, we abandon the checks and balances that safeguard our democracy,” Sen. Jack Reed, D.-R.I., said in a statement.
Sea routes from Venezuela to U.S. territory, mapped by Philip Bump, a former Washington Post data reporter.
Hegseth fires Navy chief of staff, a Trump appointee who helped reorganize the service’s policy and budgeting offices. Jon Harrison had worked with Secretary John Phelan on the changes, which among other things sought to reduce the power of the Navy undersecretary. “The sudden ouster, according to two defense officials and a former defense official, follows the confirmation this week of Navy Undersecretary Hung Cao,” Politico reported Friday.
Army’s Future Soldier Preparatory Course continues to boost recruiting. “Mr. Trump’s election win and a higher unemployment rate among people ages 16 to 24 could have played a small role in improving recruiting, Army officials said. The Army’s recent success, though, would not have been possible without the program at Fort Jackson. About 22 percent of the Army’s more than 61,000 new recruits this year came in through the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, a senior Army official said,” the New York Times reported off an August visit to the program.
Rewind to a year ago, when the program helped the service break a two-year streak of missing recruiting goals. In 2024, the FSPC contributed some 13,000 soldiers, more than a quarter of the Army’s total recruits for the year, Defense One reported in September 2024.
NGA wants to put its idle PCs to work. “Analysts will be plenty busy at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s new St. Louis campus, but they won’t use their powerful workstations around the clock. So General Dynamics Information Technology is helping NGA stitch together the high-end PCs so their unused compute power can be harnessed even when their humans are elsewhere,” reports Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams.
Around the world
A wave of Russian airstrikes across Ukraine. Early on Sunday, 53 ballistic and cruise missiles and 496 drones struck nine regions of the country, Ukrainian officials said, adding that the barrages appeared to target civilian infrastructure.
At least five people died in Lviv, a western-Ukrainian city that had earlier in the war been seen as a haven from the fighting. Saturday’s attack was the largest in the region since the war began. AP reports, here.
China is secretly bartering for Iranian oil, a financial lifeline for the regime. “Iranian oil is shipped to China—Tehran’s biggest customer—and, in return, state-backed Chinese companies build infrastructure in Iran,” the Wall Street Journal says in an exclusive report. “Completing the loop, the officials say, are a Chinese state-owned insurer that calls itself the world’s largest export-credit agency and a Chinese financial entity that is so secretive that its name couldn’t be found on any public list of Chinese banks or financial firms.” More, here.
Zoom out: the scheme is just part of the world’s growing “shadow economy” that “are no longer peripheral nuisances but core strategic terrain,” Army Maj. Benjamin Backsmeier wrote in a recent op-ed for Defense One. “Trade executed outside regulatory, taxation, and enforcement frameworks prolongs wars, defangs sanctions, frays alliances, and helps rogue governments and groups survive and thrive. These flows have long been treated as problems for law enforcement, but military and defense policymakers and planners must increase their efforts to account for and stem them.” Read that, here.
Lastly today: China’s infowar in the Philippines. Reuters has a 2,000-word deep dive on a 2021 campaign by a Chinese company that created fake social-media accounts to push narratives as Beijing’s naval forces ramped up efforts against the archipelagic nation—and worked to drive a wedge between Manila and Washington. Read that, here.
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