Archives for category: Portland

Federal Judge Permanently Blocks Federal Troops in Portland, Oregon

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2025 //
3

Judge Karin Immergut was appointed to the bench by President Trump in 2019. But unlike Trump’s appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Immergut puts the Constitution and the law above partisanship.

She had previously issued a temporary injunction against sending federal troops to Portland. Today she turned her order into a permanent injunction. She was not convinced that there was a need for federal troops in that all she saw were relatively small and peaceful demonstrations that could be handled by local law enforcement.

The Trump administration will appeal her decision.

The Department of Homeland Security insisted that troops were needed to quell rioting. Judge Immergut was not persuaded.

The New York Times reported:

President Trump overstepped his authority when he sought to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., to protect the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office there, a federal judge ruled on Friday, issuing a permanent block on troop deployments to the city in response to anti-ICE demonstrations.

Judge Karin J. Immergut of U.S. District Court, who was nominated to the bench by Mr. Trump, had previously issued a preliminary injunction blocking the president’s order federalizing National Guard soldiers in Oregon in a lawsuit that was brought by the States of Oregon and California and the City of Portland.

In her final 106-page ruling, Judge Immergut rejected arguments from government lawyers that protests at the ICE building made it impossible for federal officers to carry out immigration enforcement, represented a rebellion or raised the threat of rebellion. She also found that the attempt to use National Guard soldiers in Oregon had violated the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which gives states any powers not expressly assigned to the federal government.

“The evidence demonstrates that these deployments, which were objected to by Oregon’s governor and not requested by the federal officials in charge of protection of the ICE building, exceeded the president’s authority,” she wrote.

Never a dull moment when Trump is in office.

Categories Disruption, Justice, Oregon, Portland, Trump

Which Troops Will Trump Send to Portland, Oregon?

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2025 //
10

Trump announced on Saturday that he intends to send the military to Portland to restore safety and to protect ICE agents.

The Mayor of Portland says the city is safe. He doesn’t want troops. The Governor of Oregon agrees. But Trump has a fixation with that city. He hates Portland because there was a protest and riot there against him a few days after Trump won the election of 2016. The riot went on for days; stores were vandalized, windows smashed. Over 100 people were arrested. Almost nine years later, Trump still wants to punish Portland, and no one can stop him.

The Washington Post made clear that Trump has not yet decided whether to mobilize the Oregon National Guard or to send in active-duty military personnel.

President Donald Trump said Saturday that he will send troops to Portland, Oregon, and to immigration detention facilities around the country, authorizing “Full Force, if necessary” and escalating a campaign to use the U.S. military against Americans that has little modern precedent.

Trump said in a social media post that he was directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide troops to what he dubbed “War ravaged Portland” as well as “any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”

Saturday’s announcement appeared likely to set up a first test for a White House effort targeting left-wing protest groups. It came just days after Trump signed an executive order directing the nation’s full counterterrorism apparatus against domestic political opponents despite long precedent restricting such a move.

Right-wing politicians have long criticized Portland for the way it has handled racial-justice protests as well as its homeless population, tolerating encampments in the central part of the city. But Trump will again encounter the dynamic he faced when he deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles — a military activation in a state run by a Democratic governor who objects to the decision and could have grounds to fight it in court.

Trump’s announcement, which was posted on Truth Social while the president was at his private golf club in Northern Virginia, appeared to have come as a surprise to the Pentagon, with several officials saying they know little more than what the president included in his post.


One official familiar with the discussion Saturday said defense officials were seeking clarity on what Trump desires. The official, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about private planning.
The Pentagon released a statement a few hours later, saying defense officials “stand ready to mobilize U.S. military personnel in support of DHS operations in Portland at the President’s direction.”

The statement, by spokesman Sean Parnell, said the “Department will provide information and updates as they become available.”

Another person familiar with ongoing discussions said midday Saturday that some Pentagon officials had discussed troops being sent to Portland at some point but were scrambling to make sense of what’s next.

“You know what I know,” that person said, alluding to the president’s announcement on social media.

Among the uncertainties, it was not immediately clear whether Trump plans to deploy active-duty troops or National Guard members, or both, to Portland. As is the case in similar discussions with other cities, there are legal limits to how he can do so.

There was also no clarity about the timing of any potential deployment.

Asked for more details about the potential deployment, the White House did not answer questions but responded with a list of incidents that had recently taken place outside Portland’s ICE field office, including federal charges of arson, assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

“Despite the crime and neighborhood pushback caused by the months-long protest, Oregon Democrats still refuse to do anything about it,” the White House said in a statement.

