Is Donald Trump Attempting to Implement A Police State in Portland, Oregon?

Federal officers, from the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, in Portland, Oregon, where they have been causing huge consternation by teargassing protestors, bypassing local police, and raising fears of the establishment, by the Trump administration, of a police state.


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I’ve been shocked by the nightly scenes of violence beamed around the world from Portland, Oregon, where Donald Trump has sent in federal law enforcement officers — from the Department of Homeland Security, the US Marshals Service and the border patrol — to bypass Portland’s own police force and to assault and terrify protestors, who, since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis two months ago, have been engaged in ongoing protests about racism and police brutality.

As the Guardian explained, Donald Trump sent federal law enforcement officers to “take control” of Portland at the start of July, having decided that it “had been abandoned by its mayor to anarchists and mob rule.” The officers, “often in unmarked uniforms and vehicles”, have been deployed against protesters in Portland since the beginning of the month, “using teargas, stun grenades and munitions to control crowds descending on to federal buildings in Oregon’s largest city.”

As the Guardian also explained, the arrival of the federal officers initially “sent a wave of alarm through the demonstrators after men in camouflage began snatching people off the streets in unmarked vans. Those detained said they were dragged into the courthouse without being told why they were being arrested or by whom and then suddenly let go without any official record of being held. It smacked of police state tactics. So did some of the violence meted out by federal agents who looked more like an occupying army in a war zone.”

For Trump, this is a show of strength, playing to his rabid, far-right base in the run-up to November’s Presidential Election, while for the people of Portland — and those watching from other, non-Republican cities across the US — the arrival of the federal officers, and their behaviour, look like the opening shots in the manifestation of a police state.

Yesterday, the Mayors of 15 major US cities, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., sent a letter to the Attorney General, William Barr, and the Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary, Chad Wolf, “demanding a stop to the sending of federal forces to cities and the removal of federal officers from Portland, Oregon”, as the Guardian explained, adding that, in their letter, the Mayors “say that the federal officers are conducting law enforcement activity with no consultation with local police in tactics they likened to ‘authoritarian regimes’”, rather than the US. Complaining that there is “no oversight of the actions of federal forces”, the Mayors also point out that federal officers “have not been trained for urban community policing, including critical crowd management and de-escalation techniques.”

The extent to which Trump’s use of federal officers is proving successful is debatable. In Portland,  the Mayor, Ted Wheeler, who is also the police commissioner, “sided with the protesters against the president”, as the Guardian explained, and, in addition, “a court order limited the city police’s use of teargas and other means of restraint.” For authoritarians, this might justify Trump’s intervention, but for many others it is brutal and counter-productive. Local mothers — describing themselves as a “Wall of Moms” — have now taken to the streets every night to defend Black Lives Matter protestors, and are evidently winning the battle for hearts and minds.

Jane Ullman, the chief financial officer for tech startups in Portland, told the Guardian, “As an upper-middle-class white woman in the whitest city in America, I couldn’t stand by any longer. I’ve been doing a lot of self-educating since George Floyd. Reading and learning. The feds’ part in it pushed me over the top. I wanted to take action. But it was the ‘Wall of Moms’ that brought me out.”

While the protestors clearly have the moral high ground, other commentators have also been criticizing Trump sending federal law enforcement officers to Portland as an example of “made-for-TV fascism” and “performative authoritarianism.”

Josh O’Brien, who had travelled from Seattle to join the protests, explained to the Guardian why he thought Trump’s actions were failing. “It’s a power play by Trump”, O’Brien said. “He thinks he’s going to get his base all riled up by pitting the forces of law and order against the anarchists. But he’s f*cked it up like he f*cks everything up. Look who’s here with us. Grandmothers. Doctors. Because like most Americans they don’t think people should be abducted from the streets by the president’s secret police.”

Yesterday, the already unacceptable situation in Portland became even more shocking when the Mayor, Ted Wheeler, was himself teargassed by federal forces. “I’m not going to lie”, Wheeler said, as, in the Guardian’s words, “he stood with protesters outside the federal courthouse that has become the focus of confrontation.” He added, “It stings. It’s hard to breathe, and I can tell you with 100% honesty I saw nothing that provoked this response. This is flat-out urban warfare, and it’s being brought on the people of this country by the president of the United States, and it’s got to stop now.”

Instead, just hours earlier, Trump “announced a ‘surge’ of hundreds of law enforcement officers into Democratic-run cities including Chicago”, as the Guardian explained, “drawing condemnation from civil liberties watchdogs.” The policy of sending in federal officers is named ‘Operation Legend’, after LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old boy who was fatally shot in Kansas City, Missouri last month, and initially involved federal officers being sent to Kansas City and Portland. Now Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico have been added, and politicians in both cities are enraged.

Trump, outrageously, has tried to blame Democrats for the problem, lashing out at “radical left Democrats running cities like Chicago and so many others”, claiming that “America must be a sanctuary for law-abiding citizens, not criminal aliens”, and adding, “My vision for America’s cities could not be more different from the lawlessness being pushed by the extreme radical left.” In addition, Attorney General William Barr spoke of having “extended Operation Legend to Chicago and Albuquerque to protect the residents of those cities from senseless acts of deadly violence by targeting those involved in gang activity and those who use guns to commit violent crime.”

On Tuesday, Lori Lightfoot, the Mayor of Chicago, who, as the Guardian described it, “has made clear her opposition to federal intervention”, tweeted the following uncompromising response to Trump’s intentions: “Under no circumstances will I allow Donald Trump’s troops to come to Chicago and terrorize our residents.”

In Albuquerque, meanwhile, Martin Heinrich, a Democratic senator for New Mexico, condemned the intervention, stating, “Instead of collaborating with the Albuquerque police department, the sheriff is inviting the President’s stormtroopers into Albuquerque.”

Gauging the extent to which Trump and Barr’s policies are infringing on Americans’ constitutional rights, former defence secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta said, “One of the last holdouts for tyrants is to try to have the military be able to protect them, and that fear that he may try to do that raises a lot of concerns about just how far will he go to try to ‘take over’ a lot of these cities and states in terms of their ability to conduct law enforcement on their own.”

He added, “It’s interesting, because federalism has always been a calling card for Republicans to avoid having the federal government impose its will on states and communities. To have a president who’s prepared to send federal officers into these communities I think represents a step that ought to not only create fear in the people that are impacted by that decision, but should raise a hell of a lot of fear for those Republicans who have defended federalism most of their lives.”

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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