In the days since Donald Trump directed his “Secretary of War” to marshal troops against “domestic terrorists” in Portland, encouraging the use of “full force” in a city he likened to a “war zone,” I have been hanging around the demonstration that the president wants to crush. What I’ve found is an atmosphere that is more like a carnival than combat.
By some accounts, this all started back in June, when a group of friends decided to pitch a tent outside an ICE facility in the city. “I was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah! Occupation against deportation! Let it begin, bitches!’” Andy Siebe, who has cropped, caramel-color hair and thin, rounded stumps for teeth, told me when I got to the encampment site, which consists of a heap of cots and tents and medical supplies.
The action, Siebe told me, quickly gained the notice of Andy Ngo, a social-media influencer famous in right-wing circles for highlighting social unrest in the city, originally as a student at Portland State University and now as a regular guest on Fox News. The attention Ngo directed to the protest prompted more people to join it. “That’s what we call unintended consequences,” Siebe said.
Except that it wasn’t unintended. A frenzy of protest was probably just what Ngo wanted to see. Action, reaction; everyone has a part to play. Now Trump is playing his. The president’s promised deployment follows similar mobilizations in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., but Portland is the first place where Trump has ordered up troops in explicit reference to “antifa,” a contraction of the word anti-fascist that has become associated with a diffuse group of left-wing protesters, some of whom use militant tactics such as vandalism and arson. Trump recently sought to label antifa a “domestic terrorist organization”—a designation that doesn’t exist in American law. Portland could also see the first deployment of troops to a U.S. city since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which inflamed political divisions and fueled calls on the right for reprisal.
The protest that provoked the president is occurring in a neighborhood known as the South Waterfront, a high-rise retail and residential area on the site of a former industrial brownfield. On one side is the Willamette River; on the other, Interstate 5, with the West Hills in the distance. It’s a narrow strip of land, claustrophobic. Over the past several days, the protests have been small, usually involving no more than a few dozen people, but when the assembly grows, it gets crowded quickly. Some of the protesters cover their face, but their masks are more likely to have sparkles and streamers than the insignia of any particular warring faction. The weapon they wield is the iPhone—to document, to provoke, to stir up outrage on X or TikTok.
Even the sporadic violence outside the ICE facility seems ritualized. The first night I was there, instructions blared from loudspeakers to clear the entrance so that federal agents changing shifts or conducting raids could enter and exit through a tall, beige gate. The crowd instead closed in. Agents emerged in tactical gear and pushed back the protesters with round anti-riot shields, sometimes discharging pepper balls and mace. Then both sides retreated. In recent months, more than two dozen people have been charged with federal offenses, including assaulting federal officers and creating a hazard on government property. Most of the time, the protesters stand behind a blue line imprinted with the words FEDERAL PROPERTY DO NOT CROSS and hurl insults at agents they spot beyond the gate or on the roof of the building. When the facility falls quiet, they find other ways of passing the time—smoking, singing, sleeping.
In Portland, some protesters are true believers in a fight against fascism. Others seem to be there for a good time. In the days I spent observing the crowd, I thought repeatedly of The World Turned Upside Down, the historian Christopher Hill’s landmark account of the Diggers and Ranters and Levellers—the extravagant dissidents who took part in the civil wars that shook England in the 17th century, who danced and screamed and smoked at their meetings, who used slapstick to try to change their society.
I arrived at the ICE facility shortly before noon on a brilliant early-autumn Sunday that felt like a goodbye kiss from summer before the Pacific Northwest’s rainy season. Siebe was smoking and eating sausage pizza as I asked what had inspired the group’s protest. “We do not want to see the right to exist as a minority or marginalized person taken away,” they said. “When shit pops, Portland is right there in solidarity.”
It’s a story that’s been playing out for a long time in Portland, a combustible place where progressive ideals exist in an uneasy relationship with historically entrenched exclusion. When Oregon entered the union, in 1859, it barred Black people from living inside its borders. Today, Portland is still one of the whitest big cities in America. Trump is not the first president to hold a grudge against the city for its tradition of protest. George H. W. Bush reportedly dubbed the city “Little Beirut” because of the demonstrations he confronted in 1991.
