We Need To Talk About Portland…
We need to address some serious misconceptions and outright lies that are circulating regarding Portland, OR, and the allegedly embattled Department of Homeland Security. I’ve heard this city referred to as a “War Zone,” “Under siege from attack by ANTIFA, and other Domestic Terrorists.” President Trump claimed he was acting to “protect War Ravaged Portland” when he declared that he would be mobilizing the Oregon National Guard against the wishes of Governor Tina Kotek. Trump’s fictional narrative is so pervasive that right-wing propagandists and Trump supporters are uncritically repeating it left and right, even (and perhaps especially) when provided with evidence that he has no idea what he’s talking about.
If someone (myself included) from Portland shares photos and videos that counter this deluded perspective that the city is a “War Zone,” they’ll be condemned for “Cherry Picking,” and either not sharing evidence of the correct locations, or at the right times. They’ll come back with video clips from FOX News, OAN, Newsmax, or right-wing influencers that selectively focus on moments of conflict, ignoring the context. They also often overlook the fact that several of these videos are from the 2020 BLM protests or from three or four months ago, as is clear from the background, in which one can easily see that the windows of the Portland ICE Facility are not boarded up, as they have been since mid-June of 2025.
I can only assume this disingenuous, bad-faith distribution of selectively edited media is what the President was referencing when he discussed the fires and devastation supposedly in evidence throughout Portland (and especially in proximity to the Portland ICE Facility), because none of that is presently relevant.
Other people will respond by sharing photos and videos of homeless people, tents and litter on the street, graffiti, or people using drugs openly. This, of course, has nothing at all to do with the premise behind President Trump’s deployment of troops and the increase in Federal Law Enforcement in the city. The homeless population, tents on sidewalks, and drug users are not (in any sense) related to the supposed siege of the Portland ICE Facility. It’s the equivalent of an Ad Hominem attack or tossing a Red Herring into the discussion of the city. It’s irrelevant to the conversation at hand, and it ignores the fact that all American cities (including those much smaller than Portland) have homeless individuals and families, drug use, and graffiti.
No one with any intellectual honesty or integrity will deny that Portland has a problem with homelessness. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone suggesting otherwise. What they will say is that it’s not worse than other large American cities, which is accurate. As of January 2024, Portland didn’t even crack the Top Ten, and as of this year, Portland is the 28th most populous city in the United States. Denver has only 100,000 more people, but has twice as many homeless people, according to the same numbers from January 2024. Seattle has only about 150,000 more people, but had more than twice the homeless population of Portland last year.
But Portland, Denver, and Seattle combined barely reach half the homeless population of Los Angeles, which is roughly half again the homeless population of New York City.
Homelessness is a complicated issue. The contributing factors are manifold, and the solutions (while comparatively simple) aren’t things anyone in a position to do so wants to seriously address.
Are these National Guard troops and Federal Law Enforcement Officers coming to Portland to address issues like homelessness?
No, they are not.
Which means anyone trying to distract from the topic at hand by tossing that into the mix needs to shut the fuck up and let the adults talk. Bad faith bullshit is not welcome.
So, let’s talk about the alleged assault on ICE that Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Donald Trump, and others want to claim is taking place.
Before we move on, I’d like to dedicate some time to Kristi Noem, though. I have a relatively unique perspective in that I lived in South Dakota while Kristi Noem served as Governor, and previously as a U.S. Representative, before I moved to the Portland Metro. She was much-maligned by even Conservatives I knew in South Dakota, as a corrupt and undemocratic force in State Government. Of course, that didn’t stop them from voting for her, because she happened to be a Republican.
Noem’s histrionic portrayal of the protests in Portland is not novel. She has a long history of opposing the First Amendment right to Speech and Assembly, stretching back to the protests against the Keystone Pipeline. She was also investigated for Corruption regarding the circumstances surrounding her daughter and the Real Estate Appraisal Licensing system in South Dakota.
Perhaps most egregious, when South Dakota voters passed a Ballot Measure to legalize Recreational Cannabis in 2020, she and two members of Law Enforcement filed a lawsuit to overturn the results of the election, which passed by a margin of 54 to 46%. It’s particularly amusing when you compare it to her Gubernatorial Victory in 2018, of only 51%. The courts sided with Noem and the two Law Enforcement officials, claiming the Ballot Measure violated a “single-subject” provision. Never mind that any Ballot Measures in South Dakota undergo a legal review by the Secretary of State to confirm that they conform to state statutes.
I don’t entirely blame Noem. South Dakota has a history of corruption and anti-democratic practices. It was only two years before she was elected Governor when voters approved an Anti-Corruption measure that would have led to an independent ethics commission, campaign finance reform, restrictions on gifts from lobbyists, and increased transparency regarding campaign contributions. The Governor at the time, Dennis Daugaard, and the State Legislature repealed the Initiated Measure only a few months later, with Daugaard suggesting that voters hadn’t really thought things through.
