PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) – If protests break out in Oregon in response to federal immigration raids, President Donald Trump could legally mobilize the state’s National Guard, like he has done recently in Los Angeles.

Federal law grants the president authority to federalize a state’s National Guard under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, Section 12406, in situations of “insurrection, invasion, or rebellion,” or when it becomes “impracticable” to enforce federal law by regular means. In such a scenario, Guard troops are placed under federal control, though their roles would be largely restricted to protecting federal personnel or property. They would not be allowed to arrest civilians due to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of federal military forces in domestic law enforcement.

This means, that if Trump evoked this authority during immigration-related unrest, Oregon’s Guard troops could not act as police officers.

The president also has access to the Insurrection Act, a more sweeping statue that allows deployment of active-duty military or federalized Guard troops without a governor’s consent.

While this law has rarely been used, it could theoretically be used if civil disorder severely threatened federal operations.

There have been ICE protests in Portland recently, but they have been largely peaceful.

On Monday, during a press conference, Gov. Tina Kotek indicated she would push back against any such actions.

She described Guard troops being federalized in California as, “an alarming disregard for the safety of Americans and their ability to govern themselves.”

“The president’s unlawful actions undermine our local authorities, who should be able to do their jobs without a federal intervention escalating and inflaming the situation,” said Kotek.

So, Trump has the authority, but his power is limited for how Guard troops can enforce the law. Any attempt to deploy the Guard to quell protests would also likely be met with lawsuits from the state of Oregon.

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Florida State baseball’s season ended in heartbreak after Oregon State beat the Seminoles 14-10 in the winner-take-all game three of the Corvallis Super Regional.

Nearly 3,000 miles away from home, the No. 9-seeded Seminoles (42-16) battled No. 8-seeded Oregon State with a berth to the College World Series in Omaha on the line. In a series between two college baseball heavyweights, the Beavers emerged victorious, while FSU begins its journey back to Tallahassee with questions of what could have been.

Over the 28 innings played at Goss Stadium, three innings seemingly were the difference in the series.

FSU gave up 16 runs over three crucial, season-defining innings in the super regional, and that proved to be the difference between a second consecutive trip to Omaha for the first time in over two decades and a heartbreaking flight home to Tallahassee for the Seminoles.

“They played better than we did. I felt like there were three innings, the ninth (game one), the first, and the third (game three) that we could not escape,” FSU head coach Link Jarrett told reporters postgame. “The game revolves around the big inning, and those three were the difference in this series.”

The ninth inning of game one handed Oregon State control of the series

It looked like the Seminoles had sealed a game one victory, leading Oregon State 4-1 going into the ninth with a red-hot Joe Charles on the mound on Friday night.

Fears of a leadoff double leading to a rally seemed to shrink after two quick outs recorded by Charles. However, a five-pitch walk and a pair of singles later dramatically loaded the bases and loosened the Seminoles’ grasp on a victory.

Charles faced Jacob Kreig, who was 1-for-3 with a double to that point of the game, and the first pitch he delivered ran to the backstop and scored a Beaver runner from third base.

The resilient Charles battled back and worked into a 2-2 count, and down to their final strike, Kreig launched a two-run single to tie the game, swinging momentum in favor of the Beavers. The hit ultimately forced extra innings, and after the Seminoles went down 1-2-3 in the top of the 10th, Oregon State walked it off to snatch a game one victory, and more importantly, control of the series.

Since the NCAA implemented super regionals in 1999, the winners of game one of the best-of-three series had gone on to win the series 158 of 200 times, a 79% win rate.

Two home run filled innings ended FSU’s season in Corvallis

The Seminoles tested the odds with a 3-1 win on Saturday, anchored by quality pitching from Jamie Arnold and Peyton Prescott to force a winner-takes-all game.

With all to play for in game three, it looked like the Seminoles had made an early statement of intent as Max Williams launched a two-run home run in the top of the first on Sunday to give FSU a quick 2-0 lead.

