Portland, Oregon … protests & policing

The Oregonian@Oregonian
national media reports, particularly those published by right-wing outlets, suggest a vastly different version of how safe it is for children and families to stroll through downtown Portland.

One America News Network describes “violence gripping the city.” A Fox News headline blares “Portland protesters flood police precinct, chant about burning it down.” The New York Post reported Saturday that Portland “descended into violence.”

Many people who live in Portland…heard over the past few days from worried relatives in other states who feared that their loved ones in Portland might have been affected by fires or caught in police crossfire as they went about their day.

The images that populate national media feeds, however, come almost exclusively from tiny points in the city: a 12-block area surrounding the Justice Center and federal courthouse.

And they occur exclusively during late-night hours in which only a couple hundred or fewer protesters and scores of police officers are out in the city’s coronavirus-hollowed downtown.

Those events are hardly representative of daily life, including peaceful anti-racism demonstrations that have drawn tens of thousands of protesters, in a city of 650,000 people that encompasses 145 square miles.

The vast majority of Portland residents spend quiet home-bound lives on hushed tree-lined streets with coronavirus and its resulting economic catastrophe as the greatest threat to their well-being.

Portlanders swiftly rebutted Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf’s portrayal of the city as under siege from violent protests, posting mundane scenes from their neighborhoods.

As the national spotlight continues to shine on Portland, the Trump Administration dispatched federal marshals and U.S. CBP agents to protect federal property from vandalism after Wheeler ordered PPB to scale back their confrontations with demonstrators.

@Oregonian spoke to nearly two dozen Portlanders and visitors downtown Friday as Wolf and other federal officials continued to characterize the city as lawless and under threat of constant riots. (13/14)

Read the full story: https://t.co/rRUapwLnOA (14/14)

— The Oregonian (@Oregonian) July 18, 2020

Court documents reveal secretive federal unit deployed for ‘Operation Diligent Valor’ in Oregon

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-race-portland-valor/court-documents-reveal-secretive-federal-unit-deployed-for-operation-diligent-valor-in-oregon-idUSKCN24N2SH

(Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has deployed more than 100 federal agents to Portland, Oregon, on a mission named “Operation Diligent Valor” to patrol government buildings as anti-racism protests flared this month, court documents show.

The documents, filed on Tuesday, helped shed light on what had been a secretive operation that involved days of violent clashes between unidentified federal law enforcement officers and anti-racist protesters outside a federal courthouse.

The operation has involved the Department of Homeland Security’s Rapid Deployment Force. It stepped up its response to “increasingly violent attacks” in the Oregon city on July 4, the day after a group of people broke into the courthouse, according to the affidavit by the Federal Protective Services (FPS) regional director, Gabriel Russell.

The affidavit was filed by the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service as part of a broader lawsuit brought by journalists against the city of Portland and those agencies. The plantiffs claim that police had attempted to “intimidate the press” by attacking journalists.

“On the morning of July 4th, the DHS Rapid Deployment Force implemented tactics intended to positively identify and arrest serious offenders for crimes such as assault, while protecting the rights of individuals engaged in protected free speech activity,” Russell wrote of the operation.

According to the documents, there are currently 114 federal law enforcement officers in Portland to patrol federal buildings, including personnel from the FPS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Marshals Service and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The crackdown in the city has drawn widespread criticism and legal challenges as videos surfaced of officers without clear identification badges using force and unmarked vehicles to arrest protesters without explanation.

Some protesters last week reported that it appeared agents were looking for people who were spraying graffiti on buildings.

There have been 43 federal arrests in Portland since July 4, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told CNN on Tuesday.

Portland’s mayor called the intervention an abuse of federal power and said it was escalating the violence. Oregon’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the federal agencies on Friday, saying they had seized and detained people without probable cause.

A top U.S. Homeland Security official on Monday defended the federal crackdown on protests in Portland, including the use of unmarked cars and unidentified officers in camouflage gear and said the practice will spread to other cities as needed.

“We will maintain our presence,” Ken Cuccinelli, the acting Department of Homeland Security deputy secretary told CNN on Monday. “When that violence recedes and those threats recede, that is when we would ratchet back down to what I would call normal presence defending and protecting federal facilities.”

Another huge crowd tonight in Portland, including a new "wall" on the front lines: a Wall of Vets.

Here's a look at the line of military veterans getting set up here in front of the federal courthouse. Behind them, the Wall of Moms and the Wall of Dads are arriving. pic.twitter.com/gGnXHjI3k2

— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) July 25, 2020

Federal Agents Push Into Portland Streets, Stretching Limits of Their Authority

link https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/portland-federal-legal-jurisdiction-courts.html

PORTLAND, Ore. — After flooding the streets around the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, with tear gas during Friday’s early morning hours, dozens of federal officers in camouflage and tactical gear stood in formation around the front of the building.