Protesters have been demonstrating for weeks at an ICE processing center in the city in objection to Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts. The Department of Homeland Security on Friday said that “rioters in Portland, Oregon have repeatedly attacked and laid siege” to the facility.

Protests outside the facility reignited this June, with the Portland Police Bureau declaring a riot after demonstrators blocked the driveway and threw objects like rocks and bricks at the facility and federal agents, according to local news media accounts and social media videos. Portland police arrested more than 20 people connected to the protests after multiple federal officers were injured.

But on Saturday, the streets outside the Portland ICE facility remained largely empty in the hours after Trump made his announcement. Two homeless men slept on the sidewalk. A handful of passersby took photographs of the building, and a few talked to each other about how their experiences felt nothing like the “war-ravaged” city described….

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek (D) was one of 19 Democratic governors who signed a letter to Trump last month opposing his deployment of the National Guard over governors’ objections.
At a Saturday afternoon news conference, Kotek said she learned of Trump’s plan to deploy troops from social media and spoke to the president afterward.

“Portland’s doing just fine, and I made that very clear to the president this morning,” Kotek said. “Our city is a far cry from the war-ravaged community that he has posted about on social media, and I conveyed that directly to him.”
Kotek said she doesn’t believe Trump has the authority to deploy federal troops on state soil: “I’m coordinating with Attorney General Dan Rayfield to see if any response is necessary, and we will be prepared to respond if we have to.”

Both local and state-elected Oregon officials rejected Trump’s plan.

“The number of necessary troops is zero, in Portland and any other American city. Our nation has a long memory for acts of oppression, and the president will not find lawlessness or violence here unless he plans to perpetrate it,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson (D) said in a statement. Wilson was elected last year on a platform of moving homeless Portland residents into a temporary shelter.

Wilson said at a news conference Friday evening that the city had seen a “sudden influx” of federal agents in recent hours, including armored vehicles, which Wilson called a “big show.” Wilson was flanked by other city and state officials, who said it wasn’t clear which agency the federal authorities were from but urged the public stay calm and refuse to “take the bait.”

U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), who has criticized Trump’s domestic military deployments, said Saturday on X that the president “wants to stoke fear and chaos and trigger violent interactions and riots to justify expanded authoritarian control. Let’s not take the bait! Portland is peaceful and strong and we will take care of each other.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Portland, Trump

The Most Urgent Issue in the U.S. Today: Trump’s Invasion of Portland, Oregon

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2020 //
117

Portland, Oregon, is the scene of the most frightening series of events in the nation today. Governors may call upon the National Guard. The President, under extraordinary circumstances, may send in troops to enforce the law, as when President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to enforce a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The armed personnel in Portland were not called in by the governor. They are not there to enforce the law or a court decision. They are there to harass and bully American citizens who are exercising their Constitutional right to assemble peaceably. They are there by order of Trump and Barr to help raise the “law and order” issue for the fall election. Trump has announced that he intends to send his personal federal police force into other cities, to “pacify” them.

We cannot normalize what is happening. It is highly irregular and probably illegal. It is wrong. Trump will stop at nothing to improve his poll numbers. He has no regard for law or the Constitution. He is ignorant of both. We are moving in uncharted waters. Step by step, we are sinking into authoritarianism, fascism.

Dana Milbank wrote today in the Washington Post:

In Portland, Ore., federal police use batons, tear gas and rubber bullets on moms in bicycle helmets.

Unidentified federal officers, defying duly elected state and city leaders, throw civil rights demonstrators into unmarked vans without charges. President Trump’s acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, says his agents “go out and proactively arrest individuals.”

That’s so much easier than waiting for people to do something illegal before you lock them up!

The administration justifies the extraordinary disregard of constitutional protections by calling the demonstrators “violent anarchists” who have made “efforts to start fires at the Hatfield Federal Courthouse.” Trump says that the demonstrators “hate our country” and that “we must protect Federal property.”

Anarchists in Oregon who hate their country are trying to set fires and destroy federal property? Hmmm.

Steven and Dwight Hammond, also from Oregon, were convicted of arson for a fire that burned 139 acres of federal property in the state. A witness testified that Steven Hammond handed out matches with instructions to “light up the whole country” after his hunting party illegally slaughtered animals on federal land. Their imprisonment sparked an armed takeover of federal property in Oregon for 41 days in 2016 by dozens of militia-affiliated gunmen.

And what did Trump think of these arsonists who destroyed federal property and wanted to burn down America? Why, he pardoned them in 2018, calling them “devoted family men” and “respected contributors to their local community” for whom “justice is overdue.”

We have seen this pattern over and over.

