On Sunday morning, October 5th, Donald Trump told the press that Portland, Oregon, was burning to the ground. I looked around me, vexed. The week’s rain had just lifted and my friends and I were enjoying a sunny morning on my front porch, our coffee still steaming from our mugs. People walked by with their dogs, smiling pleasantly to themselves.
It had been a remarkably good week, in fact, and our Sunday was shaping up to be no different. The streets evidenced the first traces of autumn, littered not with ashes but with maple leaves, and our weekend had been spent carving pumpkins, dancing at the club, and strategising our Halloween decorations.
These common joys for Portland persevered, despite Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to our city the week prior by Truth Social decree: “At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
He later called Portland “a nightmare”, likening it to “World War II”. He then invoked Title 10, Section 12406, a federal law allowing the President to federalise National Guard troops when state or municipal law enforcement can’t uphold the law, repel an invasion, or suppress a rebellion or its threat.
Somehow, in the midst of all this, we’d managed to spend our weekend making crepes and playing a game of four-square at the neighbourhood middle school, all in an allegedly active war zone. The night of the announcement, four people demonstrated outside the ICE facility. One of them wore a chicken costume.
The war in question is contained to two blocks of a 145-square-mile city outside the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in South Portland — triangulated by a Tesla dealership, The Old Spaghetti Factory, and an elementary school that has since relocated after ICE’s “less-lethal” munitions and tear gas rounds disrupted recess and lessons in the garden.
Over the past several months, the demonstrations outside the ICE facility have faltered by the day, with peaceful protests occurring in the afternoon and smaller, occasionally rowdy demonstrations at night. But for months now, there haven’t been more than a few dozen demonstrators at any given time, of whom a few may be found wandering around rhapsodising a frustrated soliloquy, or gravely holding signs. Rarely are they of the violent or insurrectionist sort.
Though, to be sure, a few radicals do exist in our midst here — as they do in any American city. Since Portland’s ICE protests briefly picked up in June before floundering through the summer, the Portland Police Bureau has made 47 arrests and federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have made 183.
Very few of these have been on violent charges. One protester threw a knife towards a federal agent, others resisted arrest when being detained for non-violent charges. There have also been a couple of arson arrests, on account of small fires set outside ICE’s facility — including the burning of an American flag that demonstrators used to light their cigarettes. Another demonstrator was arrested for pointing a laser at a Portland Police Bureau airplane. And at the beginning of September, some more artfully inclined demonstrators rolled out a homemade guillotine, attesting to the severity of getting on a theatre kid’s bad side — but this prop didn’t lead to any arrests.
Even so, it remains unclear exactly what prompted Trump to claim the current state of our city as comparable to World War II. Despite internal reports from federal officials that described the demonstrations as “low-energy”, he had a call with our governor Tina Kotek and told her that he saw civil unrest on TV. “I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump remarked. “But I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different. They are literally attacking, and there are fires all over the place… it looks terrible.’”
Not everything you see on TV is real, as it turns out. It’s believed Trump was referring to a Fox News story that aired on September 4th, which showed clips from this year’s Labor Day demonstration at the ICE facility while also mixing in clips from the 2020 protests — but without distinguishing between the events.
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