Then, as one protester blared a soundtrack of “The Imperial March,” the officers started advancing. Through the acrid haze, they continued to fire flash grenades and welt-inducing, marble-size balls filled with caustic chemicals. They moved down Main Street and continued up the hill, where one of the agents announced over a loudspeaker, “This is an unlawful assembly.”

By the time the security forces halted their advance, the federal courthouse they had been sent to protect was out of sight — two blocks behind them.

The aggressive incursion of federal officers into Portland has been stretching the legal limits of federal law enforcement as agents with batons and riot gear range deep into the streets of a city whose leadership has made it clear they are not welcome.

“I think it’s absolutely improper,” Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said in an interview Friday. “It’s absolutely beyond their authority.”

The state lost its bid Friday for a restraining order against four federal agencies on the grounds that the state attorney general lacked standing, but several other challenges are still making their way through the courts.

Federal officers who arrived this month to help control protests over racial injustice and police violence have made dozens of arrests for federal crimes, including assaults on federal officers and failing to comply with law enforcement commands. More than 60 protesters have been arrested, and 46 now face federal criminal charges, said Craig Gabriel, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, in a Saturday news conference.

One protester standing on a city street outside the federal courthouse was shot in the head with a crowd-control munition, leaving a bloody scene and a serious facial injury that required surgery. In another incident, an officer was seen repeatedly using a baton to whack a Navy veteran who said he had come to speak to the agents. Videos taken by members of the public captured camouflaged personnel pulling protesters into unmarked vans.

The inspectors general of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have opened investigations into the tactics.

During 57 consecutive nights of protests, demonstrators have squared off first with Portland police and then with federal agents in what at times have been pitched battles, with protesters throwing water bottles or fireworks and agents responding with frequent volleys of tear gas. The arrival of federal agents caused the protests to swell and focused the ire of protesters onto the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse, across from a park shaded by mature trees.

What began as a movement for racial justice became a broader campaign to dislodge the federal forces from the city.

The federal agents from four agencies arrived after President Donald Trump signed an executive order June 26 ordering the protection of federal monuments and buildings.

Their presence quickly became a political rallying point.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., compared the agents to an “occupying army.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called them “storm troopers.”

Trump criticized protests around the country in cities “all run by liberal Democrats” and defended the move to send in federal agents, warning that with the continuing turbulence in the streets, “they were going to lose Portland.”

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, described protesters squaring off with federal agents outside the federal courthouse in Portland as “anarchists and criminals.”

“We will continue to take the appropriate action to protect our facilities and our law enforcement officers,” Wolf said at a news briefing this past week. “If we left tomorrow they would burn that building down.”

There is broad agreement among legal scholars that the federal government has the right to protect its buildings. But how far that authority extends into a city — and which tactics may be employed — is less clear.

Robert Tsai, a professor at the Washington College of Law at American University, said the nation’s founders explicitly left local policing within the jurisdiction of local authorities.

He questioned whether federal agents had the right to extend their operations blocks away from the buildings they are protecting.

“If the federal troops are starting to wander the streets, they appear to be crossing the line into general policing, which is outside their powers,” Tsai said.

Homeland Security officials said they are operating under a federal statute that permits federal agents to venture outside the boundaries of the courthouse to “conduct investigations” into crimes against federal property or officers.

But patrolling the streets and detaining or tear-gassing protesters go beyond that legal authority, said David Lapan, the former spokesman for the agency when it was led by John Kelly, Trump’s first secretary of homeland security.

“That’s not an investigation,” Lapan said. “That’s just a show of force.”

John Malcolm, vice president for the Institute for Constitutional Government at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former deputy assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, said federal agents have clear legal authority to pursue protesters who have damaged federal property.

“Once they have committed a crime, the federal authorities have probable cause to go arrest them,” Malcolm said. “I don’t care how many blocks away they are from that property.”

While federal authorities are not intended to be riot police, he said, the federal government has the authority to send in troops in extreme situations in which there is a breakdown of authority and local officials are unable to effectively enforce local laws.

“But we are not there yet, and I pray that we don’t get there,” he said.

Outraged by the federal presence, government leaders in Portland have been looking for ways to push back against the deployment. The Portland Police Bureau ousted federal representatives from the city’s command post. Mayor Ted Wheeler, who himself was hit with tear gas fired by federal agents Wednesday night, called the federal deployment an abuse of authority.

“My colleagues and I are looking at every possible legal option we have to get the feds out of here,” Wheeler said in an interview.

