A judge is considering temporarily restricting federal officers’ ability to use of force during protests in Portland, Oregon, after agents used teargas on a crowd that included children during a protest over the weekend.
Thousands of protesters gathered outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility on Saturday in what Keith Wilson, the city’s mayor, described as a peaceful demonstration “where the vast majority of those present violated no laws, made no threat and posed no danger” to federal agents.
The protest was part of a wave of demonstrations across the US in response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the killings of two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents in Minneapolis. In Portland, agents used teargas, pepper balls and rubber bullets on the crowd outside the South Waterfront facility.
“They’re teargassing children. They’re teargassing elderly people. They’re teargassing families,” attorney Matthew Borden said during a hearing on Monday, according to Oregon Live.
Monday’s hearing was part of an ongoing court case that began in November when the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of protesters and journalists. The suit aimed “to stop the Trump Administrations’ retaliatory violence … that has been a sustained feature of the federal officers’ activities at the Portland ICE building”, the ACLU of Oregon said in a statement.
At Saturday’s demonstration, one witness said she was about 100 yards (91 metres) from the ICE building when “what looked like two guys with rocket launchers” started dousing the crowd with gas. One of the teargas canisters broke the window of an apartment, Oregon Live reported.
“To be among parents frantically trying to tend to little children in strollers, people using motorized carts trying to navigate as the rest of us staggered in retreat, unsure of how to get to safety, was terrifying,” Erin Hoover Barnett wrote in an email to the outlet.
In a statement after the incident, the city’s mayor urged ICE agents to leave the city and said: “Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.”
During another demonstration on Sunday, protesters marched from city hall to the ICE building where they were met with chemical munitions fired by federal officers.
The ACLU of Oregon and other attorneys pointed to these events in legal filings submitted to the court over the weekend as part of the ongoing case.
“After a small group of individuals stood in the driveway of the Portland ICE Building, Defendant DHS officers emerged deploying flash bangs, detonating large volumes of tear gas at the front and toward the back of the crowd, and shooting munitions from the lower roof down into the crowd,” one filing said, adding that the violence followed “a pattern of retaliatory force”.
The filings included declarations from witnesses to the weekend’s protests. One demonstrator said: “It seemed as though the federal agents wanted to hurt the people protesting because they continued to throw teargas at us when we were trying to get away.”
The US district judge Michael H Simon said he will rule on whether to issue a temporary restraining order on Tuesday.
Teargas has often been used in Portland protests. In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, the Portland Police Department (PPD) made use of an excessive amount of the toxic chemical , raising concerns about the effects on health. A subsequent investigation on a June 2020 incident concluded that the city’s downtown was blanketed with gas at more than 50 times the level federal regulators consider “immediately dangerous to life or health”.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
