Pivot Point in Portland?

The last few days have brought whiplash-inducing developments in the story of the federal government’s incendiary deployment of federal agents to Portland.  A couple of days ago, it was reported that the Trump administration was planning to send 100 additional US marshals to confront protestors in Portland, while also considering dispatching an additional 50 CBP agents.  It was chilling to learn that, after the federal presence had provoked a massive escalation in the size of the Portland protests — with some recent demonstrations estimated to involve between 2,000 and 4,000 attendees — the federal government viewed increasing its footprint as in any way reasonable.

But now we have news that Oregon Governor Kate Brown has reached an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to replace the federal presence around the federal courthouse in downtown Portland with state police over the the next two weeks, beginning on Thursday.  However, according to The Oregonian, DHS head Chad Wolf says that the federal forces in the city will remain “until the violent activity toward our facility ends. We are not removing any law enforcement while our facilities and law enforcement remain under attack.” Additionally, Wolf indicated that both members of the Federal Protective Service and US Marshals would remain within the perimeter of the courthouse and inside the building itself (The Washington Post has a thorough rundown of the discrepancies in the statements being made by Brown and Wolf). It is certainly possible to read Wolf’s caveats as setting down a list of conditions that may not be easily met by the city.

These two developments — plans for deployment immediately followed by plans for retreat — suggest confusion and conflict at the federal level as to the effectiveness of the agents’ presence in Portland, both in terms of achieving what the government has claimed they are meant to, and in terms of serving the underlying purpose of supporting the president’s re-election effort by demonstrating his willingness to commit abuses against the citizens of Democrat-governed urban areas.  The involvement of Vice President Mike Pence in the negotiations hints to me that he and others in the White House may be concerned about a public backlash to the president’s efforts to operate as a full-on authoritarian.  Additionally, the earlier reporting on the planned new deployments noted that “some federal law enforcement officials worry that agents in Portland may be losing control of the streets around the federal courthouse and losing the public debate over their handling of the unrest”; such a recognition of reality may also lie behind this hedged federal climb-down from confrontation.

The reality is that, from the president’s perspective, he has to date gotten some of what he wanted and a lot of what he didn’t.  A small minority of protestors have continued to vandalize and engage in physical confrontations with the federal agents, which means the president has been able to feed his grossly exaggerated narrative of a Portland in chaos.  Yet far larger crowds have appeared near the federal courthouse downtown to continue showing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and also obviously to protest the federal presence.  In fact, Portlanders have acted heroically and effectively since the beginning of the protests in support of BLM two months ago, despite countless abuses by Portland police and then by federal security agents.  Against the federal effort, which is as much a propaganda initiative as a physical one, protestors self-identifying as moms, dads, teachers, doctors, and nurses have put the lie to right-wing attempts to paint the protests as the project of “violent anarchists.”  America watched secret police tear gas soccer moms, and asked what the hell Trump was doing.  America watched federal goons beat veterans, and knew immediately whose side was the just and moral one.  This is clearly not what Trump wanted.

The prospect of a de-escalation and withdrawal of the over-the-top federal presence is good news, particularly in light of the steady escalation of federal violence to date.  Multiple peaceful protestors have sustained serious head injuries after being shot by those misleadingly-named “nonlethal munitions,” as luck and helmets have so far held at bay the reality that any object shot at someone’s skull fast enough is able to kill them.  Many others, numbering at least in the hundreds, have been shot by pepper balls and rubber bullets, beaten with batons, and tear gassed and maced indiscriminately.  As the formaldehyde-infused maraschino cherry on top, the feds have behaved in the manner of a secret police force, obscuring individual and unit identities, and abducting Portlanders off the street in unmarked van, as if this were not the United States of America but warn-torn Sri Lanka or 1980’s Chile. It has felt inevitable that the federal agents would end up killing someone.

This is as good a point as any to point out that any framing of the conflict as being primarily between the city of Portland and the federal government is utterly misleading.  When an American president brings the power of the federal homeland security apparatus to bear on an American city for nakedly partisan ends, the president is not simply making war on that city — such a gross abuse of power means he is making war on all Americans.  It would be ridiculous to think that Portland should be responsible for taking on the federal government; a major clue to this absurdity is that this is exactly how Donald Trump keeps trying to frame it.  It is a relief that Governor Brown has stepped in; a state-level response to the federal intrusion was completely appropriate, but the true offense has been President Trump’s abuse of power against the nation as a whole.

Among other things, this sinister and brutal occupation renders absurd the federal government’s presumption that it is any position to set conditions for its own withdrawal.  The deployment of government agents in support of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is a presidential abuse of power, and the willingness of officials and agents of the DHS and affiliated agencies to implement the president’s deranged plan merits investigation and appropriate punishment.  Agents who violated the rights of protestors need to be held to account, up to losing their jobs; officials who were complicit in a plan to brutalize American citizens for political purposes must be held to account, including at a minimum an assurance that they will be fired and banned from future government employment. And as many have already pointed out, this deployment highlights the final transformation of the Department of Homeland Security into an instrument not of defense against foreign threats, but of domestic repression. While its agents abused lawfully protesting citizens, the leadership of DHS spread lies that portrayed all protestors as violent and the city as on the brink of destruction — a distortion of truth all the more stunning when one stops to consider that this same department is charged with making accurate assessments of actual external dangers to the nation’s security. Where we would expect competence and commitment to the national interest, we instead witnessed hysteria and subservience to a corrupt president. In the name of our actual security, it’s time to think about doing away with the Department of Homeland Security.