In the state’s legal challenge, Rosenblum argued that the operations of federal authorities, using unmarked vehicles to detain protesters, resembled abductions. The lawsuit called on the court to order the agents to stop arresting individuals without probable cause and to clearly identify themselves and their agency before detaining or arresting “any person off the streets in Oregon.”

But in his ruling Friday, Judge Michael Mosman of the U.S. District Court in Portland said the state attorney general’s office did not have standing to bring the case because it had not shown that the issue was “an interest that is specific to the state itself.”

In an interview, Rosenblum said that having federal agents battling protesters in Portland was un-American because the country does not have a tradition of a national police force.

“The police should be ideally as local as possible,” she said. “It’s about trust, relationships and community building.”

She warned that all Americans need to be concerned about what is happening in Portland.

“It could be happening in your city next,” she said.

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari, told lawmakers in a letter that he planned to examine the authority the agency used to deploy agents to Portland.

Some of the protesters who originally focused their anger on the case of George Floyd, whose death in police custody in Minneapolis in May sparked demonstrations around the country, now have turned much of their attention to the presence of federal officers on Portland’s streets.

On Friday night, a crowd gathered outside a fence erected around the federal courthouse; some in the crowd lit fires, lobbed fireworks over the fence and attempted to pull it down with power tools. Federal agents entered the street to disperse the crowd at 2:30 a.m.

Gabriel, the assistant U.S. attorney, said that the federal officers were forced into the streets to protect the fence. “The officers would love nothing more than to stay in the courthouse all night long,” he said. “If the protesters don’t seek to damage or destroy the fence, then the officers have no need to go outside the fence or leave federal property.”

Most of the demonstrations during the evening, though, were peaceful. A group of military veterans lined up along the fence, joining a “Wall of Moms,” hundreds of mothers who have linked arms to challenge the presence of the federal agents, who had been there on previous nights. There was also a “Wall of Dads” carrying leaf blowers to combat the tear gas.

Jennifer Kristiansen, a family law attorney, was one of many women who came out to the protests in recent days to join the “Wall of Moms.” In the early morning hours Tuesday, she said, as agents were clearing protesters from in front of the courthouse, one of them reported to another that Kristiansen had struck him.

Kristiansen said that she had done no such thing and that one of the officers ended up assaulting her, groping her chest and backside during the arrest.

“This is not creeping authoritarianism,” Kristiansen said. “The authoritarianism is here.”

‘White as hell’: Portland protesters face off with Trump but are they eclipsing Black Lives Matter?
On another night of confrontation with federal agents, activists said their message was in danger of being forgotten

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/26/portland-federal-agents-teargas-protesters-black-lives-matter

Teal Lindseth surveyed the sea of mothers she was about to lead into the firing line.

“I look at this crowd and I don’t see many black people,” lamented the 21-year-old African American activist. “Oregon is white as hell. Whitewashed.”

Lindseth has been a stalwart of the Black Lives Matter protests that have continued for nearly 60 days without interruption in a city that was derided as “Little Beirut” over the intensity of its demonstrations against a visit by George HW Bush four decades ago.

Portland has cemented that reputation in the Trump era, as the protests evolved into nightly showdowns with federal paramilitaries sent by the president to end what he described as anarchy.

But Portland has another reputation alongside its radical image. That of the whitest large city in America in a state with a constitution that once barred African Americans from living there. An 1850s law required black people to be “lashed” once a year to encourage them to leave Oregon, and members of the Ku Klux Klan largely controlled Portland city council between the world wars. Housing was effectively segregated in large parts of the city.

Many of today’s protesters say their support for racial justice in a city where the police department has a history of disproportionately killing African Americans is driven at least in part by an attempt to atone for Oregon’s racist past. But as Portland’s battles play out on the national stage, and Donald Trump stokes unrest for political advantage, some black leaders are asking whose interests the televised nightly confrontations really serve – and whether they are a continuation of white domination at the expense of black interests.

The president of the Portland branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), ED Mondainé, warned that the Black Lives Matter movement in the city is being coopted by “privileged white people” with other agendas. He said the confrontations with the federal officers sent by the president are little more than a “spectacle and a distraction that do nothing for the cause of black equality”.

Mondainé accused groups of young white people at the forefront of confronting federal officers of rising to Trump’s bait and using the campaign against racial injustice to provoke a fight in pursuit of other causes, such as anti-capitalism.

“The children of the privileged are dancing on the stages of those that gave their lives for this movement,” he told the Guardian.

Trump’s dispatch of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) taskforce reinvigorated the protests in Portland as federal agents in camouflage snatched protesters off the streets in unmarked vans and severely beat others.

Outrage in the city, and nationally, at what smacked of police state tactics only fuelled the demonstrations, which did not displease the president. Trump presented the pictures of protesters in helmets and gas masks confronting federal agents as evidence of a city overrun by anarchists and antifa, and the Democrats as either helpless or complicit in the chaos.