Portland’s reputation as a refuge for nonconformists was cemented by the TV show Portlandia. But in the eight years since the series ended, the city has become better known for its role in a more sinister, real-life political drama: Starting during Trump’s first term, far-right activists and anti-fascist demonstrators clashed in the city, in lurid scenes amplified by Ngo, then a student at PSU. Social unrest intensified after the killing of George Floyd, in 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, roving street brawls popped up in some parts of the city. The instigators of that violence went to prison, and Portland learned a lesson, according to locals.
Now the crime rate is lower, the COVID era is loosening its grip on the economy, and city leaders insist that the version of Portland vilified by the president no longer exists. When Trump’s renamed “Department of War” called up 200 members of the Oregon National Guard, the city joined the state in suing the administration to block the deployment, arguing that federal law prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Addressing U.S. military commanders on Tuesday, the president recounted his conversation with Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, who sought to persuade him to stand down over the weekend. “I get a call from the liberal governor: ‘Sir, please don’t come in. We don’t need you.’”
The president said he was unbowed, telling her, “This looks like World War II.” He saw an opportunity in Portland, he said, explaining that he told his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Trump’s social-media order deploying the National Guard to Portland caught even senior military commanders unaware, and the soldiers he wants in the city could still take days to arrive. Vetting and training need to happen, along with travel and lodging, at an estimated cost of $10 million for federal taxpayers. The anticipation has already turned the street outside the ICE facility into a spectacle, like a booth at a state fair. On Sunday morning, a man on an electric scooter, a cocktail glass tattooed on his leg, zipped by. “Good job showing those flaccid fascists who’s boss,” he called out, eliciting whoops and whistles from the small crowd that had assembled.
Siebe shrugged off the threat of war: “Same shit, different day.” One of Siebe’s friends, who told me he goes by only the name Griffin (“first and last, like Prince”) and was dressed in a knitted hat and a keffiyeh, predicted that the soldiers wouldn’t know what to make of their surroundings. “They’ll be like, ‘Oh, these people are weird.’ I’m like, ‘Now you’re weird, too, because you’re in Portland.’ And then maybe they can do some sanitation work like they did in D.C., just going around and helping us pick up cans and plastic bags and shit.”
Later, I received a tour of the protest site from a person in a chicken suit. “Our reality is beyond satire at this point,” Jack Dickinson, who at 26 still has a baby face with freckles around his chin and long, sandy hair, told me. “So meeting it with absurdity,” he added, explaining his attire, “I guess that’s the idea.”
Dickinson, a former elementary-school math teacher, led me from the encampment to the front of the ICE facility, past laminated pieces of paper nailed to wooden posts that display the names and faces of people the protesters say were taken by ICE, including a mother of four and a 22-year-old from Venezuela who was detained when he came in to sign paperwork. Immigrant-rights groups have been standing watch at the facility to ensure that people swept up by ICE get social and legal services, but they say that their access to subjects of raids has been curtailed. Dickinson and I crossed the street to get a better view of the concrete facility, Oregon’s only outpost of the immigration-enforcement agency, and stood by a former racing-car-parts store whose fence has been turned into an anti-Trump tableau, with graffiti proclaiming ICE MELTS and, more ominously, WE GOT THE GUILLOTINE. Pinned to the fence are photographs of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein.
I asked Dickinson if he considered himself part of antifa, and he hesitated. “Maybe,” he eventually replied. “The conversation about antifa is dominated by people not in it, talking about what antifa is,” he said. “Obviously, I’m anti-fascist, but I do sometimes find myself hesitating to use the label.” Portland is home to one of the oldest known antifa factions, Rose City Antifa, but the organization is amorphous, and some of the people who took part in violence at demonstrations where the group’s presence was felt have faced prison sentences. Protesters I spoke with mostly scoffed at the label, saying that it’s now used to criminalize opposition to fascism.
