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A new year brought Portlanders a new reason to mass in the streets against President Donald Trump. Hours after the White House announced it had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, several hundred protesters marched through downtown Portland to decry the military raid.
Advocacy groups organized two rallies on Saturday afternoon before joining forces to march from Powell’s City of Books to the Willamette riverfront. Their opposition to regime change in the socialist South American country was largely echoed by local elected officials.
“Last night, Trump once again trampled the Constitution by launching an illegal and reckless military strike in Venezuela and capturing their leader,” U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Oregon) said in a statement.
The strongest condemnation came from Portland city councilors affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. Councilors Mitch Green and Angelita Morillo both posted furious messages on Bluesky.
“All my fucking tax dollars go towards murdering innocent people abroad,” Morillo wrote. “Never enough money for free college. Or free school lunch. Or to fix the goddamned roads and the crumbling bridges. Always enough for murder.
“I am so livid,” she concluded.
The Trump administration has justified the seizure of Maduro, an authoritarian leftist, by saying his election was illegitimate and he had abetted drug trafficking in the U.S. (A federal indictment accuses him of narco-terrorism.) The early-morning raid in Caracas is an extraordinary escalation of Trump’s military campaign that has repeatedly sunk the boats of Venezuelan drug traffickers. Legal experts were largely skeptical on Saturday that Trump had legal grounds for his actions, even though international election observers believe Maduro’s rise was likely aided by fraud.
Trump’s pretext for the raid was met with scorn this afternoon in the traffic island next to Shake Shack on West Burnside Street, where several groups, including the Portland chapter of the DSA, held a rally.
“‘Narco-terrorism’ is the new ‘weapons of mass destruction,’” Luisa Martinez, a member of the Portland DSA and National Political Committee, said in a speech. “What has happened is completely illegal, wildly illegal.”
Martinez asserted that Maduro was democratically elected and that any caveats to the condemnation of Trump’s actions would only empower the White House to seize Venezuelan assets like oil reserves. (In a press conference on Saturday morning, Trump repeatedly referenced his desire to intervene in the country’s oil industry.) “None of this ‘both sides’ bullshit,” she said. “That is what has led us to this moment.”
In its scale and its participants, the rally on Burnside strongly resembled the nightly gatherings outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in South Portland over the past year. A dozen or so inflatable animals were in attendance; so was Jack Dickinson, the Portland Chicken. As at ICE, a handful of Trumpist counterprotesters set up shop with a megaphone and GoPro cameras across the street, on the sidewalk outside Powell’s, heckling the assembly.
As a rain shower began, the protesters joined with another group—peace demonstrators who had gathered in Pioneer Courthouse Square—and together they marched down the MAX tracks to the river.
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