Trump raised the ante by vowing to send a “surge” of federal forces to other Democratic-run cities such as Chicago, ostensibly to quell gun killings. He said Operation Legend, named after a four year-old boy shot dead in Kansas City, would see thousands of agents from the FBI, US Marshals Service and other agencies deployed to end a “rampage of violence”.

The mayors of Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and 11 other cities wrote to the administration on Tuesday, accusing the president of an abuse of power and alleging that “federal law enforcement is being deployed for political purposes” amid suspicions that Trump is more interested in creating conflict than ending it in the run-up to the election.

“Unilaterally deploying these paramilitary-type forces into our cities is wholly inconsistent with our system of democracy and our most basic values,” they wrote.

The mayors also said they were disturbed at the actions of federal agents in Portland, calling their failure to wear proper identification and the snatching of protesters off the streets “chilling”.

“These are tactics we expect from an authoritarian regime – not our democracy,” the letter said.

Mondainé, who led a rally on Thursday evening to “bring back the focus” on to Black Lives Matter, said “empty battles” were serving Trump’s agenda because the president creates political theatre for electoral advantage. He said Trump is baiting protesters in Portland to light the fuse on a racist backlash across the country before the presidential election.

“We have to change that narrative. We cannot let teargas and rubber bullets define the moment that we’re in now. We must seize the moment and assure the world that this time racism will no longer live,” he said.

A dark stain

Mondainé and other black leaders want to shift the focus of protests in Portland back to one of the enduring legacies of Oregon’s racist past – reform of a police department with a long history of violence against the supposedly liberal city’s relatively small black population, and which has seen a sharp rise in the killing of African American men since Trump came to power.

African Americans make up just 6% of Portland’s 650,000 residents but accounted for 30% of shootings by police over the past three years. Black people were also several times more times likely to be arrested or stopped. The police department has proved so trigger happy that the Obama administration placed it under federal court oversight, although it sidestepped the issue of race in doing so.

But African Americans in Portland remain sceptical that the city or the police department are committed to change, particularly when officers are accused of siding with far-right groups such as the Proud Boys who regularly use the city as a platform for protests knowing it will create a backlash.

Accusations that the force tolerates neo-fascist sympathies are not new. Critics regard the case of Mark Kruger as a particularly dark stain on the police department and city government.

In about 2000, the then Portland police sergeant built a shrine in a public park to five Nazi soldiers including a member of Hitler’s SS and a war criminal. Kruger nailed plaques with their names to what he called an “Ehrenbaum” or honour tree. They were positioned so he could see them from the road when driving to work as a police officer, and he kept them polished.

The shrine remained in the park for several years until Kruger removed it when he was the target of federal lawsuits for use of excessive force against anti-Iraq war protestors. Portland attorney’s office stored the plaques until they were discovered years later by an internal affairs investigator.

That led to an investigation which concluded Kruger brought “discredit and disgrace” upon Portland police and the city. But he kept his job after a brief unpaid suspension for illegally posting the plaques on public property, and was later promoted to captain and head of the vice squad.

Kruger admitted wearing Nazi uniforms but said it was because of his interest in history. He said the plaques were to honour the Germans’ military prowess not their crimes against humanity.

“Many military historians have erected similar remembrances all over the world,” he claimed at the time.

He remained a captain in the police department until his recent retirement.

People pressing for police reform saw Kruger’s continued employment and promotion as a reflection of the values of a police department with a reputation for brutality. The Obama justice department finally intervened over the level of police shootings in Portland, prompted by the case of Aaron Campbell in 2010.

The young black man’s brother had died earlier in the day. Campbell’s family feared he might be suicidal and called the police. The officers who went to check on him quickly established that he was not a threat to himself or anyone else, and even exchanged a lighthearted text message that put everyone at ease. But a second police unit arrived as Campbell emerged from a building. They shot him with a bean bag.

When he instinctively reached for where he had been hit, officers said he was going for a gun and shot him dead. Campbell was unarmed.

The civil rights leader Jesse Jackson called Campbell’s killing “an execution”. A Portland grand jury said the officer who shot him acted within the law but that did not mean he was innocent.

“This was very difficult for us as a grand jury, as our sympathies lie with the Campbell family and the mood of the community. As a group, we are outraged at what happened,” the grand jury said in a letter to the district attorney. The city paid Campbell’s family $1.2m.

The Obama administration demanded reforms and placed the police department under federal court oversight in 2014. But in a move some critics suspected was to save Portland’s Democratic leadership from embarrassment, the justice department said Campbell had been shot because the police had a pattern of using excessive force against people with mental health problems, not because he was black. Campbell’s family disagreed.