In Washington’s Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, federal police operating under the administration’s command fired gas and projectiles at peaceful demonstrators to clear the way for a presidential photo op outside a church. But when armed militants poured into the state Capitol in Michigan, brandishing their weapons in the legislative chamber to intimidate lawmakers (some of whom felt the need to don bulletproof vests) over public health restrictions, Trump declared that the gunman were “very good people” and that the state’s Democratic governor should “make a deal” with them.

Now Trump is decrying a supposed absence of law and order in Chicago and other cities run by Democrats (“worse than Afghanistan,” he said) and is threatening to overpower those cities, too, with armed federal agents. But when a Missouri couple came out of their home shouting at nonviolent racial justice demonstrators, pointing a pistol and brandishing a rifle at them, Trump called it “a disgrace” that they might face charges. Never mind that it’s a felony in Missouri to exhibit “any weapon readily capable of lethal use in an angry or threatening manner.”

In Trump’s America, it seems, the First Amendment applies only to those exercising the Second Amendment. Unarmed demonstrators pose a threat to “law and order.” But if you’re carrying a gun, you should feel free to threaten your elected representatives, menace civil rights demonstrators or do what you like to federal property.
Trump’s pretext for overriding state and local leaders with federal firepower is the racial justice demonstrators’ supposed violence. Though the majority of protesters have been peaceful, a few are indeed violent — you can view them on Fox News — and they deserve condemnation. But Trump is fomenting violence in the service of fueling a culture war he hopes will salvage his reelection. “It’s a choice between the law and order and patriotism and prosperity, safety offered by our movement, and the anarchy and chaos and crime,” he declared at a telerally this past week.

Or so he would like it to be.

Oregon’s Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, said Trump’s “dictatorship”-style use of “secret police” was “adding gasoline to a fire” that had been dying. “The situation had been improving over the past several weeks,” she told NPR, and “their presence here substantially escalated the situation.”

But escalation is clearly Trump’s aim when he threatens to send federal police into more American cities. He needs to frighten Americans into embracing federal police taking up arms against American citizens — and Americans taking up arms against each other.

On Tuesday, for example, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany described Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the Missouri couple who threatened demonstrators with guns, as being menaced by “violent” protesters who “trespassed,” threatened to kill them and “burn down the house,” but not before moving into the house and “taking a shower.” Video of the affair shows peaceful marchers on the sidewalk, walking past the agitated and gun-toting McCloskeys, on their way to demonstrate outside the mayor’s nearby house.

“The prosecutor apparently thinks her job isn’t to keep us safe from criminals, but to keep the criminals safe from us,” Mark McCloskey told Fox News on Monday.

What a perfect distillation of Trumpian justice! Nonviolent civil rights demonstrators are the “criminals” — and the people who threaten them with guns are the victims.

Categories Accountability, Fascism, Oregon, Portland, Trump

White Nationalists Rallying Today in Portland, Oregon

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2018 //
34

The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of our nation’s most valuable organizations defending our Constitution and democratic values against extremists.

Their report today says that extremist groups are holding a hate rally in Portland, Oregon, today. There are many links, which I am not including because I would have to do each one manually. If you sign up to get their newsletter, you can get the full report with links. What SPLC describes is an example of the way the far-right is “weaponizing the First Amendment,” using it as a shield to defend hatred, racism, and incitement’s to violence. What or who incited these groups?

SPLC writes:

AUGUST 4, 2018
Weekend Read // Issue 91

The threat of violence hangs over a rally that’s being staged by far-right groups in Portland, Oregon, today, nearly a year after the deadly white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys have held more than a dozen rallies throughout the Pacific Northwest over the past year, events marked by street violence and harassment and buoyed by a wide array of racist and antigovernment extremist allies.

David Neiwert, who frequently writes for our Hatewatch blog, has been covering the rallies from the beginning. In a piece for The Baffler, he describes the last violent rally they held in Portland on June 30th:

The Proud Boys and Patriots were primed for battle. Indeed, the whole point of the event was to try to provoke a fight that they were not simply prepared for, but were keen to take part in. Prior to the onset of street hostilities, the alt-right crowd bristled with warlike talk about martyrdom as the price of freedom and “taking down” the antifascists across the street. Periodically they’d break into chants of Queen’s mock-authoritarian seventies anthem “We Will Rock You,” which they dedicated to British Identitarian Tommy Robinson.

As I watched the last of the Proud Boys—waiting for the final school bus that had brought them to the rally to arrive so they could leave, clustered on a street corner and haranguing the counter-protesters across the way—I mused about how conservatives’ sudden concern to safeguard civility in American discourse is a crude, cynical manipulation. Its operational logic is very similar to the Proud Boys’ insistence on claiming that their protests are about nothing more than the assertion and protection of free-speech rights.

