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One morning in court the other day, Maj. Gen. Timothy L. Rieger, a soft-spoken, broad-shouldered military official who has played a bit role in Portland’s National Guard saga, recalled a news item from several years ago that moved him.
The protests over the murder of George Floyd were in full swing in California. And the state’s National Guard, which he then helped lead, was deployed in broad force to quell the unrest. There had, he recalled, been “ravaging, pillaging, plundering.” But in Rieger’s telling, the arrival of the troops restored calm. One of the best examples, he said, occurred in Los Angeles, when, joining demonstrators, “one of our captains actually got down on the ground and prayed.”
The point of this whole account—at least the point that the attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice seemed to be trying to draw out as he questioned Rieger on the witness stand last week—was that, liberal hysterics notwithstanding, the National Guard was a force not of martial threat but of reliable, neighborly service.
Sure, Rieger acknowledged, guard members were armed with implements of death (“I’ve never seen us go anywhere without our weapons”). But the guard, in his mind, was in essence a community resource for when the going gets tough: “I’ll see you at Trader Joe’s, I’ll see you at the coffee shop, I’ll see you at a church, and then the flood hits, and you see me in uniform, pulling you off the roof of your house.”
As the judge would point out moments later, the connection between this aside and the question before the U.S. District Court was a bit tenuous. The proceedings, on paper, concerned whether President Donald Trump’s decision to federalize the National Guard for a mission to Portland—a city he had described as ravaged by war and besieged by leftist terrorists—was based on a plausible, good-faith assessment of the conditions on the ground.
In practice, though, the trial held Oct. 29–31 was about something more interesting and subtle, which Rieger’s perspective did in fact tap: the different and changing ways sworn law enforcement and security officials see themselves and their relationship to the communities in which they operate.
The trial featured no voices of immigrants, nor of the many protesters who have turned up to demonstrate or agitate, generally on those immigrants’ behalf, day in and day out at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in South Portland. Really, these legal proceedings were barely about them at all, except in terms of the threat they did or did not pose to those testifying. Every single witness called to the stand was a law enforcement or military figure. And perhaps more than anything else, the trial of State of Oregon v. Trump revealed the world as seen through their eyes.
How the feds view the protests
All agree that the ICE protests in Portland swelled on June 14. Among those saying so last week was Robert Cantu, the deputy director for Region 10 of the Federal Protective Service, the agency tasked with protecting some 8,000 federally owned or leased buildings, including several hundred in Cantu’s zone, encompassing Alaska, Washington, Idaho and Oregon.
That day in mid-June, Cantu said, he’d posted a small contingent of FPS officers to support immigration officials in the city. The first No Kings march had flowed through Portland, and soon a rowdy fragment of protesters had descended on ICE, the great symbol of their ultimate disgust with the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement.
Before long, Cantu said from the stand, demonstrators threw rocks and sticks, launched fireworks, broke building windows, and shattered the front door. The “building envelope” was at risk of being compromised, he said, and the officers, some of whom sustained injuries, felt a threat closing in. Federal officers deployed tear gas, which flowed back into the building itself. Protesters were getting close to the entrance. “It was perceived that there was a breach that was about to happen,” Cantu said. Inside the building, officers were moving into “lethal capability.”
“Fortunately,” Cantu added, this did not prove necessary, even as protesters demonstrated their devious intentions by chaining the front doors shut. There were other doors through which officers could exit, Cantu added, and a Border Patrol tactical unit arrived at the facility with an armored vehicle to provide backup. Still, the event underscored the officers’ sense that they were under siege. And they felt they got little help from officers of the Portland Police Bureau, who ultimately declared a riot.
Of course, that was all more than four months ago, and more than three months before Trump moved to call in the troops. As June went on, ICE workers temporarily worked elsewhere, and the protests grew far tamer with time.
But still, as small-scale demonstrations persisted into the summer, the feds, fearing a rapid escalation, had committed to a tighter security regime. According to documents presented at trial, the federal law enforcement presence at the facility—primarily officers from ICE and FPS, many cycled from outside the region—surged to nearly 100 officers per night in June, before settling to an average of around 50 into July and August.