‘An often tense relationship’

A justice department report found “a pattern of dangerous uses of force against persons who posed little or no threat” but who had mental illness. These include the case of a 42-year-old local musician with schizophrenia, James Chasse, who was shot multiple times with a taser and beaten so badly by the police he had a punctured lung, 16 fractured ribs and 26 broken bones in all. He died in custody.

In another case, Portland police repeatedly tasered a naked and unarmed man who was acting oddly because he was suffering a diabetic emergency.

Although the justice department sidestepped a full investigation of racism by the Portland police, it did note “the often tense relationship” between the force and the African American community. It said there was a widespread perception among black people of racial profiling and that the police “protect the white folk and police the black folk”.

Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch, which monitors police killings, said eight years of justice department oversight has not fundamentally changed how the Portland police act because, while the agreement between the city and the federal government requires new policies and training, it does not measure whether they are successful.

“If the Portland police continue to use violence against the general public, they’re still in compliance with that agreement. Have some changes have been made? Yes. But does it did it get at the root problems and the issues that people were worried about the first place? Not at all,” he said.

Handelman said that if anything, the situation has worsened.

“We had not actually had a shooting death of an African American Portlander by the police between early 2010 and February of 2017, which is rather remarkable. A seven-year stretch with no black man being killed. Since then, there have been at least five shootings of African Americans, and four of them died,” he said.

“For me, part of that is the national situation that we’re in. That the election of President Trump kind of ripped the Band-Aid off of the racism that was bubbling under the surface of the country for a very long time.”

The police response to protests in Portland after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May reinforced the perception that the force was resistant to change and raised questions about accountability.

In recent days, Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has made a show on national television of denouncing Trump’s deployment of federal forces, accusing the president of conducting “urban warfare” in his city. But when Wheeler turned out to speak at a protest on Wednesday, he faced hostility from demonstrators who accused him of hypocrisy.

The mayor is also the city’s police commissioner. In May, Wheeler declared a state of emergency amid escalating protests over Floyd’s death which saw storefronts smashed and some looted. Critics accused the police of overreacting by being too quick to fire teargas to break up demonstrations until a federal judge barred its use except where the police declare a riot.

When Wheeler arrived at Wednesday’s demonstration, a protester emptied a bag of spent teargas canisters at his feet as others peppered him with questions and accusations about his oversight of the police. Later, the mayor faced a barrage of derision after he denounced federal agents for an unprovoked firing of teargas that left him gasping for breath.

Teressa Raiford, the African American founder of Don’t Shoot Portland, accused the mayor of using the presence of the federal agents as cover for his own failure to address police reform.

“Our leaders now say: ‘Donald Trump’s attacking you and we care about you’. But the people on the front line realise we were being attacked by them before Donald Trump started attacking us,” he said. “They’re trying to claim that they stand as allies with the protesters. It is political. What you’re seeing with the mayor being sprayed with teargas, that is political propaganda.”

Raiford said Portland’s political leadership did not care to substantially change the system of policing because much of the city was comfortable with policies that, as the justice department noted, protect whites and police blacks.

‘All these liberal cities have extreme inequality’

The failure of so many American cities run by Democrats to address reform of racially biased policing hangs over Democratic political leaderships that claim to support the Black Lives Matters campaign.

Hyung Nam, who has been closely observing police reform as a member of a city committee that advises on how the police budget is spent, said the lack of political will reflects economic realities.

“All these liberal cities have extreme inequality, economic inequality, and there’s a major racial dimension to that. As long as we have that kind of economic inequality we’re going to see some form of policing like this,” he said.

Nam said there is a pattern of more prosperous whites gentrifying black Portland neighbourhoods and then demanding increased policing which often makes the remaining African American residents feel insecure.

“Just the other day when I was testifying at the city council, there were people from the Irvington neighbourhood complaining to the council about homeless people that were engaged in illicit activities and basically calling for the cops to do something, which means criminalise them and sweep them somewhere.

“This is what’s happening in all these Democratic liberal cities. Inequality has grown enormously and the way we’re dealing with that is through tougher policing.”

However, Nam thinks that the scale of popular protest over Floyd’s death may finally have pushed the administration to get serious about reform including “significant” cuts to the police budget for its paramilitary teams and enforcing proper civilian oversight.

For now though, attention in and on Portland remains focused on the nightly theatre outside the federal courthouse – and where Trump will target next.

Who’s escalating this? It’s not us’: Portland protester says federal agents deliberately intensifying violence

https://news.yahoo.com/whos-escalating-not-us-portland-191936244.html

Protesters in Portland claim federal agents occupying the city are intentionally escalating violence in the city.

Donald Trump deployed federal agents to protect a federal courthouse in Portland, against the wishes of the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler.

