PORTLAND, Oregon — On his 27th birthday, Jack Dickinson stepped into a fuzzy yellow chicken suit, pulled a red, white and blue cape over his shoulders, and headed to the place he’d spent nearly every day of the last 170 — the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.
The streets were wet but spicy with pepper ball residue, and Dickinson coughed as he made his way to the front. A month ago, this block was jammed with costumed protesters. Tonight, Dickinson saw, there were 30 or so people and only two in costume. Nearly everyone else had gone home after the weather turned and a federal judge blocked President Donald Trump from deploying the National Guard to this city he’d described as “war-ravaged.”
“I had hoped the costumes might fizzle or evolve,” Dickinson told another longtime protester, a 30-year-old who dresses as the Disney character Stitch.
For a while, Dickinson believed gentle mockery was the smartest way to to dismantle Trump’s efforts in Portland. The costumes had shown Portland wasn’t war-ravaged at all. But they’d also turned the neighborhood into a tourist attraction, and Dickinson worried the protests had not protected the region’s most vulnerable people. Trump had targeted Portland as one of six cities for heightened immigration enforcement, and all fall, ICE agents had detained increasing numbers of people here. Still, Dickinson returned night after night, in part, because the demonstrations had radically changed his life.
He had felt lonely and untethered before this year. Now, he and other regulars spent hours outside the ICE facility talking about everything from Mario Kart wins to Portland’s municipal budget. They charted data, extolled ranked choice voting and talked about the latest political dramas with an enthusiasm Dickinson described as “repressed theater kid energy.” Federal agents and pepper balls aside, the block often felt more like a college dorm lobby than a protest site.
“Have you heard about third places?” Stitch asked Melissa Gianoplus, a 52-year-old health care provider, as they lingered at the facility’s edge. “Our generation doesn’t have them, unless you count bars, but who can afford to go to bars?”
This place was free. Someone was always playing music, and people brought food to share. That night, the group included a professor, a teenager and a former “MAGA granny” who spent time in prison for her role in the Jan. 6 riot, then refused Trump’s pardon. There were a few old-school “black bloc” protesters and a group that called themselves “The Humble Boys,” whose strategy was to act as boring as possible. Behind them, a couple salsa danced in the street.
“This is the only thing that cured my depression,” Gianoplus said. “It’s better than therapy.”
“Same,” Stitch said.
Gianoplus was right, Dickinson thought. This — this fight, this community — was the only thing that could cure that.
‘Snapped me out of it’
The man who became the Portland Chicken spent his younger years 10 minutes away from the block that would change his life. He grew up upper middle class in a lush Southwest Hills neighborhood high above the city.
As a teenager, Dickinson joined the math club and played Magic the Gathering, but he found it hard to connect with other people. He didn’t date. Instead, he spent a lot of time on YouTube, and one day, the site suggested he watch a video of the conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro. Dickinson watched Shapiro talk about social justice warriors and blue-haired feminists, and he felt smart in a kind of contrarian way. Liberals thought one way, he decided as he watched Shapiro, but free thinkers knew better. The algorithm pulled Dickinson from one right-wing video to another, and though he wasn’t always sure they were right, he felt comforted by the idea that he was somehow a victim.
Dickinson graduated from one of the region’s best high schools with great grades and a scholarship to study math at the University of Rochester, but he never felt rooted. He left school in 2018 in the middle of his sophomore year. Back home, a friend challenged Dickinson’s Shapiro talking points, and his right-leaning thoughts began to dissolve. He re-enrolled in college, and in 2022, he went to Sweden for a master’s degree in economics. The coursework took a toll on him, though, and he came back depressed and unable to do much, let alone work.
By then, he considered himself liberal, but only in the way many White middle class Portlanders are. He read the news and he watched YouTube videos, though he had quit social media. But he didn’t do anything with the knowledge he’d amassed.
After Trump was elected to a second term, Dickinson was so worried about the future of the country, he alternated between crying and doomscrolling for two days. He read Project 2025, the 920-page blueprint the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups wrote to shape federal policy. He streamed YouTube segments that warned about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and right-wing plans to dismantle democracy, and he felt a clarity he’d never quite reached in his Shapiro-watching days.
Dickinson tried to talk about politics at his weekly pickleball game, but no one was as interested in Musk’s influence as he was. Last winter, Dickinson saw a flier for a protest at the local Tesla dealership, and he decided to go. He was nervous his signs weren’t clever enough, but after he’d spent hours talking to people who were as concerned as he was, he knew he had found something he’d wanted for a long time — a community.
‘A desperation move’
Portland’s Tesla dealership is next door to its ICE facility, so Dickinson spent much of the spring migrating between the two. Most days, he sat outside the immigration building and documented how many people went in for what should have been routine check-in appointments and how many came out. People shook as they approached the entrance, he said, and his stomach twisted as he watched their family members wait in terror outside.