As you can see, Noem comes from an environment where corruption and undemocratic sentiment run rampant. It should have been a warning sign about the Trump Administration that she would be so readily welcomed into the fold. For some of us, it was. Of course, for many of us, there had already been several warnings.
Placing her in charge of Homeland Security has been an unmitigated disaster, as anyone could predict. But it’s not the disaster she might propose. Since Donald Trump returned to office in January, at least 15 people have died while in ICE Custody. This does not include the two detainees who were murdered by the shooter in Dallas last month. That number also doesn’t include individuals who died shortly (or immediately) after they were released from ICE Custody, nor does it include individuals who have died since being deported or falling victim to the Administration’s new take on Extraordinary Rendition.
But, guess what, a total of zero ICE agents have been killed in that same time frame. This, despite President Trump’s wild claim that people have died in Portland. Unless he’s speaking of unrelated deaths (or deaths from years ago), no one has died as a result of protests happening in Portland. The last death of anyone involved with the Department of Homeland Security (not an ICE agent) was a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent who was shot on January 20th, during a traffic stop in Coventry, Vermont.
Most recently, the only injury of note was when an ICE officer was dragged by a car driven by an undocumented immigrant attempting to evade him. The immigrant in question was killed; the ICE officer was not.
Still, all the talk from the Administration has been focused on how ICE agents are under attack. But, it certainly sounds like it’s far less dangerous to work for ICE than it is to be taken into their custody.
Noem and Homan like to talk about large percentages when they discuss the increase in assaults on ICE agents. Of course, those numbers are readily subject to scrutiny, because that percentage reported by DHS has fluctuated dramatically, sometimes within hours: 500%, 700%, 1,000%. It’s almost as if they’re just tossing large numbers in front of a percentage sign to appeal to the average person’s inability to contextualize what a percentage increase actually means. A keen observer might notice they’re loading the statements to make people afraid.
Let’s break down how percentage increases work for those of you who need some assistance.
If there were hypothetically only one ICE agent assaulted between January and September of 2024, it would mean that five, seven, or ten had been attacked during the same time frame this year to reach those previously mentioned percentages of 500, 700, or 1,000%. But to say it was ten agents that had been assaulted over the course of an eight or nine-month interval doesn’t have the same dramatic flair to it. Most recently, they’re claiming it’s a more than 1,000% increase, but without providing any actual numbers to contextualize what that percentage means. The real numbers (according to all official records) were something to the effect of ten assaults in 2024 compared to 79 in 2025. This is also far less dramatic than using a percentage increase to trigger an emotional response. After all, we could refer to it as a 790% increase. Which number sounds scarier to you?
Mind you, only a small percentage of these assaults involved protesters, and an even smaller number had anything at all to do with Portland. These attacks are largely coming from people they are detaining.
And, of course, the numbers have spiked. ICE is more active and aggressive, and is utilizing tactics that are absolutely going to increase violent reactions. When masked men with no official insignia are grabbing people and hauling them into unmarked vehicles, it looks more like a kidnapping than anything official or legal. Never mind that there have been several documented incidents this year of people being assaulted, kidnapped, and raped by people pretending to be ICE agents. There’s even one reported killing by a fake ICE officer. Knowing all of this, would you simply accept that this is a legitimate, state-sanctioned detainment?
There’s also the deeply concerning fact that several of the things that constitute assault in the eyes of DHS have been categorically ludicrous in many instances. The official claim was that the New York City Comptroller, Brad Lander, had assaulted agents when he was detained at an Immigration Court proceeding in June, though the available video evidence shows no assault of any kind. Garbage dumped on an ICE agent’s lawn was also one example of “assault” on DHS, while another was a sign that included an individual ICE agent’s name and a great deal of profanity. There was even an incident here in Portland where an Indigenous woman was charged with Assault because an ICE officer claimed to get a headache because she was blowing a whistle on the sidewalk in front of the Portland ICE Facility. Even if those examples were the only questionable ones, they would present a huge issue when discussing relatively small numbers of incidents.
And, of course, it could be argued just as easily that assaults performed by DHS agents have increased by similarly huge percentages, but Noem and Homan are disregarding that. The very real likelihood, though, is that more people are being assaulted by ICE agents than are assaulting them.
Several of these assaults have been without cause or provocation, unless you claim standing in place, holding a sign with mean words on it, and yelling profanities at these masked men constitutes a clear threat. Based on how fragile and sensitive the Administration seems to want us to believe the people working for ICE happen to be, I guess those things might just be adding to the assault statistics.
