By Diana Novak Jones, Dietrich Knauth and Jeenah Moon
CHICAGO (Reuters) -A federal judge in Chicago on Thursday said she would temporarily block U.S. President Donald Trump’s deployment of hundreds of National Guard soldiers in Illinois, five days after another U.S. judge blocked a similar deployment in Portland, Oregon.
U.S. District Judge April Perry’s decision followed more than two hours of arguments from lawyers for the U.S. government and the state of Illinois, which sued the Trump administration over the deployment.
On Thursday morning, Guard soldiers had been seen patrolling at a suburban Chicago immigration facility that has become a frequent target for protests in recent weeks.
Separately, a three-judge panel at a federal appeals court in San Francisco on Thursday appeared likely to set aside the ruling blocking Trump’s Portland deployment, which would clear the way for hundreds of soldiers to enter that city.
The outcomes of the two cases could have significant implications for Trump’s expanding campaign to deploy military personnel to the streets of U.S. cities over the objections from their Democratic leaders.
Government lawyers in both courts said the Guard soldiers were needed to protect federal officers and property from demonstrators. The Democratic governors of Illinois and Oregon have accused Trump of deliberately mischaracterizing small, mostly peaceful protests as violent and dangerous in order to justify National Guard deployments.
In delivering her decision on Thursday from the bench, Perry said she was having difficulty lending credence to the government’s claims of violence during protests at the immigration facility in Broadview, Illinois.
She cited a ruling from another Chicago judge, also issued on Thursday, that temporarily limited the ability of federal agents to use force to disperse crowds. Protesters and journalists had sought that order, saying federal agents had injured them at the Broadview center.
Perry said the behavior of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers has prompted the protests, and that deploying Guard soldiers to Broadview would “only add fuel to the fire that defendants themselves have started.”
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago, Dietrich Knauth in New York and Jeenah Moon in Broadview, Illinois; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York, Nate Raymond in Boston and Emily Schmall and Renee Hickman in Chicago; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Mark Porter and David Gregorio)
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