The federal agents were tasked with protecting the courthouse and subduing the protesters. They have been filmed arresting people without explanation and forcing them into unmarked vans, beaten protesters with batons, and used tear gas and pepper spray against demonstrators since arriving in the city.

A protester told MSNBC that the federal agents were escalating tensions at the protests.

“We came out here in t-shirts, they started gassing us. We came back with respirators, they started shooting us. We came back with vests, they started aiming for the head… And now they call us terrorists. Who’s escalating this? It’s not us,” the protester said.

On Wednesday, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon said that all Customs and Border Protection and ICE agents would leave Portland and be replaced by Oregon State Police.

Her statement may have come too soon, as US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf contradicted her, stating that federal agents would stay in the city “until we are assured that the Hatfield Federal Courthouse and other federal properties will no longer be attacked”.

Mr Trump weighed in on the matter as well in a tweet on Thursday.

“Kate Brown, Governor of Oregon, isn’t doing her job. She must clear out, and in some cases arrest, the Anarchists & Agitators in Portland. If she can’t do it, the Federal Government will do it for her. We will not be leaving until there is safety,” he wrote.

Mr Wolf said federal troops would leave once they had assurance that the federal facilities would be protected. Mr Trump appears to have moved the goalposts and threatened to leave the agents in Portland until political dissidents are “cleared out”.

Ms Wolf replied with her own tweet, calling Mr Trump’s invasion of Portland a “failure”.

“I think we’ve had enough political grandstanding from DC. The President’s plan to ‘dominate’ the streets of American cities has failed,” she wrote. “We will protect free speech and the right to protest peacefully.”

from https://www.opb.org/news/article/police-violence-portland-protest-federal-officers/

Only after that last tactic gathered national headlines would the country take notice and ask: Was Portland really a “city under siege,” as acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf described it? Protesters and journalists who regularly showed up at the nightly demonstrations agreed a siege was happening — but over 14 days, federal law enforcement increasingly became the occupying force.

Here is how we got here:

June 5
As in cities across the county, Portlanders turned out to protest racism and violence in the criminal justice system after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. After a week of widespread use of tear gas and impact munitions to disperse mostly nonviolent protesters, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Portland Police Bureau, limiting their use of tear gas to instances “in which the lives or safety of the public or the police are at risk.”

In his order, U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez said that, given the evidence, there was a “strong likelihood” the bureau had violated protesters’ Fourth Amendment rights, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and covers excessive use of force.

June 26
The city and protesters agreed to expand the restraining order beyond tear gas, to include crowd control devices like pepper spray and rubber bullets. Portland police still continued to use tear gas and impact munitions, but the bar to justify their use was significantly higher. State lawmakers in the Oregon Legislature also passed a law requiring police to first warn protesters before using tear gas. Under the new law, officers must determine that a “riot” is occurring. Oregon law defines a riot as just five people acting in a violent manner.

That same day, Trump signed an executive order to protect statues and monuments across the country and to combat what he described as “criminal violence” arising from protests against police violence and systemic racism.

The order came as statues of Confederate generals and other slave-owning historic figures were either removed or pulled down by protesters, including one of George Washington in Northeast Portland on the eve of the Juneteenth holiday and another of Thomas Jefferson days before that. In response, the Department of Homeland Security sent officers to Portland, Seattle, Gettysburg National Park in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection memo dated July 1 noted that the executive order created a DHS task force to “surge” federal law enforcement resources to protect against potential civil unrest. (The Nation first reported on the documents.)

July 1
Federal officers started playing a more obvious and active role during nightly protests in Portland, pulling protesters’ attention away from the Multnomah County Justice Center and refocusing it across the street on the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. That night, federal officers emerged from the boarded-up courthouse to fire pepper balls at demonstrators who came too close to the building. Their appearance changed the protests.

“People felt like they knew what they were getting into with Portland police,” said Portland-based independent journalist Tuck Woodstock, who has been covering the protests since late May. The protesters had specific demands for Portland police — they wanted officers held accountable for specific acts of violence and the bureau defunded.

Woodstock said that in the wake of the temporary restraining order, demonstrators felt like some accountability for the Portland Police Bureau was possible. Weeks before, protesters had successfully pressured city government to disband the bureau’s controversial Gun Violence Reduction Team, end the school resource officer program and reallocate nearly $16 million from the police budget into community programs.

“With the federal officers, it feels like everyone in the city of Portland is almost powerless to hold them to any kind of account,” Woodstock said.

July 4
Hundreds of protesters gathered around the Multnomah County Justice Center and Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. Fireworks shows across the country, including Portland, had been canceled because of the pandemic, but protesters filled the gap.

