(soothing music) - Immigration enforcement out of this administration is not just about immigration enforcement.

It's about trying to show that the president's powers can be maximized.

(crowd shouting) - The president is entitled to say enough is enough and bring in the National Guard to reinforce the regular forces.

- I think the prospect of having military troops coming into Portland was frightening.

This became a bit of a tipping point and having the ability as an attorney within this office to help in efforts to prevent that felt very important to me.

- What is the limitation here on presidential power?

- It felt like Portland won.

- [Narrator] We're looking at the Trump administration's aggressive immigration deportation plan and attempts to deploy the National Guard in Portland.

In this final chapter, the Limits of Power.

- Gotcha, now I have to carry you.

(Jackie speaking Spanish) (Abigail speaking Spanish) (Jackie speaking Spanish) (Abigail speaking Spanish) - (speaking Spanish) I decided to take my mom and my kids to go and see my sister who resides in Canada, and we decided to meet at Peach Arch Park and we got arrested.

(speaking Spanish) The same guy who arrested us, he told someone, "I'm bringing you another body."

(music) That was me.

That is how they express about us.

- Wait, bubba.

Come back!

- I had gotten tipped off to Jackie Merlos's case in July 2025.

(music) We had learned that Jackie was in the U.S.

lawfully and had a pending U Visa and a work permit.

Her and her husband had been working in the U.S.

for more than two decades.

(music) (music continues) Jackie, her mother, and her four kids were all being kept in this facility in Ferndale, Washington.

This was a facility that we'd already reported on that had been described like a jail cell.

- [Jackie] They treat us like a criminal, even knowing that my kids have citizenship.

Sometimes we would spend eight hours in the room, you know, kids need to get their energy out and they know that they shouldn't treat us that way.

And my kids asking me, "Mom, why you haven't talked to daddy?

Why they didn't let us talk to daddy?"

Like all these questions.

And I said, "Just keep praying."

- [Narrator] President Trump focused much of the first hundred days of his second term on immigration enforcement.

- Birthright, that's a big one.

- [Narrator] He made it harder for immigrants to stay in the country and tightened security at the borders.

(music) - It invokes various executive powers relating to the ongoing invasion at the southern border.

- [Narrator] This led to record high numbers in immigration detention facilities.

- This administration has been claiming that its focus is to go after the worst of the worst.

But in fact, what we're seeing is a huge change in the administration taking people who were in kind of safe statuses.

They had authorization to be here, to work, to become part of their communities.

We are starting to really see hundreds of thousands of people losing that lawful status, that lawful protection.

They may have U.S.

citizen children here and suddenly those U.S.

citizen children's lives are upended if either their parent is arrested or they've realized that their parent could be arrested.

- As the Department of Homeland Security was preparing to deport Jackie with her kids, they fast tracked the kids' passports in order to fly the whole family to Honduras.

They were at the airport when an immigration judge halted the deportation and a family friend had to drive from Portland to Seattle to pick them up.

Jackie was among the first wave of detentions in the second Trump administration that made headlines.

And in fact, it was one of the many cases that set off protests in Portland.

People were enraged.

- [Crowd] Immigrants are welcome here, no hate, no fear.

- Immigration is an area where the executive branch, the administration can say, "We need more power.

We need more power in order to handle these crises."

And now because our immigration actions have triggered these protests, (crowd chanting) ... say it clear!

can the executive branch use its power to quell protests and dissent and can we get extraordinary power to do that?

And so if there are immigration crisis after immigration crisis, if we have to go after the worst of the worst here and we have to solve a border crisis here and we have to solve a protest there, it's kind of hijacking the immigration system in order to obtain that much greater executive power.

- Around the same time that Jackie and her four kids were picked up, within days, agents were at their home in Portland and picked up Jackie's husband, Carlos.

Carlos was very quickly taken to the Tacoma ICE facility and ultimately deported to Honduras.

- They took me to Tacoma Detention Center.

It was a cell, prison - with a sink and a bathroom and cement floor.

- When people hear that the immigration system is fundamentally not a criminal system, people are really surprised.

And I think that's because the rhetoric around immigration is so keyed to criminal.

We're going after the worst of the worst.

We're going after the criminals.

- [Cameraperson] That's my mom.

- When the public sees all of the tools and accoutrements that ICE uses to arrest people and put them in something that looks an awful lot like a jail, even though it's an administrative facility, it's a detention facility, it looks an awful lot like they're arresting criminals, but in fact they're carrying out civil law most of the time.

- While Jackie's in the ICE facility in Tacoma, she's hiring an attorney to try to take legal action against the federal government for her detention.