Of course, all of this escalation on the part of the Administration is a painfully transparent attempt to trigger a response. The same thing was done in Los Angeles earlier this year. The same tactic was also on display during the BLM protests in 2020. President Trump, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and others are gambling on the likelihood that increased Federal Agents and the addition of Military Personnel will be sufficient to push the situation past a tipping point. At that point, they will have the flimsy justification required to impose greater Authoritarian control over Portland, Chicago, and wherever else they decide they want to add pressure.
It’s an absurd truth, and one that got Portland’s Mayor, Keith Wilson, laughed at and mocked, but the best thing protesters can do is to refuse to take the bait, to stay home, and to make the Administration look like the scaremongering force it absolutely is. Of course, that may not solve anything, since right-wing agitators have been masquerading as protesters and journalists already. It would hardly be a stretch to imagine them inciting violence just to ensure it adversely impacts their opponents. Some of them also have a documented history of instigating fights, both within the protest groups and as counter-protesters. They also have a history of fabricating violent altercations and even going so far as to start fights just to selectively capture the retaliation on camera for the purpose of furthering their propaganda objectives.
Either way, what we end up with is a situation wherein protesters are expected to behave in a way that is beyond reproach, or they’re condemned for inciting violence. That may sound painfully familiar to anyone who has dedicated time to studying the Civil Rights Movement. But the uniformed individuals who are supposedly trained to de-escalate situations are deploying pepper spray and gas canisters despite the law clearly stating the use of force must be reasonable, necessary, and proportionate. They’re intended to adhere to the same standards required for self-defense on the part of the average person.
In fact, on July 25th, Assistant Chief of Operations for Portland Police Bureau, Craig Dobson testified, “It makes it extremely difficult for us to deal with, as the folks that are on the other side of this fence have been, night after night, actually instigating and causing some of the ruckus that’s occurring down there…” and that DHS agents are not following best practices.
It’s also on record that ICE had been witnessed firing pepper balls on the crowd without any apparent warning or provocation on June 12th. Then, it was back on June 14th when protesters shattered the glass of the front door, subsequently leading to the boarding up of all windows. DHS officials panicked and used indiscriminate force against the protesters at that time. The one ICE agent who was hurt had abrasions and nothing worse. The same kind of disproportionate and indiscriminate attack by ICE agents was documented on June 23rd and 24th, when an ambulance had to be called because a protester was hit in the head with a gas canister. It can get dangerous out there, but the vast majority of the danger is directed at the people exercising their Constitutional Right to protest the actions of the Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.
If someone intends to protest, they need to understand their rights. But that’s not enough; they also need to know the limited power bestowed upon the people they are protesting against. It’s essential to recognize that Department of Homeland Security officers have significant limitations. No one within ICE has the authority to arrest, detain, or restrain any American Citizens. There are several examples of ICE agents violating this explicit limitation in their purview. There are exceptions regarding Citizens who assault an ICE agent or who actively interfere with ICE performing the duties that are within their scope. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers have fewer restrictions. But a Citizen would have to commit a Federal Criminal Offense in the officer’s presence before they can restrain, arrest, or detain someone. Finally, Federal Protective Services has similar authority to Customs and Border Protection, but its scope is focused on Federal Facilities.
It’s imperative to recognize that, unless a protester is actively breaking the law in some way related to the “work” DHS performs, these officers are not permitted to so much as lay a hand on any Citizen. Assuming the protester has not trespassed onto the Federal Property, damaged the same, assaulted an officer, or obstructed them in their lawful duties, no one working for DHS has any authority to use physical force against the protester.
They can (and should) be sued each and every time they violate the limited authority they have. Further, though I want to be clear that I am not encouraging violence, if someone is attacked by an employee of DHS without provocation, they are well within their rights to defend themselves. Even though they may be wearing uniforms, their authority as Law Enforcement ends the moment they violate the restrictions associated with their role. If someone does fight back (and some would suggest they should), I will offer the same recommendation I’ve received from individuals who specialize in self-defense; if they’re threatened to the extent that they have to defend themselves, they need to make sure it’s safe for them to turn their back on the threat to walk away. The threat can no longer be a threat.
If you find yourself in a situation wherein you have to fight back (and I believe you should), that fight doesn’t end in the street. Keep fighting their attempts to prosecute you for assault as well, because if they’ve stepped outside of bounds, they’re just some asshole, not an actual cop. In Oregon, you’re legally entitled to use physical force if you believe it’s necessary to protect yourself, another person, or your property from Unlawful physical force. You are permitted to use whatever force is proportionate to the perceived threat. Just keep in mind that you cannot be the initial aggressor.