After more than a month of police using tear gas, impact munitions and flash bang devices to disperse enormous crowds and largely nonviolent demonstrations, the protesters on Independence Day had a fireworks display of their own. They aimed at times at the two government buildings — and the government officers — who had come to represent everything the demonstrators were protesting: racism, police brutality and an unjust criminal justice system.

Just before 11 p.m, protesters fired a variety of fireworks, including some commercial-grade fireworks, at the federal courthouse. Some also aimed green laser pointers at the exterior. Demonstrators yelled at the officers hiding behind small hatches cut in the plywood facade of the boarded-up building; the holes were used as blinds to fire pepperball munitions on the crowd.

After about 15 minutes, federal officers grew impatient. Officers from the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group, Customs and Border Protection’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit or BORTAC, and the Federal Protective Service quickly filled the courthouse’s covered entryway with tear gas. Flash bangs detonated as protesters scattered, and officers poured out of the boarded-up front entrance.

From there, officers continued across the street into Lownsdale Square, a city park. They continued marching west, joined by the Portland Police Bureau, pushing the crowd farther and farther along city streets. By the time federal officers stopped marching, the line of law enforcement officers was blocks away from federal property at the courthouse.

July 8
After multiple failed strategies in response to the protests and a continued inability to end the nightly demonstrations, Portland Deputy Chief Chris Davis met with the media. He characterized the protesters as criminals who had co-opted a peaceful movement, a tried and true tactic used by government officials over the decades to delegitimize social movements. Protesters of nearly every stripe rejected the characterization.

In response to the July 4 events, Davis said Portland’s police had no control over federal officers and that their presence made local officers’ jobs more difficult.

“I don’t have authority over federal officers,” Davis said. “They’re governed by their own policies and procedures. They’re acting under federal law, federal authority. … It does complicate things for us.”

Still, Davis said, an officer from the federal agencies was stationed in the Portland Police Bureau’s nightly command post to coordinate as needed.

July 10
During a military briefing in Doral, Florida, Trump brought up the federal presence in the city of Portland unprompted. He said he had sent the officers to Oregon because “the locals couldn’t handle it.”

“It was out of control,” the president said.

July 11
Protesters once again gathered at night in the city park across the street from the federal courthouse. They taunted federal officers, telling them to get out of Portland.

One demonstrator, 26-year-old Donavan La Bella, stood at the edge of the park closest to the courthouse. He held a boombox over his head with both hands. When a tear gas canister landed at his feet, he bent over and pushed it a few feet away. He stood back up and lifted the boombox again, and a U.S. marshal shot him in the head with an impact round, fracturing his skull and leaving him in critical condition.

The shooting prompted outcry from Oregon elected officials. Gov. Brown said it was the result of Trump continuing to push for force and violence in response to protests.

Unlike several of his fellow city commissioners, the governor and Oregon’s two U.S. senators, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler took almost 18 hours to respond. His written statement bemoaned the violence, but didn’t go as far as other elected officials in condemning federal behavior.

“I’m concerned that the actions of federal officers last night escalated, rather than de-escalated, already heightened tensions in our city,” said Wheeler, who is also Portland’s police commissioner.

July 13
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said Trump had a dangerous fixation with strong-arming peaceful protesters.

“What America does not need is Donald Trump parachuting federal law enforcement into U.S. cities as if they’re enemy strongholds requiring an occupying army to suppress,” Wyden said.

The next day, Sens. Wyden and Jeff Merkley, and U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer and Suzanne Bonamici — all Democrats — sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice seeking answers about the federal officers’ deployment in Portland.

At the White House, Trump said nothing of the injuries to protester LaBella, and praised the federal law enforcement’s response.

“We’ve done a great job in Portland,” Trump said. “Portland was totally out of control. They went in and I guess they have many people right now in jail. We very much quelled it. If it starts again, we’ll quell it again, very easily. It’s not hard to do.”

July 15
In the early morning hours of July 15, video surfaced on Twitter showing two officers in camouflage getting out of an unmarked van. They walked toward a person in a black hoodie and a helmet.

Officers put the person’s hands behind their back and walked them back to an unmarked van before driving away.

Related: Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab Protesters Off Portland Streets

In a separate incident, around 2:30 a.m., Mark Pettibone was also grabbed by federal agents in camouflage.

“A van pulls up right in front of us,” Pettibone later told OPB. “I am basically tossed into the van. I had my beanie pulled over my face so I couldn’t see, and they held my hands over my head.”

Pettibone said he was taken to the federal courthouse where federal officers searched and photographed him but gave no reason for his arrest.

“They patted me down, took my picture and rummaged through my belongings,” Pettibone said. “One of them said, ‘This is a whole lot of nothing.’ He seemed disappointed that I didn’t have any weapons or anything on me.”

