When President Donald Trump criticized U.S. District Court Judge Karin J. Immergut on Sunday for blocking his deployment of 200 members of the Oregon National Guard, it was evident he didn’t know who she was, despite having appointed her to the job.

“That judge ought to be ashamed of himself,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn.

Misgendering aside, Immergut’s former colleagues said Trump’s assessment couldn’t be further from the truth of who Immergut is.

“You don’t know Karin Immergut,” former U.S. Attorney Billy Williams said of Trump. “And I do and so do a lot of other people — she’s very well respected.”

Immergut, 64, is now at the center of one of the most consequential cases over executive authority in modern presidential history. Her decision will shape precedent over when a president can send federal troops into American cities and override the sovereignty of state governments. If the White House chooses to further circumvent that order, it would lay a foundation for a constitutional crisis.

Former colleagues, including judges and federal prosecutors from across the ideological spectrum, describe Immergut as exceptionally qualified, immune to political influence and versed in high-stakes cases. Her work has riled Democrats and Republicans alike: In the 1990s she investigated President Bill Clinton as part of Kenneth Starr’s team, and as a judge in 2023 she ruled against sheriffs and gun advocates who argued Oregon’s gun control laws violated the Second Amendment.

“She’s an honest and careful reasoner and absolutely committed to the Constitution,” said Oregon’s Federal Public Defender Lisa Hay, who has known Immergut for two decades. Hay argued cases against Immergut as a prosecutor and before her as a judge.

When Immergut temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s troop deployment — first on Saturday and then again Sunday — she said it was because the facts on the ground didn’t provide a legal basis for it.

“There’s no showing that military help is necessary to protect law enforcement or the one federal building for ICE,” she told attorneys from the Trump administration.

Trump, his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and many conservative voices have since painted Immergut as someone who isn’t taking public safety threats seriously.

By her own telling, public safety is the reason Immergut entered the legal profession.

‘She has no fear’

Immergut grew up in Brooklyn, where she developed a “constant vigilance” about the city’s crime, she told the Oregon State Bar Association in 2004.

Her parents were Austrian and Swedish immigrants with backgrounds in chemistry and math. Her dad fled Austria to escape Nazis in the 1940s. They wanted her to pursue a career in science. But Immergut told the bar she was fascinated by what drove people to commit crime and how society could deal with it.

“My parents taught me to be honest, work hard and treat others with dignity and respect,” Immergut told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018 during her judicial confirmation hearing.

“I’ve become keenly aware that judges and our staff are the face of our judicial system,” she told the committee. “How we treat people has a tremendous impact on the public’s trust in our democracy and the rule of law.”

Immergut’s public service career began when she joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, shortly after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley Law School.

Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, was Immergut’s supervisor at the time and directed training for new federal prosecutors.

“I affectionately called it rookie row, but she was anything but just a rookie. She has no fear,” Levenson said. “She’s a really nice person – not that that’s required – but, she is. She just doesn’t have a lot of ego. She doesn’t posture."

Immergut later became a prosecutor for Multnomah County, where Janice Wilson, a now-retired circuit court judge who presided over many of Immergut’s cases, called her “really smart, extremely diligent in her preparation and very ethical and principled.”

The two became friendly as colleagues after Immergut was later appointed as a circuit court judge. Wilson also presided over Immergut’s wedding to Portland attorney Jim McDermott, who represented Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union during a 2019 impeachment inquiry of Trump.

Levenson and Wilson each separately described Immergut as someone who will follow the facts, regardless of who appointed her to the bench.

“I don’t think she’s at all been somebody who does her job because of any political leanings,” she said.

Immergut, a non-affiliated voter since July, was a registered Republican for decades.

But she was a registered Democrat in the 1990s before she temporarily left her job as a prosecutor in Multnomah County to join Starr’s investigation of President Clinton for his dealings around the Whitewater Development Corporation.

A ‘maelstrom of controversy’

Immergut’s family urged her not to join the Starr investigation.

“My parents felt, ‘Do you really want to enter that maelstrom of controversy?’” Immergut told The Oregonian in 1998 after the months-long inquiry.