That, after all, has been what Gibson’s Patriot Prayer events have been ostensibly about since they were launched in Portland last year. Gibson and his comrades claim that they’re standing up for “conservative speech,” which has always translated into a lot of immigrant-bashing, Islamophobia, “constitutionalist” gun nuttery straight from the Bundy Bunch, and a heavy dose of Deep State/globalist conspiracy theorizing. Unsurprisingly, the gatherings attracted more than their share of extreme rightists, including a broad array of skinheads and white nationalists; last year one of the more unhinged such fellow travelers showed up to one of the earliest Patriot Prayer events draped in a flag, and then began shouting that he was a Nazi and using racial epithets. Organizers kicked him out.

His name was Jeremy Christian. One month later, in May 2017, while riding a Portland MAX commuter train, he began harassing two Arab teenage women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, using ethnic slurs against Muslims. Three men riding the train tried to intervene; Christian pulled out a knife and stabbed them, two of them fatally. At his arraignment, he was still protesting Joey Gibson style: “Free speech or die, Portland! You got no safe place. This is America—get out if you don’t like free speech!”

Patriot Prayer had a previously scheduled rally just over a week after the murders. Civic leaders urged the group to cancel the event amid burgeoning anger in the community, but Gibson and his cohorts held it anyway. It turned into a gigantic melee, with the Patriot crowd heavily outnumbered, and a number of assaults and arrests on both sides. It was some of the worst crowd violence Portland had seen in decades.

Since then, Gibson has organized an ongoing series of “free speech” and “freedom” rallies along the West Coast and elsewhere—in Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Olympia and Vancouver, Washington. He’s denounced white supremacists after Charlottesville, but also openly embraced the Proud Boys, the group founded by the white identitarian hipster journalist Gavin McInnes, who’s long been a presence at Gibson’s rallies. The June 30 event was originally intended to commemorate the post-murder event, but it took on a life of its own after an early June rally in downtown Portland also dissolved into violence.

Gibson made a pitch for help from supporters across the nation, and the Proud Boys gladly obliged, putting out the word on their regional social media sites. As a result, a considerable number among the Patriots were wearing black polos and red MAGA ballcaps, and they came from all over the country, especially California.

Listening to them bait the counter-protesters with ugly speech, and talk among themselves about fighting tactics, it was clear the “free speech” they wanted to defend was bigoted and threatening. The lofty constitutional principles were little more than a pretext: they were there mostly to bash some “leftist” heads.

Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys were emboldened by the fighting at that June 30 event. Organizers have discussed coming to the rally armed; open carry is legal in Oregon. We will be monitoring the event closely and reporting live on Hatewatch and Twitter.

The Editors

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Education Reform, Oregon, Portland, Racism

Portland, Oregon: Corporate Reformers Launch Vicious Attack on School Board Member

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2017 //
5

Portland, Oregon, is in big trouble. Despite massive spending by the fake reform Stand on Children–err, Stand for Children–the corporate reformers lost in the school board election. Now, as local activist Deb Mayer reports, they are trying to bully a school board member into resigning.

Why the attacks on a man who won his seat and supports public schools? The board has been unable to pick a new superintendent. So the composition of the board is crucial, and the privatizers need another seat. They want Paul Anthony’s seat so they can win by bullying what they could not win at the polls.

Citizens of Portland must be informed. Stand for Children represents Bill Gates and the rest of the zbillionaire Boys Club that funds SFC. They are not working on behalf of the children and families of Portland.

Don’t be fooled.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Portland, Privatization, Testing

Good News: Pro-Public School Activist Wins Seat on Portland, Oregon, School Board

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2017 //
4

Rita Moore, a pro-public education advocate, won a hotly contested seat on the Portland, Oregon, school board. Her son attended Portland public schools, and she has long been involved in support of public education. She holds a Ph.D. in political science.

She ran against a candidate who was principal of a KIPP school in Houston and worked also for TFA. See here.

In her response to a survey of candidates, she expressed her views about the importance of public education.

What is your stance on the movement to privatize education?

I am fundamentally opposed to efforts to privatize education. Free public education is America’s gift to the world. It has been the foundation of our society, the bedrock of our democracy, and the engine of economic growth, producing the American dream and making the US the capital of innovation.

Privatizing education is not good for students or this city. I am completely opposed to it, as is the vast majority of voters and residents of Portland. Public education is a door that all kids have the right to walk through and which we as a society have the obligation to fully fund.

Congratulations, Rita Moore!

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Portland, Privatization, Supporting public schools