In Portland, Oregon, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s use of chemical weapons has chased away a K-8 school just weeks before the start of the academic year, Rolling Stone reports.
The Cottonwood School, a publicly funded charter school, was, until this month, located adjacent to the city’s ICE facility. But in recent months, as protests against Trump’s mass deportations ramped up around the facility, ICE agents began to deploy tear gas against demonstrators.
According to the school’s executive director, Laura Cartwright, chemical munitions began to stray onto school grounds.
“At the end of the school year, we started noticing more activity at the ICE building, and there were chemicals being used on a regular basis and munitions being found on our playground,” she told local NBC affiliate KGW.
Cartwright also told Portland’s ABC affiliate that they were finding the munitions on a daily basis.“We were getting footage in the evenings of green gases, and gases being used near our gardens and enveloping our area,” she said.
As Rolling Stone reported, in June, the fence of the school’s play area displayed a laminated message. Its reported content, which matches a statement Cottonwood posted to Facebook, denounced the “harm being inflicted on our neighbors, ecosystem, students and school” and called on ICE to cease using weapons such as tear gas, “‘green’ gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets reported near our campus.”
This isn’t the first time they’ve experienced this, Cartwright told Rolling Stone. The school, after all, weathered protests against police brutality in Portland in 2020. (Per KGW, the school emerged from that summer relatively unscathed.)
Historically, the Cottonwood School has operated “harmoniously with the protesters,” Cartwright explained to Rolling Stone. “Our issue is the chemical weapons being used against them that were impacting our space.… We can’t have children picking up a plastic tear-gas ball that’s going to pop.”
As enrollment began to take a hit and it became clear that remaining in place was untenable, the school ultimately decamped to another Portland neighborhood.
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