As we walked toward a Tesla dealership and service center neighboring the ICE building, Dickinson explained that the demonstrations against ICE originated with dissent against Tesla’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, back in February. Nationwide protests in June, under the banner of “No Kings,” brought more people out just as the focus was shifting to ICE. Unruly demonstrations over the summer were met with “heavy gassing” by federal agents and numerous arrests, Dickinson told me, but lately it had been quieter. “It’s almost ironic that the president’s message and this possible deployment are happening just as things were winding down,” he said.
Today would be different, he said. A direct action had been called for 4 p.m. People would gather in force to show that the president’s depiction of Portland was a figment of his imagination.
By the afternoon, the crowd had grown to a few hundred, as Dickinson had predicted. I met people as young as 6 and as old as 86. “I have 13 grandchildren, and I want them to know I was here!” a protester shouted to me over the sound of honking cars. A few people were in wheelchairs. One woman was topless. There were faith leaders and union organizers. Alison Miller, a Unitarian Universalist minister, told me she has attended the protests with her 13-year-old. “I showed up to oppose the misuse of military power in our city at a time when everything is relatively peaceful,” she said. Clergy have been a constant presence at the site, a Lutheran pastor, Ron Werner, told me. “We’re committed to nonviolent protest and action,” he said.
As federal agents moved out of the facility to clear a path for vehicles, Helena Bartkowski, a student with a mane of red hair, sat on a concrete slab, holding a sign that asked, “Will your children be proud?” An agent wearing camouflage tactical gear, a ballistic helmet, protective eyewear, and a gray neck gaiter covering his face leaned over, yelling at her to move back. She brushed it off. “I’ve seen them come out here and throw five, 10 tear-gas canisters at protesters,” she told me. I asked what she was trying to accomplish, which she said was a “loaded question.” Initially, she thought protests could help drain ICE’s resources by forcing the agency to focus on putting down protests. But the president’s tax-and-spending law, which he called the “big, beautiful bill,” gave the agency a four-year budget exceeding the annual police expenditures by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined. “Now I would say it’s more about symbolism,” Bartkowski told me.
Others seem to see the situation as an opportunity to advocate for a panoply of causes. As I was speaking with Bartkowski, spontaneous speeches highlighted the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and called attention to Oregon’s racist past. “I’m here to raise awareness about intersectionality,” said one speaker, dressed in a yellow T-shirt and a gas mask. Some of the people who live in nearby apartment buildings wish the protesters would pipe down. As I moved to the outskirts of the crowd, I met two women, Ashley and Dori, who both declined to provide their last name. “They’re just causing anger, violence, and then all this graffiti,” said Dori, who is 62 and works as a housekeeper. She thought the National Guard could help restore order to her neighborhood. Ashley, who is 43 and disabled, called the mobilization “overkill,” saying the city’s police should instead mobilize and tell the crowd, “Get the hell out of here!”
Portland police officers kept their distance from the federal building, instead trying to manage traffic. When a white Tesla ignored their efforts to direct cars away from the crowd and traveled instead toward the protesters, a swarm of people seemed to thrill to the chance to fight, holding up their middle fingers or their iPhones to record. Police cleared a way for the driver, steering with one hand and holding up her iPhone in a retaliatory gesture, to back up.
By nightfall, the proportion of people clad in all black, with ski masks or sunglasses, had grown. Some wore the First Aid symbol and rushed to help a man writhing on the ground after being sprayed with mace. A man who identified himself as an Air Force veteran, his face covered with a camouflage cloth, was bellowing into a megaphone, calling for an armed populace and for the “feds to hang.” A Donna Summer hit was pulsating from loudspeakers, keeping the beat for screams of protest: “Ooh, I feel love, I feel love, I feel love, I feel love, I feel love.” A gray-haired man was burning a miniature American flag while a kid in a tank top hoisted a billowing Soviet banner skyward.
