White House Confident Courts Will Greenlight Their Portland Plan. Trump Is Telegraphing Plan B.

President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act if federal courts bar him from sending National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon.

It’s a tactic the president has been anxious to use, but several key allies and White House officials don’t think he’ll need it. At least for now.

They are confident the Trump administration will prevail in court after a federal judge twice blocked the White House’s efforts to send troops into Oregon because she ruled that the president’s move lacked legal basis. The administration has appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and would almost certainly take the case to the Supreme Court if needed.

“To be frank, if somebody wants 20-1 odds that this temporary restraining order would survive Supreme Court review, I’d give it to them,” said Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at The Article III Project, a Trump-aligned legal organization founded in 2019. “That’s how strongly I think this is doomed to be reversed.”

But even as the White House insists the president is on firm legal ground, Trump has made clear he has a plan B: the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that gives the president emergency powers to deploy troops on U.S. soil to quell what the president deems an insurrection.

“If I had to enact it, I’d do it,” Trump said in the Oval Office Monday. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

Trump declined to invoke the Insurrection Act earlier this year in the context of the emergency at the southern border, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recommended against it. But in recent weeks, the White House has been increasingly building the case to use the move in blue cities, with Trump repeatedly calling rioters in Portland “insurrectionists.”

Its invocation would fulfill a long-term desire of the president. He views it as the epitome of presidential power and considered invoking it to quell unrest during the George Floyd protests in 2020. Aides suggested it again after he lost the 2020 election, and he talked about it extensively during the 2024 campaign. And allies discussed it in the context of the 2024 election, concerned that Trump’s victory would spark violent protest movements.

It would mark major intensification in the president’s crackdown on crime, immigration and riots, making his promises to use the military for domestic law enforcement on the campaign trail a reality.

“This is what Trump wanted to do in his first term, and now he’s putting these measures in place,” said Miles Taylor, who worked for Trump’s DHS during the first term but has since become a critic of the president. “One of the things that was an active conversation inside the Trump administration in the first term, when I was even there, was that in a second term, they would need to do as many extreme things as fast as possible to get them run up to the Supreme Court as quickly as possible.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said “amid the ongoing violent riots and lawlessness, that local leaders like [Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker] have refused to step in to quell,” that the president has “exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets.”

“President Trump will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities,” she added.

U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut — whom Trump appointed to the bench during his first term — issued her first ruling against the president’s initial deployment of the Oregon Guard on Saturday. In response, the administration sent troops from California — a move the judge decried as an effort to circumvent her original order. She blocked the administration from doing that, too, prompting White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to slam the ruling as another example of the “legal insurrection” taking place against the Trump administration.

Wade Miller, a senior adviser at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think-tank formerly run by Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought, said Trump is not only within his right to deploy federal troops, he is obligated to do so.

“If the law is that if you’re here illegally, and then you must be removed, then he is required to do that,” said Miller, of the Center for Renewing America. “And if he has instructed ICE agents to do that ... and there are people who are not just protesting, but actively trying to impede, or in some instances, use violence against federal authorities, the president is also constitutionally required to protect his federal law enforcement.”

The Center for Renewing America last year published a paper on how the Insurrection Act could be used to help secure the border, and the document heavily hinted that this could apply to U.S. cities, he said.

“If the president were to invoke the Insurrection Act with Portland specifically, I think it’s an open and shut slam dunk that would be upheld in the courts,” he said.

A president has not invoked the Insurrection Act since 1992, when former President George H. W. Bush sent troops to quell riots in Los Angeles, though that was done in accordance with the mayor’s and governor’s wishes. The situation in Portland or Chicago, which Trump has described as lawless hellscapes, is very different, with local officials vociferously opposing the moves.

Portland being at the center of the administration’s latest legal battle is no accident. Trump’s obsession with the liberal city dates back to the summer of 2020, when protesters gathered against police violence for more than 170 days. While many protests were peaceful, some rioters that summer looted shops, tore down statues and clashed with police.

Now, protests at a federal ICE field office in South Portland have been on the White House’s radar. The demonstrations peaked in June, when police made arrests and issued a riot declaration. Since then, protests have continued daily, a mixture of larger, peaceful daytime protests and smaller, sometimes hostile groups coming out after dark.

There’s been frustration among locals in the neighborhood, as well as fears among some police officers that federal intervention could further fuel tensions. And some locals say the situation isn’t being accurately captured by Democratic leaders in Oregon or the White House.

“You have Gov. Tina Kotek, Mayor Keith Wilson … the congressional delegation saying ‘nothing to see here.’ It’s all farmers markets and puppies and urban utopian rainbows,” said Ben West, county commissioner in Clackamas, just south of Portland. “And then you have … the Trump administration saying it’s World War Two. It’s a war zone, right? And neither one of those are true. The truth lies a little bit in the middle.”

Trump’s battle with Portland is just the latest in his expansion of the use of the military on U.S. soil — as he says American cities should be the “training ground” for troops. The president has already surged federal troops to Los Angeles and D.C., while also deploying Texas Guard troops to Chicago, a move that has already been hit with a legal challenge. He has also launched a federal intervention in Memphis, Tennessee, in coordination with Republican Gov. Bill Lee.

Democrats have warned against the president’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Judiciary and Armed Services Committees, said there’s no “factual or legal justification” for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act, and has renewed his call on Congress to reform the law.

“Clearly there’s nothing like the threat of rebellion or invasion that would justify using the Insurrection Act,” Blumenthal said. “That’s probably the reason he hasn’t used it up to now.”

Joe Gould contributed to this report.