Pettibone was placed in a cell by himself and read his Miranda rights, he said. Officers asked if he wanted to waive his rights, he said, but Pettibone declined and asked for a lawyer. He was released about 90 minutes later.

“It was clear to me that this was just a totally indiscriminate detainment,” Pettibone said.

Speaking in the Oval Office later that day with Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump again spoke about the protests in Portland and alluded to a larger role federal law enforcement could play in cities across the country, similar to Portland.

“We’re doing a great job in Portland,” Trump said. “Portland was very rough and they called us in, and we did a good job, to put it mildly. Many people in jail right now. But we have other cities that are out of control. They’re like war zones.”

July 16
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan told Fox News that Trump was planning an announcement about enhanced federal law enforcement actions involving the Department of Justice and Homeland Security “next week.”

“We’re going to do what needs to be done to protect the men and women of this country,” he said.

Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf also made an unannounced visit to Portland, where he toured graffiti on the federal courthouse and talked to federal officers and Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner.

Portland’s mayor refused to meet with Wolf, saying he disapproves of the federal presence and that there’s nothing he can do to stop federal action. Oregon’s governor told OPB she spoke with Wolf on the phone earlier in the week.

“I said, ‘Please take your officers home,’” Brown told OPB’s “Think Out Loud®.” “’They are only escalating things here in the city and you need to go home.'”

Before leaving, Wolf went live on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, where he said the Department of Homeland Security would continue to have a presence in Portland despite opposition from local, state and federal officials from Oregon.

“We need to make sure that we’re supporting our law enforcement officers here and making sure that they’re continuing to protect the federal courthouse here; that’s what DHS does,” Wolf said. “We’re going to do our job, we’re going to do it professionally.”

Shortly after Wolf toured the federal courthouse, OPB published Pettibone’s story, confirming federal law enforcement agents have been grabbing protesters off the streets in unmarked vehicles and without giving any explanation to the people being detained.

The U.S. Marshals Service issued a statement denying their officers participated in Pettibone’s arrest. Homeland Security officials did not respond to written questions about the arrest.

July 17
National scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security increased, with a fresh round of condemnation from Oregon lawmakers, as well as national figures such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon Billy Williams stood on the steps of the federal courthouse in front of a large group of protesters and called for an investigation into the actions of DHS agents in Portland.

“Based on news accounts circulating that allege federal law enforcement detained two protesters without probable cause, I have requested the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General to open a separate investigation directed specifically at the actions of DHS personnel,” Williams said in a statement.

Later in the day, the ACLU of Oregon filed a lawsuit seeking to restrain how federal law enforcement interacts with journalists and legal observers at protests. The Oregon Department of Justice also sued federal agencies, and the Oregon attorney general said state prosecutors may pursue criminal charges against the officer who shot LaBella.

In a written statement, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed officers from Customs and Border Protection had been arresting protesters in Portland using unmarked vehicles. The agency defended the arrests as lawful and justified.

“In Portland, they have. I wouldn’t say this is used anywhere else,” Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security, told NPR. “Upon questioning, they determined they were — they did not have the right person — and that person was released.”

Cuccinelli said he didn’t know if the case he was asked about was Pettibone’s and wouldn’t say how many times similar arrests involving unmarked vans have happened.

But he said the practice would continue.

“I fully expect that as long as people continue to be violent and to destroy property that we will attempt to identify those folks,” he said. “We will pick them up in front of the courthouse. If we spot them elsewhere, we will pick them up elsewhere. And if we have a question about somebody’s identity — like the first example I noted to you — after questioning determine it isn’t someone of interest, then they get released. And that’s standard law enforcement procedure, and it’s going to continue as long as the violence continues.”

July 18
The backlash against border patrol actions on Portland streets did little to deter federal law enforcement.

In the early hours of the morning, with no clear provocation, federal officers dressed in camouflage used tear gas, pepper balls and other impact munitions to push hundreds of protesters far from federal property. Portland police officers marched beside them at times. The scenes prompted Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty to demand that Mayor Ted Wheeler turn over day-to-day management of Portland police to her.

After more than two weeks in Portland, federal officers have come to be seen as a wild card.

“PPB is usually predictable in their response to something,” said freelance reporter Garrison Davis. “The federal officers are not. It’s harder to get a sense of what their goal is and what they’re going to do. It makes being there safely very difficult.”

The increasingly aggressive actions by federal officers have also energized the protest movement in Portland, a city known for its cultural defiance to authority. Crowds grew significantly July 17 and 18.

At one point Friday night, a naked woman sauntered to a police line and pointed her finger at federal officers, who were dressed in camo and carrying less-than-lethal weapons. She dared the officers to shoot, and they obliged — spraying the ground inches from her feet with pepper balls.

The woman didn’t move.