Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, toured the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday, getting a first-hand look at a small protest outside, which is entirely unlike the fiery “siege” Donald Trump claims is taking place there.
Noem, whose department has produced increasingly belligerent social media content of federal officers conducting immigration raids and firing teargas at protesters, was accompanied by a trio of conservative influencers who were whisked from the airport to the facility in her motorcade.
Portland police cleared the street outside the Ice office in the city’s south waterfront neighborhood before the secretary’s arrival, keeping a handful of protesters, one dressed as a chicken and another as a baby shark, at a distance.
A country-style song, with the refrain, “Trump is in the Epstein files, yes he is”, blared from a protest encampment down the street from the facility and one protester shouted to a government videographer filming from the roof: “Did we rename the Department of Homeland Security the ministry of propaganda?”
Reporters from non-partisan news outlets were also held behind the police line outside, as the partisan influencers in Noem’s entourage, Benny Johnson, Nick Sortor and David Medina, shared social media updates of the secretary leading federal officers in prayer inside, giving a pep talk and telling a member of the Oregon national guard to: “Get ready.”
Noem has previously echoed the president’s claims that a small band of protesters, who have rallied in their dozens outside the Ice facility since June, including one who wears an inflatable frog costume, are “terrorists” who have placed the office “under siege”, making the deployment of federal troops essential.
On Saturday, a federal judge in Portland blocked Trump’s effort to federalize Oregon’s national guard, determining that the president’s claims that the largely peaceful city was “burning to the ground” were “untethered to the facts”.
A day later, the same judge, Karin Immergut, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, expanded her order to block national guard troops from any jurisdiction from being deployed in Portland. She acted after Trump responded to her first order by trying to deploy members of the California national guard, previously federalized in response to protests in Los Angeles, to Oregon.
Since Trump has drawn attention to the small but persistent protest outside the Ice facility, and made false claims that Portland is “war ravaged”, a growing number of his supporters, including Maga influencers, have turned up to confront the protesters.
Some of those confrontations have led to scuffles and fistfights, prompting arrests by the Portland police. Sortor was among those arrested, after he tried to force his way through a protest encampment on a sidewalk near the Ice facility, and was involved in a scuffle over an American flag. Sortor had previously taken the flag from a protester who was burning it.
The charges against Sortor were later dropped after an outcry in the conservative media prompted the head of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, Harmeet Dhillon, to threaten an investigation of the Portland police bureau over supposed anti-conservative bias.
The two women Sortor was arrested for fighting with still face charges.
On Sunday, Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, accused federal officers in the Ice facility of trying to antagonize the protesters by using disproportionate amounts of teargas in a residential neighborhood, and inviting conservative social media influencers to film the crowd from the roof of the facility. “They are clearly trying to antagonize the crowds,” Kotek said.
Three of those conservative influencers were referred to in a police report last month as “counter-protesters” who “constantly return and antagonize the protesters until they are assaulted or pepper sprayed” and refuse “repeated advice from officers to stay way from” the protesters.
Johnson, a former journalist who reinvented himself as a Christian nationalist influencer after he was fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism, shared video of Noem looking down from the roof of the Ice facility at the small group of protesters below, including Jack Dickinson, a protest organizer who wears a chicken costume to mock Trump. Johnson captioned the video of Noem inspecting the placid scene below: “DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stares down army of Antifa and a guy in a chicken suit.”
The protesters below tried to spoil Noem’s photo-op by blaring the Benny Hill theme.
Despite the disconnect between the claims from Trump and Noem that this Ice field office is “under siege” from “domestic terrorists” and clear visual evidence of a small number of demonstrators in non-threatening attire, the influencers with Noem continued to refer to the protesters as dangerous radicals.
During her visit, Noem also met with the Portland police chief, Bob Day, who has been caricatured as “woke” in the conservative media for allowing his officers to arrest Sortor. In a social media update on the meeting, Johnson claimed that the chief had “sided with violent ANTIFA militants assaulting journalists and officers outside ICE facility”.
Noem’s motorcade then drove out of the facility past a handful of protesters on the street outside, including one dressed as a bear wearing a sombrero.