Such a commitment, Cantu said, strained FPS, which has struggled for years with short staffing. The agency went from providing security at Portland ICE during business hours to offering it 24 hours a day, Cantu said. Rotations for officers, typically 30 days, were reduced to 20—an acknowledgment of the exhaustion and mental health challenges they faced, according to Cantu, given their constant proximity to protesters “who say some of the most vulgar, foul, racial slurs, consistently throughout the day, throughout the night, on bullhorns.”
Cantu wasn’t the only witness who suggested the invective had taken its toll. FPS Cmdr. William Turner recalled coming up from his command in Eugene every other week for stints starting in July, to join what the feds had dubbed “Operation Skipjack Portland.” He recalled times that protesters showed up wielding bats, and how one day in early September a guillotine appeared in the street. “At the time, it looked very real to us,” he said. “We didn’t know that it was a prop.” Such displays felt particularly menacing, he said, given that officers guarding the ICE facility had been called Nazis, the N-word, Uncle Toms, race traitors. He recalled demonstrators placing an X on the ground, under officers standing on the ICE facility roof, indicating where the officers should land when they killed themselves.
The sense of menace, the FPS officers testified, followed their colleagues beyond their security shifts. They had lights shined in their eyes when they left the building. They reported instances of officers being tailed, of protesters showing up at the hotel where they stayed.
Given that protesters sometimes obstructed the ICE facility’s driveway, simply getting out of the building could be an operation. Turner described how officers used a loudspeaker to direct demonstrators to clear the driveway when a caravan of cars had to leave. If and when demonstrators didn’t comply, he said, the officers routinely pressed together in large groups to “push out”—creating a three-sided formation that forced protesters away.
And yet, such a maneuver, they often worried, left the fortress exposed. Every time officers opened the gate, Turner said, there was the possibility a protester might run inside.
How Portland police view the feds
The trial that unfolded last week took place in the 13th-floor courtroom of U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut in the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. Portland Police Bureau Cmdr. Franz Schoening was among the officers who worked the protests in 2020 outside that very building. From the witness stand, he recalled assaults on officers, arson, Molotov cocktails, and other sundry misfortunes that plagued the downtown core.
He’s also worked the more recent protests outside the ICE facility. Asked by an attorney to compare the two protests, he said: “Other than the duration, there is no comparison. The level of violence, criminal conduct that we saw in 2020 was markedly different.”
Other Police Bureau officers echoed his assessment: In recent months Portland’s anti-ICE protests have been generally peaceful, if pocked with sporadic incidents of trespass, civil disobedience and interpersonal conflict.
On balance, Portland officers seemed generally unimpressed with the police work of their federal counterparts. They say federal officers at Portland ICE have used indiscriminate force, deploying tear gas, for example, without giving advance notice or a clear rationale, and more broadly taking actions disproportionate to the level of crime and violence at hand.
At one point in the trial, attorneys had Portland police officers assess what appeared to be an instance of friendly fire in which a federal officer shot some kind of nonlethal munition that bounced on the ICE building roof, prompting other federal officers to shoot munitions back at the crowd. (Cantu said feds deploy tear gas based on the totality of circumstances, as a means to disperse a crowd.)
Portland officers argued such jumpiness makes it harder for them to do their jobs—in part because it forces them to flee scenes as well when they might be, say, making targeted arrests, removing “bad apples.”
More to the point, they doubt the federal approach even works. The bureau has developed a positive track record lately working with protest groups, Schoening explained, and with good reason: When a crowd experiences what it perceives as illegitimate or unjust action, this can change its “normative behavior and collective identity,” Schoening said, such that it becomes “more resistant to exercise of authority.”
Whatever their crowd management philosophy, officers of many stripes agreed June 14 did not go particularly well, and the Portland Police Bureau moved to adapt. According to Assistant Chief Craig Dobson, the bureau issued internal guidance for the “evolving” situation, seeking to get its officers who were working the demonstrations on the same page, clarifying that they “were to be arresting for all criminal activity.”