A handful of other people protested alongside him, but most days the surrounding block was empty save for the immigrants waiting outside. Dickinson decided he needed a new strategy. People in Serbia and Turkey had worn Pikachu costumes to protests, he knew. Maybe a little whimsy would draw people in, Dickinson thought. He logged on to Amazon and ordered a button-up chicken suit for $25.
It was both “a desperation move,” Dickinson said, and a nerdy commentary on Trump’s pattern of imposing tariffs then rescinding them: “Trump Always Chickens Out,” people on Wall Street said.
In June, on the morning of the first No Kings march, Dickinson stepped into the suit and felt transformed. He was no longer an anxious young man. He was a superhero of sorts, a purveyor of tactical frivolity, a serious commentary dressed as something silly. A friend loaned him an American flag cape with hearts instead of stars.
Dickinson is 6-foot-1. He has earnest blue eyes, full cheeks, and long, dirty blond hair. Normally, standing out made him feel insecure, but as he drew closer to the march, he realized people liked his chicken suit.
“It’s a very gentle, nonthreatening way to say f— you to the fascists,” Tara Velarde, a 47-year-old who met Dickinson at the Tesla demonstrations, said, “which I think a lot of people were looking for.”
Other people started wearing costumes, too, but by late September, Portland police testified in court documents, the protests remained low energy. Then Fox News aired a report that mistakenly used footage of the rowdier 2020 protests, and Trump decided to intervene.
“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 from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Dickinson saw the news as soon as he woke up. He put on his costume, grabbed a new sign — “Portland will outlive him” — then drove to the ICE building.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), The Washington Post and others visited that morning, and each reported they’d seen only one protester: a man dressed as a chicken. “According to the Trump administration a guy in a chicken suit counts as a reign of terror,” Wyden posted.
The next month, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem visited Portland, and a video of her staring down from the ICE roof at Dickinson appeared on every late-night comedy show. The chicken suit made Portland’s protests seem non-threatening and fun. By mid-October, costumed protesters were line-dancing outside the facility every night and hosting classes on everything from knitting to Jazzercise by day.
For a while, Portland’s scene was so booming, activists in Chicago, New York and even small towns in the Midwest began dressing up, too. But the party lasted only as long as the weather did. In early November, when United Church of Christ clergy traveled through a storm to bless the costumed protesters, they found only one — Dickinson.
‘We love you, brother’
The night after Dickinson’s birthday, he parked a few blocks south of ICE and slipped on his costume. It was his fourth chicken suit. The first burned mid-August when an agent threw a flash bang canister, and the sparks hit Dickinson’s legs. The second and third disintegrated from the repeated laundering he’d done to wash out tear gas.
Even before he reached the building, people called “Chicken!” with the kind of delight a kid might express when they spot a monkey at the zoo. A man handing out 16 loaves of homemade sourdough bread cheerfully waved Dickinson over, as did another juggling illuminated balls.
That night, there were at least 100 people there, a quarter of whom were live-streaming the event. A group of far-right men had declared that Friday the start of “Patriot Weekend.” They drove down in extended cab pickup trucks, waved pro-ICE flags and set up a giant, inflatable Trump. More than one of them carried an assault rifle at his side, but mostly, they hung around their trucks and grilled dinner.
Around 9 p.m., a man in a plastic Trump mask sauntered up to Dickinson.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?” the man joked.
“Why?” Dickinson asked.
“To vote for Trump in 2028!” the man said, then held out his hand. “We love you, brother.”
Dickinson chuckled. He disagreed with their beliefs, but he suspected many of them were looking for the same thing he was — a community, something to build a life around.
“The loneliness epidemic, it’s not an excuse for going down this route,” he said, “but it is a real thing that happens.”
Dickinson had found his own cure. He had turned the chicken suit into a full-time gig. He’d traveled to Washington, D.C., to march, and he regularly attended city council meetings with the friends he’d made outside. He thought he would protest for three years — the rest of the Trump administration — then eventually, maybe run for office himself.
“Do you still have the original chicken suit?” Velarde asked him. “We should auction it off for mutual aid.”
“When I was in D.C.,” Dickinson said, “someone told me I should hold on to it because it’s going to be in the Smithsonian someday.” He rolled his eyes, a little embarrassed at himself.
Soon after 10 p.m., Dickinson found three of his friends sitting in front of the ICE building. They talked about silly stuff — board games they liked, memories they shared. It was quiet and a little quaint, but then federal agents started shooting pepper balls from the rooftop for no reason anyone could discern. The tiny crowd went coughing down the street.
Dickinson used to be able to handle the pepper, but lately he wondered if his lungs were permanently damaged. He and others had even filed lawsuits over the agents’ use of tear gas and pepper balls. But the protests didn’t scare Dickinson. Nothing did anymore, in part because for the first time in his life, he knew exactly where he belonged.
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