- (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) Okay, Jackie, (speaking Spanish) But not fighting, you know, physically.

We're gonna bend our knees, we're gonna pray.

- [Narrator] While Jackie was fighting her case from inside the Tacoma Detention Facility, the City of Portland was about to get into a legal battle of its own.

- Protests took different tones at different times.

In mid-June, the numbers were high.

(crowd chanting) It got violent.

(gun booming) (crowd shouting) Between August and September, a lot of the activity died down.

- The Trump administration starts to argue that these protests are getting really big and that they're not actually getting the support and the help that they need from the City of Portland and local police.

And they also say that these protests are becoming actually so disruptive that they're preventing the federal government from enforcing immigration law.

- Portland Antifa, Seattle Antifa, they've put federal buildings and federal law enforcement, federal courts under siege.

- The Portland Police Bureau who was responding to these protests were monitoring them, but deciding that they weren't violating city ordinances, for example.

They weren't...the crowd behavior wasn't rising to the need that the Portland Police Bureau had to step in.

The federal law enforcement who were there, however, were arguing that they needed the local police's help and they weren't getting it.

(crowd talking) - September 27th, Trump announced that he would be sending the National Guard to Portland, and then the following day, Hegseth wrote the memo ordering that it happen.

(music) (mouse click) - Portland, Oregon, this place is a nightmare.

It's probably, it's certainly not the biggest, but it's one of the worst, it's brutal.

They go after our ICE people who are great patriots and tough job too, but they love it.

They love it because they're cleaning up our country.

- We're not on fire.

We're not war-ravaged.

So to have to go into court and prove that felt ridiculous.

- Feds out of Portland.

- Feds out of Portland.

- When we throw more rhetoric and more force at an issue, especially one where people have begun to protest, I think we see more reaction, more protest rather than less.

Portland has a pretty strong reaction to feeling invaded.

- I don't see no riot here.

- I don't see no riot here.

- Why are you in riot gear?

- Why are you in riot gear?

- We were seeking to restrain President Trump from sending the National Guard.

The city attorney for Portland called me and the following Friday, we were in court with a temporary restraining order.

(music) So after Judge Immergut issued her opinion and her opinion said that Trump could not deploy the National Guard, Trump turned around and sought to deploy the California National Guard to Oregon.

(tense quiet music) - There's another hearing and Immergut tells the lawyer for the Trump administration, "Aren't defendants simply circumventing my order, which relies on the conditions in Portland?"

The hearing concludes with Judge Immergut actually issuing a second temporary restraining order, and then the Trump administration starts to appeal.

(music) - What was happening in Portland was happening in cities across the country.

- [Reporter] The guard was there to help carry.

- The governor's office said even leadership within the Illinois National Guard has communicated to the White House that the state does not require the military.

- Portland's different because it's the only case where it actually advances to trial.

It very quickly goes from a threat in late September to an actual courtroom and a hearing in front of a federal judge in late October.

(music) - This trial was probably the most chaotic that I've ever been involved in, and that's in large part due to taking an entire case from inception to trial in a month.

I think the argument that the Department of Justice was making on behalf of the Trump administration was ultimately frightening, essentially that President Trump was above reproach.

(computer mouse scroll) - I remember covering this trial really closely.

This was a legal question that had never been tried before.

Does the president have the authority in a situation like this to deploy the National Guard?

The law the President's trying to use allows the presidency to deploy the National Guard in cases of a rebellion, in cases of a foreign invasion, or to execute federal law.

And they were using this trial to make that argument, and watching it play out is one of the wildest things I've really ever seen in court.

(music) (bike passing by) - Judge Immergut looked night by night by night at what activities had been going on, and she concluded that the protests became manageable and that the federal government had sufficient civilian police to handle it.

- And what was amazing to watch was Judge Immergut basically pull off a trial in a month and issue a 106-page opinion that did answer a legal question.

What is the limitation here on presidential power?

In that opinion, she wrote, "Since that brief span of a few days in June, the protests outside the Portland ICE facility have been predominantly peaceful with only isolated and sporadic incidents of relatively low-level violence.

This court concludes that even given great deference to the president's determination, the president did not have a lawful basis to federalize the National Guard."

- I think it renewed some faith in the legal system for people to see that a Trump appointee was telling Trump no.

Portland was the, you know, David, Trump was the Goliath, and we won.

(music) - [Narrator] The ruling stopped troops from coming to Portland.

The Trump administration said it would appeal, but after a similar case in Chicago was punted by the Supreme Court, the legal ground beneath that effort began to shift.

