Court of Appeals Overturns Its Own Ruling on the Portland National Guard Deployment

It was a quiet but remarkable admission. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, has overturned its own decision in the case State of Oregon, City of Portland v. Donald J. Trump. The order was signed by Chief Judge Mary H. Murguia, who, after a vote by the active judges, decided to rehear the case in full bench. This means that the ruling which had approved Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Portland is no longer valid.

In the official order it states: “Upon the vote of a majority of the nonrecused active judges, it is ordered that this case be reheard en banc pursuant to Rule 40(c) of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. The decision issued on October 20, 2025, is vacated.” Referring to Circuit Rule 40-3, the court made clear that the previous decision is fully vacated – it has no legal effect whatsoever.

The case, registered under number No. 25-6268, stems from a lawsuit filed by the State of Oregon and the City of Portland against then President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. The proceedings were initially held in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, Portland Division, before being moved to the Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The background is delicate. The deployment in question was based on an image of chaos that never actually existed. The Trump administration had claimed that Portland was once again in flames in 2025 – a repeat of the unrest from 2020. But that was a lie. Several media outlets, including us, who were the first to expose the matter, were able to prove that the images the White House presented as evidence of “ongoing violence” originated from the George Floyd protests five years earlier.

Here are the links to our previous investigations and articles: “The Great Lie of Portland – How Fox News Feeds Trump and Turns a City into an Enemy Image” under the link: https://kaizen-blog.org/en/die-grosse-luege-von-portland-wie-fox-news-trump-fuettert-und-eine-stadt-zum-feindbild-macht/ and the article: “The Great Lie of Portland II – Trump’s Threat, Fox’s Images and the Truth on the Street” under the link: https://kaizen-blog.org/en/die-grosse-luege-von-portland-ii-trumps-drohung-fox-bilder-und-die-wahrheit-auf-der-strasse/

They showed the same streets, the same courthouse, the same nights – but from 2020. All of the footage came from Portland, but was rebroadcast years later by Fox News and presented there as current scenes of an alleged uprising. The images showed the area around the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, where demonstrators and security forces had clashed for days during the summer of 2020. This manipulation was no minor matter. It formed the basis of the legal argument used to justify the deployment of the National Guard. Without these images, there would have been no tangible state of emergency. The fact that the Ninth Circuit has now withdrawn its earlier ruling is therefore also an indirect correction of the political misrepresentation at the heart of this case.

Presiding Judge Murguia, who signed the order, has been a member of the court since 2011 and is considered a restrained but uncompromising jurist when it comes to constitutional questions of executive power. Her concise, factual tone in the order underscores the gravity of the move: the court has not only changed its mind – it has withdrawn its own decision. Such a thing is rare. En banc hearings – retrials before all active judges of a court of appeals – are only granted in exceptional cases, for instance when a ruling is considered fundamentally flawed or constitutionally questionable.

In the formulation highly damaging to Trump – “the decision is vacated” – there is far more than legal routine. It is a quiet admission that politics, propaganda, and the judiciary came too close to one another in this case, that evidence provided by journalists was not taken into account – and that the truth, painstakingly documented, ultimately finds its place. For Portland, it is delayed justice. For the American judiciary, it is a sign that self-correction is possible – even when it bears its own name.