Coming off a career-high eight innings pitched vs. Mississippi State, Wes Mendes toed the rubber with hopes of delivering something similar in Corvallis.

However, five hits, two home runs and seven runs later, Mendes exited the game after less than an inning pitched, and a touchdown allowed in the first inning. For the second time in the series, the Beavers had snatched away the momentum from FSU in dramatic fashion.

“This was built around stating pitching, and Wes had been fighting an illness this week, the travel, and the different allergy stuff that’s going on out here for him, he didn’t look like it was as good as I’ve seen it,” Jarrett said.

“You have to have command of secondary pitch. We were trying to get him through it to see if he can find one of the secondary pitches, and you have an all-right-handed lineup. It seemed like if he could get that changeup going, that changeup’s pretty good. But they were on it, and we could not get out of it. That was damage.”

While jarring, a 7-2 lead didn’t feel insurmountable for the Seminoles, and a second inning Chase Williams home run proved FSU wasn’t going to roll over without landing a few counter blows.

But after delivering a staggering right hook in the first inning, the Beavers landed a knockout punch in the third with six runs scored, including a grand slam and a two-run home run to put the game out of FSU’s reach, despite their best comeback efforts.

The Beavers hit four home runs in the two innings, and scored six runs with two outs, with 11 of the 14 runs the team scored coming on the long ball.

The two innings counteracted what was FSU’s best offensive performance of the weekend as the Seminoles outhit their opponent 17-12, and scored runs in all but three innings, and held Oregon State scoreless after the fourth.

And FSU wasn’t without its opportunities to tie the game, as 10 runners were left on base, including two innings that ended with the bases loaded.

Ultimately, missed opportunities and three innings of poor pitch execution out of the 28 innings played in the series sent the Seminoles home, and not to Omaha.

“We fought, we had chances, believe it or not. This game, you could have looked up, and this thing could have been 14-14, and still going,” Jarrett said. “But some of the at-bats, some of those moments, we needed to do a little bit more, and we needed a crooked number.”

“And we were scoring… but we needed that big blow, that big one, and we didn’t get it.”

Liam Rooney covers Florida State athletics for the Tallahassee Democrat. Contact him via email at LRooney@gannett.com or on Twitter @__liamrooney

The unique situation of American Samoans has caused confusion across several U.S. states, including Oregon, where officials inadvertently registered nearly 200 American Samoan residents to vote when they obtained driver’s licenses under the state’s motor-voter law.

Of those, 10 cast ballots in an election, according to the Oregon Secretary of State’s office. Officials there determined the residents had not intended to break the law and no crime was committed.

“We pay taxes, we do exactly the same as everybody else that are U.S. citizens,” said Tupe Smith, an American Samoan charged in a similar case in Alaska. “It would be nice for us to have the same rights as everybody here in the states.”

The situation in Oregon reflects broader national confusion stemming from the legal classification of American Samoans as U.S. nationals rather than U.S. citizens — the only U.S. territory whose people are not granted birthright citizenship.

American Samoans are entitled to U.S. passports and can serve in the military. Men must register for the Selective Service. They can vote in local elections in American Samoa but cannot hold public office in the U.S. or participate in most U.S. elections.

The legal and cultural questions around this status also resonate within Oregon’s American Samoan community.

Siniva Bennett, board chair of the Samoa Pacific Development Corporation, a Portland-based nonprofit, explained why many in the territory have grown wary of birthright citizenship.

“We’ve been able to maintain our culture, and we haven’t been divested from our land like a lot of other indigenous people in the U.S.,” Bennett said, referring to the potential threat to communal land ownership laws if citizenship were imposed.

Trump administration challenges Oregon over voter rolls in lawsuit

Although supporters of automatic citizenship say it would benefit the estimated 150,000 to 160,000 American Samoan nationals living in states such as California, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Utah and Alaska, others worry about unintended consequences. The debate reflects a broader tension between equal rights and cultural preservation.