- [Reporter] The decision represents a rare defeat for this administration by this conservative leaning court.

- Eventually, the administration quietly backed away.

- But we pulled it out.

We had a Supreme Court decision.

We could go back.

We're allowed to go back in.

- While the National Guard case got the door slammed shut, some of the most egregious conduct came in the months that followed.

There's two cases that start moving through the court system at the same time, right?

One of them deals with protesters who say their First Amendment rights were violated, infringed upon by federal law enforcement officers.

They're represented by the ACLU, and they point to things like widespread use of tear gas and pepper spray, really, you know, so much so that they felt they couldn't even go out and protest, right?

I mean, it was a viewpoint discrimination.

(flash bang) - The other case that was filed was on behalf of residents of the apartment complex kitty corner from the ICE facility.

What they were describing was tear gas seeping in through their windows and through their doors, wearing gas masks to bed.

It just speaks to the way that the, that the Trump administration is deploying tactics and deploying legal arguments that we don't... That we haven't typically seen before.

(air booming) - One major incident that really underscored both of these cases happened in late January.

Thousands of people began to actually march towards the ICE building.

It was a union-backed protest.

It was some faith groups.

It was a lot of families.

(crowd chanting) Mighty, mighty union.

Federal law enforcement officers responded by shooting tear gas and other munitions into a crowd that included elderly people, children.

(flash bang) (crowd shouting) (flash bang) It was chaos.

- There you go.

- Good job.

Good job.

Good job.

- And spit it all out.

Spit, spit, spit, spit.

- Good job.

- Owie... (flash bang) (crowd murmuring) (flash bang) (music) - The intersection outside the Portland ICE building is an interesting place to think about presidential power.

On the one hand, the National Guard didn't get deployed, right?

The powers of the presidency, they were checked.

On the other hand, there's these other cases, and the courts have indicated that they're far more willing to side with the president in those cases.

- I mean, I think what we've seen is the administration trying to identify, trying to create, you know, crisis number one, and then crisis number two, and then crisis number three.

And there's a use to doing that.

In other words, if there's a crisis, then it makes sense to give the government more powers to handle it.

If things had gone the other way and the judge had said, "No, it's okay to bring the military in.

It's okay to federalize the National Guard," I think things would've been really different, and that almost happened.

- Knowing the way the Department of Homeland Security went into Minneapolis after Portland and the tactics that they were using there... - Get back right now.

- [Reporter] Detaining for deportation those they say are illegal aliens with forceful pushback against it by enraged Minnesotans.

(wind) (music) - Seeing firsthand the way that the narrative that almost led the National Guard to be sent into Portland, how it was spun, you know, there was just this massive disconnect between what we were seeing outside the ICE building and what was being reported up to the Trump administration and in some cases, to national outlets.

It was really interesting to see how the federal government was going to and ultimately failed to uphold its image of the City of Portland.

- One thing we heard a lot of our experts talk about in our reporting was just the fact that this is a president that is intent on maximizing the authority that the executive branch, that the president has, right?

It was a very national, international story that also felt very local.

(crowd singing) (violin playing) - After months in custody, Jackie's case was dismissed, but the federal government still kept her in custody for two more weeks as they figured out whether or not they were going to appeal that dismissal.

It was only after that that she was finally reunited with her four children.

- Momma.

- Mommy.

- Mommy.

- Mom!

(Abigail squealing) (Jackie laughing) - You came back?

- Yes.

- [Cameraperson] She's back.

- [Jackie] When I got released, they just ran to me.

- Yippee.

Yay.

(children shouting) - And when I saw them, I said, "I'm not going to separate anymore.

We're going to be together."

- Okay.

- And I remember that day, I bent my knees again and I talked to my house, believe it or not.

Said, "House, I'm going to come here again."

That cost us so much that we have been working for.

- Okay, don't fall.

I know that you guys cannot... - Yeah, not having my husband here is really hard.

The provider of my house.

(music) They say, "Mom, Daddy is not there."

(music) (soccer ball being kicked) We were a team working together.

We were having a successful business.

And from being a family, from being six to being five.

But I have to think of my kids' future, they were born here, they are from here, and then I'm going to keep fighting for them because they deserve so much.

(chick chirping) Even if I have to put the pieces together, I'm going to start again.

(music) (music continues) (music continues) - [Narrator] The scene outside the Portland Ice Building looks very different today.

Protests are less frequent.

The area isn't bathed in tear gas on a nightly basis, but it's still a place where immigrants are required to go for regular check-ins, where immigration attorneys gather to see if their clients come back out.

(crowd cheering) And the crackdown appears to be ramping up once again.

(music)