A visit to downtown Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, hours after Donald Trump falsely declared the city “war ravaged” to justify the deployment of federal troops, made it plain the US president’s impression of the city, apparently shaped by misleading conservative media reports, is entirely divorced from reality.
There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”. Jack Dickinson, 26, wore a chicken costume draped in an American flag and held a sign that read “Portland Will Outlive Him”. Passing motorists honked in appreciation.
Dickinson, who is from Portland and has helped organize the small but persistent protest at that location, which is going on three months, said he was not surprised to see Trump focus his attention on the city. But he called the president’s threat to have soldiers use “full force” against the protesters, whose numbers occasionally swell into the dozens, unwarranted.
“There’s no justification, no reason for the national guard or military to be using ‘full force’ on people,” Dickinson said, “but they have this narrative about Portland that’s been helped by selectively edited videos to set themselves up for a crackdown.”
The Ice field office, which the city of Portland recently accused the agency of illegally using for detentions, is also attractive to protesters because it sits directly next to a Tesla dealership. Another protester held up a sign that read “Tesla Funds Fascism/Stop Buying Teslas”.
A third protester, a young man who goes by the nickname Burrito, said that he was “protesting them wrongfully kidnapping random individuals based on their skin color”.
He also rejected the president’s characterization of the city and of the anti-Ice protesters. “This is not a war zone and it’s disgusting the way that he talks about us,” he said.
The activist said that the point of the protests was to frustrate and wear out the federal agents, who, he said, have been responsible for any violence that has taken place: “As the day progresses, we get more numbers, they start to show more force and our people come out. It’s just a matter of how they escalate things, because they are the escalators, not like the one that Trump took that doesn’t work.”
The number of protesters was vastly smaller than the number of people in nearby coffee shops and restaurants, where Portlanders went about their usual weekend business, joking about life during wartime.
The city’s downtown blocks, which were the scene of mass protests in 2020, first against racist policing and then against Trump’s deployment of federal agents to guard a courthouse, were similarly placid.
The only person on the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse was a street sweeper, wearing a neon-green vest with the words “Clean & Safe” on the back. The fence that surrounded the building five years ago had long since been removed, as had the plywood boards that covered the windows of the adjacent police headquarters, where thousands of racial justice protesters rallied after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
There was also no sign of activity at the nearby Edith Green federal building, with its distinctive facade clad in vegetated screens, one day after a local TV reporter recorded the arrival of a convoy that included masked federal agents in an armored homeland security truck.
By contrast, the nearby Portland farmers’ market was packed with residents and tourists buying produce and eating acaí bowls from a thriving local business started by a yoga and meditation teacher.
On social media, Portlanders continued to mock Trump’s false claims about the city as they have for weeks, by posting images of themselves enjoying life in the city with audio of the president saying, earlier this month, that it is “like living in Hell”.
