[Editor’s note: I’d been working on this post over the past week, and the overall story it covers has now gained national coverage with reports that federal agents have been driving unmarked vans in downtown Portland and arresting non-violent protestors without identifying themselves or the reason for the arrests. These secret police-type arrests are a huge development, and I’ll be writing about it shortly; in the meantime, I still wanted to post this mildly outdated piece, with the caveat that there’s more to come.]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the multiple incidents of police violence against social justice protests in Portland, including actions directed at journalists covering the demonstrations. Since then, the American Civil Liberty Union has filed a lawsuit against the City of Portland and its police department “on behalf of journalists and legal observers who were targeted and attacked by the police while documenting protests in Portland over the killing of George Floyd,” as described by The Oregonian.
As if homegrown police violence were not enough for the city, at the beginning of July Portland received deployments of various federal law enforcement officers under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security. Such personnel include elements of BORTAC, a Border Patrol tactical team that has also deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group. Portland, along with Seattle and Washington, D.C, has been singled out by the Trump administration for such military-grade deployment of federal personnel. Since their arrival, federal security forces have employed non-lethal munitions and tear gas against mostly peaceful protestors; The Oregonian reports that “Civil liberties advocates and activists have accused federal authorities of overstepping their jurisdiction and excessive use of crowd-control measures, including using tear gas and patrolling beyond the boundaries of federal property.” The use of tear gas is significant, as “Portland police are prohibited from using tear gas under a recent temporary court order unless they declare a riot.”
Last Saturday, an officer with the U.S. Marshals’ Special Operations Group shot a peaceful protestor in the face with what is being described as an “impact munition.” The shot fractured the man’s skull, and he has been hospitalized since the incident. The shooting provoked a broad outcry from Oregon’s federal officials, as well as Governor Kate Brown, who like other Oregon politicians placed the onus for the incident squarely on the presence of the federal agents; she noted that, “President Trump deploying armed federal officers to Portland only serves to escalate tensions and, as we saw yesterday, will inevitably lead to unnecessary violence and confrontation.” In a similar vein, Senator Ron Wyden referred to the president acting as if American cities “are enemy strongholds.”
Some Oregon federal officeholders have sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for responses to a number of crucial questions, such as who is directing the Department of Justice and DHS response in Oregon, what the chain of command is, and what other Oregon cities are sites of federal deployments. But it’s clear that the issues raised by the shooting of a peaceful Portland protestor are larger than Oregon’s right to be rid of trigger-happy agents far more used to combatting drug runners on the border than citizens exercising their right to free speech on the streets of an American city. As Greg Sargent writes at The Plum Line blog, the deployment of these forces to Portland and elsewhere is part of President Trump’s ongoing effort of “trying to escalate tensions around the [nationwide] protests, while utterly refusing at every opportunity to de-escalate them.” Sargent points to the clearing of Lafayette Square of peaceful protestors for a presidential photo-op last month as the template for such a strategy.
The shooting in Portland is all the more disturbing because of President Trump’s comments on Monday that, “We’ve done a great job in Portland. Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail. We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we’ll quell it again very easily. It’s not hard to do.” It’s nauseating to contemplate that the president took a victory lap a day after a severe injury to a protestor, or that he was specifically celebrating that fact; but as Sargent suggests, the idea that urban riots threaten the national fabric has become part of his re-election campaign. In this case, much like the demonstration at Lafayette Square, Portland is being used as a larger canvas for the president not only to indulge his instincts for bullying and violence, but to create a fictional portrait of a city so out of control that only the iron fist of Homeland Security, and the president who authorizes such actions, can put it to rights.
Portland City Commissioner Joanne Hardesty made an important link between the president’s actions and Portland’s failure to rein in police violence, noting that if it weren’t for the Portland Police Bureau’s inability to deescalate violent protests previously, there wouldn’t have been such a clear opening for the president to try to make Portland part of a campaign ad.
I realize that these small nighttime protests can seem abstract to many Portlanders. But regardless of the exact mix between overwhelmingly peaceful protestors and a minority with more confrontational attitudes, we should all be worried far more by the police and Homeland Security’s nightly practice of abuses than the acts of a small group of people who engage in vandalism. The power of the US government is vast, and violence against citizens by members of a department created to protect the United States against external threats is disturbing in the extreme. The same critique goes for the Portland police, who are becoming acclimated to thinking of Portlanders as an enemy force to be put down, rather than a citizenry that they serve. It is a purely anti-democratic development for officers of the law and security agents of the federal government to grow comfortable with inflicting pain and terror on their fellow Americans. This concern is all the greater when we focus on the federal agents deployed with what may be specific orders to view the protestors as the enemy, with their allegiance not to the law but to the president who has ordered them to such questionable ends.