If President Trump follows through on his latest threat, Portland OR won’t be the only U.S. city to find unidentified federal security forces patrolling its streets.
Trump said he plans to dispatch law enforcement personnel to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland CA, Reuters reported Monday.
All of those cities’ mayors, Trump pointed out, are “liberal Democrats.”
Portland’s experience offers more than a hint of what might happen elsewhere.
“For more than 50 nights,” reports NPR, “hundreds have gathered in [Portland’s] downtown to protest racism and police brutality, following the killing of George Floyd” while in police custody in Minneapolis.
But Portland’s mayor, Oregon’s governor and both U.S. senators have said federal agents aren’t needed to deal with the civil unrest — and insist the feds are making things worse, not better.
Mayor Ted Wheeler told CNN on Sunday that there are “dozens, if not hundreds,” of federal troops in his city. Some were observed wearing camouflage or black uniforms, some reading “Police,” but without badges or personal identification.
Wheeler added that “people are literally being scooped off the street and into unmarked vans, rental cars apparently. They are being denied probable cause and due process. They don’t even know who is pulling them into the vans, the [officers] are not identifying themselves. As far as I can see this is completely unconstitutional.”
“Their presence here is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism,” Wheeler said.
“It’s simply like adding gasoline to a fire,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said. “What’s needed is de-escalation and dialogue.”
“The Trump administration needs to stop playing politics with people’s lives,” Brown told NPR. “We don’t have a secret police in this country. This is not a dictatorship. And Trump needs to get his officers off the streets.”
Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenbaum is suing several federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, “for engaging in ‘unlawful law enforcement in violation of the civil rights’ of protesters and detaining people without probable cause,” CNN says.
Portland police have sometimes teamed up with the feds, but said on Monday that “federal agents used tear gas to disperse the crowd and moved to extinguish a fire that was lit within a portico of [a federal] courthouse,” Reuters reports. “Police did not engage with protesters and did not use tear gas, the department said.”
“We are not escalating, we are protecting,” Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, insisted in a Fox News interview. “We’re not going to apologize for it.”
But in a weekend statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) said:
“We live in a democracy, not a banana republic. We will not tolerate the use of Oregonians, Washingtonians – or any other Americans – as props in President Trump’s political games.”
