By Miranda Devine
A federal judge on Saturday issued a temporary restraining order blocking President Trump from sending Oregon National Guard troops to Portland to defend federal agents from violent attacks by black bloc militants who surround the ICE facility every night.
Obama-appointed District Judge Michael Simon was convinced by lawyers for Oregon that the attacks were peaceful.
This flies in the face of footage from Fox News and “citizen journalists” chronicling violence every night as Antifa mobs hurl rocks at federal agents and their vehicles, assault journalists, and block traffic while Portland police stand by.
In fact, Portland police are doing worse than nothing: They have been filmed actively gathering complaints from Antifa thugs who claim they were maced or roughed up by federal agents.
When called for backup, these pretend cops respond that they “don’t have the resources,” according to court documents tendered in Oregon’s lawsuit.
After “citizen journalist” Katie Daviscourt was given a black eye by an Antifa type who attacked her with a flagpole last week, Portland police ignored her entreaties to arrest her assailant.
But the next night, they arrested her colleague Nick Sortor and charged him with disorderly conduct after he got into a one-sided scuffle with an aggressive group of black bloc militants who pushed him to the ground and broke his camera.
After spending the night in a cell, Sortor told Fox News that the Portland jail was “weirdly empty because they don’t actually arrest criminals around here, just people like me that report on what’s actually happening on the ground …
“If what I was doing was disorderly, what do you call people with megaphones at 3 in the morning lighting fires in the middle of the street?”
Under orders from the Democrats who run the city, there’s no question that Portland cops are taking sides against the federal government, even as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has revealed that her officers are being threatened with doxxing campaigns and even $10,000 bounties to kill them.
This is why Trump ordered troops into Portland. He has now bypassed Simon’s ruling by deploying California National Guard troops instead, only to prompt yet another Democratic lawsuit, this time from California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
It shouldn’t be this hard for the president to do the job the American people elected him to do.