But Immergut saw it as a new challenge. Everyone wanted to see what was going on from the inside, she told the newspaper, and she had the opportunity.

The case consumed her for months. She would work on it all day and stay up til 2 a.m. watching news coverage of it, she said. She recalled how unnerving it was being known and called out by name by members of the press on her way to and from the courthouse.

“I’m a pretty apolitical person,” she told The Oregonian at the time. “I felt that being conservative or liberal had nothing to do with it. I didn’t go in with any anti-Clinton bias.”

In Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation, Starr credited Immergut for her handling of Monica Lewinsky’s deposition. He recalled Immergut’s insistence on including explicit details in their report that contradicted the president’s claims that he had no sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

In 2003, President George W. Bush appointed Immergut to be the U.S. Attorney in Oregon, the state’s top federal prosecutor. Concern over terrorism threats loomed over her time in the office.

“I spend a lot of time just worrying, are we doing everything we can to make this area safe?” she told the Oregon Bar Association in 2004.

That same year, Immergut prosecuted a case involving Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongfully accused of a train bombing in Spain. The case became international news.

“I remember Karin handling the Brandon Mayfield matter with absolute grace,” said Dwight Holton, a former Oregon U.S. Attorney whom Immergut hired as an assistant federal prosecutor.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had mistakenly connected Mayfield to a Madrid train bombing after Spanish police pulled a latent fingerprint off unexploded detonators found at the train station. Mayfield spent several weeks in jail. The fingerprint was later connected to another person.

“Karin was absolutely determined to get to the bottom of it,” Holton said, “both recognizing the interest if in fact this person had been involved in it, which he wasn’t, but also recognizing the reality that that if he wasn’t, then it was a serious issue with respect to his rights.”

Mayfield’s attorney, Steve Wax, later wrote a book about the incident, “When Kafka Comes to America.” Wax said the FBI made a mistake in the case, but that Immergut handled it professionally.

“I did not find her to be in any way a zealot. I found her to be a professional prosecutor,” said Wax, who has known the judge for 25 years. “She seemed to have a sound understanding of the power that a prosecutor had and the limits that a prosecutor had to be conscious of in his or her actions.”

When Trump nominated Immergut in 2018 to become a federal judge, she had the support of not only most Republicans, but also Oregon’s two Democratic senators.

“I’m really pleased to see the quality of you judges,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, told Immergut and a fellow nominee during a 2018 confirmation hearing. “I have every confidence in the two of you, I’m proud of both of you.”

‘Right where she needs to be’

Trump’s troop deployment isn’t the first time Immergut has issued rulings that angered Republicans.

After voters narrowly passed Oregon’s Measure 114, which regulated high-capacity magazines and required a permit to purchase a firearm in the state, firearms groups challenged the constitutionality of the measure.

Immergut found herself with a highly contentious case over the meaning of the Second Amendment. The job was made more complicated by a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that changed the legal test for how courts should weigh firearm controls.

As she is now with the National Guard deployment, Immergut was tasked with weighing a legal issue with significant implications but minimal precedent. Over the course of a week, a parade of historians and other gun experts testified before Immergut in Portland about weapons regulations around the time of the county’s founding.

Ultimately, she found Measure 114 did not violate the U.S. Constitution. That decision was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where it’s still pending.

“She’s not left or right or anything,” said Williams, who worked with Immergut as a prosecutor in Multnomah County and Oregon’s U.S. Attorney’s Office. “She’s right where she needs to be, which is ‘Where are the facts and what’s the law. What’s the right thing to do?’”

Williams served as U.S. Attorney during the first Trump administration, including Portland’s 2020 protests. He agreed with Immergut that the city’s streets are not in comparable chaos to that year.

“I was in the middle of that,” he said, “and it’s not what’s happening now.”

He said Immergut is absolutely correct in her assessment on the troop deployment.

“We’re still a nation of laws and, and they pertain to everybody including the administration,” Williams said. “Good for her because she’s calling it out in a court of law.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/07/karin-immergut-judge-trump-portland-troop-deployment/