This did not stop Turner and Cantu of FPS from observing that Portland officers, with a broad interpretation of sanctuary laws forbidding them from aiding in federal immigration enforcement, continued in the coming months to be generally of little use.
But records show that as protests went on, the bureau frequently checked in with the feds about the situation outside Portland ICE. Often, little was going on at all. At other times, protesters were more active. On some occasions, the two law enforcement factions observed behavior that veered into the darkly bizarre.
“[Turner] told me they are seeing several older transients that are being coerced into approaching the gate and causing a distraction or just told to [rattle] the gate,” wrote one Portland officer to colleagues in an email in early September. “On one occasion, FPS took custody of an elderly man after he asked the agents if he could just come up to the gate and rattle it so the antifa instigators would leave him and others alone. He was escorted behind the gates and interviewed. He told agents he and several other transients are being coerced to act on [protesters’] behalf to instigate agent response. The subject was given a cite and released.”
Ultimately, if partly on the basis of a kindred sense of identity and duty, or the genuinely ridiculous behavior they have to occasionally deal with, some solidarity may still exist between Portland police and the feds. When a DOJ attorney asked Cantu if Portland officers did excellent work when they were “allowed to do their job,” Cantu affirmed this was so. When Dobson of the Portland Police Bureau approached the stand, he passed by Cantu and turned to drop an avuncular attaboy wink.
How the judge views the testimony
At trial, plaintiffs argued that Portland’s anti-ICE demonstrations pose the sorts of inconveniences that are part and parcel of urban democratic life, and as such are the proper remit of law enforcement, not the military.
Judge Immergut, who as of press time planned to issue her final ruling on the case by Friday, seems basically to agree. If the preliminary injunction she issued two days after the trial concluded is any indication, she seemed largely unmoved by the Trump administration’s argument that the demonstrations outside Portland ICE constitute a “potential rebellion” or render the administration unable to otherwise enforce federal law—predicates under which it can legally federalize the National Guard.
“The credible testimony has not shown that ICE was unable to effect arrests or otherwise perform the agency’s duties,” she wrote. “Although the evidence so far showed that protesters frequently blocked the driveway of the ICE building, the evidence also showed that federal law enforcement officers were able to clear the driveway.”
Meanwhile, she added, even when protests forced the ICE facility to close in mid-June for a few weeks, ICE was able to relocate and its officers continued to make immigration arrests in the community.
As it turns out, it is unclear just how many. Cammilla Wamsley, who runs ICE operations in the Pacific Northwest, testified at trial that she had a goal of doubling arrests in her region to 30 per day, but, as an attorney for the state of Oregon pointed out in closing arguments, Wamsley, when asked how many arrests her office did carry out, said she was “not sure.”
This, for the plaintiffs, was further evidence that the Trump administration had scant evidence for its assertion that it was unable to enforce federal law. But many protesters, of course, would be quite pleased if they adversely affected the statistics; they regard ICE’s operations in the community as immoral attacks on some of society’s most vulnerable, and its officers as unaccountable thugs providing cover for Trump as he carries out his and his supporters’ authoritarian fantasies.
Cantu, for his part, described himself as a midlevel manager. His federal service far predates Trump’s presidency, and despite his intimate knowledge of the security situation at the ICE facility in Portland, administration officials, it emerged at trial, did not bother to consult him when they decided to call in the National Guard. He was surprised, he acknowledged, though he welcomed the help, imagining services resembling those provided by the security contractors his agency already hires en masse to help protect federal property.
One strange detail of the trial was that, despite their full names and biographies appearing elsewhere in the court record, Cantu and Turner were addressed during the proceedings by their initials—an ineffective bid at protecting their already public identities. Knowing their names, of course, suggests a chance to know the men more fully. And yet, when the proceedings wrapped up, it remained unclear what the officers thought of the work of the agency whose operations they were seeking to protect. This, too, was outside the scope of the trial.