In Alaska, confusion leads to criminal charges

The legal ambiguity continues to surface in unexpected places, like Whittier, Alaska, a cruise-ship stop squeezed between glacier-packed mountains and Prince William Sound. It’s so small that nearly all of its 260 residents live in the same 14-story condo building — yet it became the unlikely setting of an unprecedented noncitizen voter fraud case.

Alaska prosecutors are pursuing felony charges against 11 residents of Whittier, most of them related to one another, saying they falsely claimed U.S. citizenship when registering or trying to vote. The defendants, all born in American Samoa, say they believed they were eligible.

“To me, I’m an American. I was born an American on U.S. soil,” said firefighter Michael Pese, one of those charged in Whittier. “American Samoa has been U.S. soil, U.S. jurisdiction, for 125 years. According to the supreme law of the land, that’s my birthright.”

The case began in 2023 when Pese’s wife, Tupe Smith, ran unopposed for a local school board seat. After winning with about 95% of the vote, she was arrested and charged.

Oregon elections officials refer cases of possible noncitizen voting to state DOJ

She explained to officers that she knew she wasn’t allowed to vote in U.S. presidential elections, but thought she could vote in local or state races. She said she checked a box affirming that she was a U.S. citizen at the instruction of elections workers because there was no option to identify herself as a U.S. national, court records say.

“When they put me in cuffs, my son started crying,” Smith told The Associated Press. ”He told their dad that he don’t want the cops to take me or to lock me up.”

Later, Pese and eight relatives — along with one man from their village in American Samoa — were also charged. Advocates say they were targeted despite a lack of criminal intent.

“There is no question that Ms. Smith lacked an intent to mislead or deceive a public official in order to vote unlawfully when she checked ‘U.S. citizen’ on voter registration materials,” Neil Weare, one of Smith’s attorneys and co-founder of the Washington-based Right to Democracy Project, wrote in a brief to the Alaska Court of Appeals last week, after a lower court judge declined to dismiss the charges.

Critics argue the prosecutions are politically motivated amid false claims from President Donald Trump and others that noncitizen voter fraud is widespread. Even state-level investigations have found voting by noncitizens to be exceptionally rare.

In Hawaii, American Samoans have faced similar confusion.

Sai Timoteo, who was born in American Samoa, ran for the state Legislature in 2018 before learning she wasn’t allowed to hold public office or vote. She had always considered it her civic duty to vote, and the form on the voting materials had one box to check: “U.S. Citizen/U.S. National.”

“I checked that box my entire life,” she said.

She also avoided charges, and Hawaii subsequently changed its form to make it more clear.

A simple truth is at the root of many false election claims: Voter rolls are imperfect

In Alaska, the confusion reached such a level that the Pacific Community of Alaska reached out to the Alaska Division of Elections in 2021 and 2022 to ask whether American Samoans could vote in state and local elections.

Neither time did it receive a direct answer, said Tafilisaunoa Toleafoa with the organization.

“It is my hope that this is a lesson learned, that the state of Alaska agrees that this could be something that we can administratively correct,” Toleafoa said. “I would say that the state could have done that instead of prosecuting community members.”

Legacy of colonialism and exclusion

The root of the issue stretches back to the colonial legacy of American Samoa.

In the 19th century, the U.S. secured part of the Samoan archipelago as a naval refueling station. Over time, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands gained birthright citizenship — but American Samoa did not.

Congress considered it for American Samoa in the 1930s, but declined. Some lawmakers cited financial concerns during the Great Depression while others expressed patently racist objections, according to a 2020 article in the American Journal of Legal History.

In 2021, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to extend automatic citizenship to those born in American Samoa, saying it would be wrong to force citizenship on those who don’t want it. The Supreme Court declined to review the decision.

Several jurisdictions across the country, including San Francisco and the District of Columbia, allow people who are not citizens to vote in certain local elections.

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Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska, and Johnson from Seattle. Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon, and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher in Honolulu contributed to this report.