When the ICE officers retreated into the building, protesters looked for other places to direct their anger, trading insults with right-wing journalists and media personalities who had descended on Portland in search of viral footage. They all seem to know each other, like high-school sports rivals. Theirs is a social-media beef come to life. “Make me famous, you dumb bitch!” a protester called out to Chelly Bouferrache, known as “Honey Badger Mom,” who was filming the protester because, she told me, the woman had recently punched her in the head. Katie Daviscourt, a reporter for the right-wing website The Post Millennial, stood with her feet firmly planted in the street as protesters encircled her, laughing and calling her names. A woman in cowboy boots hung at the edges of the group, her hand deep in a party-size bag of kettle corn. Someone in clown makeup was observing from the sidewalk.
The performance was worth the seven-hour drive from Idaho for Pamela Hemphill, who has traveled an unusual path since storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021: refusing a Trump pardon and serving 60 days in prison, and then aligning herself with the left. Once known as “MAGA Granny,” she told me that she now calls herself Pamtifa, a portmanteau of her name and antifa. “I love it,” she said of the protest, dancing in a dark-blue beret.
“It becomes like entertainment,” James Hieb, a Marine veteran and former Republican state lawmaker, told me as he leaned against a fence, beholding the scene. The protesters’ angriest confrontation of the night was not with agents coming in and out of the federal building but with a YouTuber who goes by the name JD Delay, a burly man covered in tattoos who arrived with a pack of black-clad men after headlining a video on his YouTube channel, “LIVE FROM THE PORTLAND ANTIFA RIOT.” Protesters called him a Nazi and shouted at him to go home.
The next day, the chief of the Portland police, Bob Day, trundled into the city’s police museum for a news conference addressing what he termed “unprecedented times.” Day waved a sheaf of paper for emphasis as he noted that the world’s attention was focused on just a small part of his jurisdiction. “The city of Portland is about 145 square miles,” he said. “This is one city block.”
The police chief had no information about the mobilization of troops in his city—its timing, its scope, or anything else. He knew nothing about the helicopter seen flying overhead in recent days. I asked if this frustrated him. “No, it doesn’t frustrate me,” he answered.
“I see this as a chance for us to be able to demonstrate what we’ve learned, how we’ve grown, and the trajectory we are on that is very positive,” he said, as if trying to convince himself.
Outside, it was raining. I returned to the protest site and found Siebe on the same cot and sleeping bag, but with tarps to guard against the weather. We spoke about the response to Trump’s announcement—“I wish even more people had come out”—as a protester who later introduced herself as Cassandra Rose shouted at federal agents inside the ICE facility. “You all must be terrified of the consequences of your own fucking actions coming home to roost and wrecking your entire lives,” she screamed, her iPhone in one hand and a shepherd’s crook in the other.
Rose is trans and chose her name because she sees herself as a soothsayer. She is 38 and said she was homeless for 18 years across six different states. She arrived in Portland about two years ago, and the city was able to find her housing. She is disabled from nerve damage and cannot work, she told me, saying she spends most days “stomping pavement on the internet, yelling about Gaza or human rights.” As we spoke, a white-haired woman in a bright-red raincoat came up to thank Rose for being there. She was glad to be acknowledged and told me that she usually attends the protests at night. “It’s better to work in the dark,” she said.
That night, Rose was joined by about two dozen others, including a man in a trucker hat who announced proudly that he had come all the way from Clatsop County, on the coast. There was also a community-college student who told me that her neighbor of three years was detained at a nearby Home Depot. Dickinson, in his chicken suit, was there. “Yo, I see you here every day,” a long-haired man in a beanie told him, reaching out his hand. “If you’re here, I know I’m safe.”
The following day, ICE announced that the agency had detained “four criminal illegal aliens” for allegedly using a laser to interfere with a helicopter operated by Customs and Border Protection—the helicopter that had been a mystery to the police chief. Federal agents made additional arrests that night outside the ICE facility. In one skirmish, the Post Millennial reporter, who has been at the protests nearly every day, was struck in the face. She said a black eye was forming and went on Fox News to talk about it. The same day, Siebe was detained by federal agents while standing in the street and blocking their path, pushed back and then thrown to the ground.
The post The Weird Portland Protest That Trump Wants to Crush appeared first on The Atlantic.
