On Sunday, the Trump administration sought the intervention of a federal appeals court to overturn a judge’s decision that blocked the use of the National Guard in Portland, Oregon. The administration criticized the ruling as being full of “critical errors” and argued it failed to give President Trump the “deference” warranted in such matters.

The Department of Justice submitted an emergency petition to the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, requesting a stay pending appeal or at least an administrative stay by November 21. They defended Trump’s earlier decision from September to federalize troops to safeguard an ICE facility and federal staff against an alleged threat of “rebellion,” despite the most intense violence having occurred several months prior.

U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, appointed by Trump, recently determined that while “violent protests” did occur in June, these were swiftly managed by local law enforcement. Since then, the demonstrations have been “predominantly peaceful,” with only isolated incidents of minor violence typically occurring between protesters and counter-protesters.

Trump’s move to involve the National Guard long after the peak of violence has been a contentious issue, highlighted during the early October hearings at the 9th Circuit.

The three-judge panel initially sided with Trump, but later in October, the 9th Circuit reversed that decision and decided to hear the case en banc, which involves the entire bench reviewing the arguments anew.

That move came days after the DOJ admitted multiple prior representations about federal deployments to Portland were “incorrect” and expressed “regret” for making numerous such “errors” in court filings.

Immergut, after a brief trial, preliminarily revealed at the start of November that even handing Trump a “great level of deference” on the issue did not override “credible evidence” that there likely was “no lawful basis” for federalizing Oregon’s National Guard and or calling in troops from other states.

Days later, Immergut ruled that the federal government violated the 10th Amendment and 10 U.S.C. § 12406, the statute that authorizes the president to call up the guard when he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

In its latest filing before the 9th Circuit, the Trump administration asserted that Immergut’s decision to permanently block “federalization and deployment of the Oregon National Guard or Guardsmen from any other state to Portland” was erroneous in a number of ways.

The DOJ said Immergut “wholly failed” to give Trump the “deference required,” “wrongly downplayed the dangerous conditions at the ICE facility,” and treated the June violence as “irrelevant” to Trump’s “plainly lawful” decision “just a few months later.”

“And while the court attempted to paint a picture of sharp decline in violent activity since then, the record shows that violence and threats of violence recurred more-or-less continuously,” the government said. “More broadly, the court emphasized that certain incidents did not result in significant violence. But this ignores the substantial and continuous threat of violence and resulting inhibition of federal operations. The President certainly had ‘colorable’ grounds to determine that regular forces were ‘unable’ to sufficiency protect federal personnel and property and that the conditions rose at least to the level of a ‘danger’ of rebellion.”

Accusing Immergut of making “several critical errors” by siding against Trump, the DOJ threw the Portland Police Bureau under the bus as “not a reliable partner in protecting federal officials and property[.]”

That, the DOJ said, “only further underscores that [Trump] had a colorable basis for his determination.”

“Congress empowered the President to ‘call into Federal service’ members of the National Guard when ‘there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States’ or ‘the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States,’” the filing concluded. “The President judged that those conditions were satisfied in Portland, and the district court had no basis to override that judgment.”