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Watching the video out of Mar-a-Lago from last Saturday—when President Donald Trump and his underlings recounted the manly raid that hours prior had culminated in the abduction of the Venezuelan despot Nicolás Maduro—Jack Dickinson, the Portland chicken, took note of a minor rhetorical tangent.
Moments after praising the massive South American military operation, Trump lamented the sorry state of Los Angeles and Chicago: cities full of ungrateful people that, like Portland, he has attempted to straighten out with U.S. troops.
It’s obvious Trump makes little distinction between the military and the police. But for Dickinson, who spent much of the past year confronting federal agents while dressed in a felt chicken jumper, this particular Trumpian weave underscored how little difference the president sees between his foreign adversaries and “the enemy within.”
This, Dickinson feels, is an important frame for understanding Trump’s recent announcement that he would, for now, call the National Guard off its mission to Portland.
“What it feels like to me is this is not really a politically opportune moment,” he says. “I think that’s part of the effectiveness of the protests—or at least the aspect of the protests that got so much coverage in Portland. You have a troop deployment look ridiculous. But situations on the ground could change. Or, their ability to craft the narrative could change.”
Indeed, Portland’s National Guard saga of 2025—which, after three months, appears to have ended this week as the Pentagon ordered the last active troops to demobilize—revealed both the potential and limits of the Trump administration’s storytelling powers.
Just as his Truth Social post announcing the mobilization contained a plain fiction (that Portland was “War ravaged”), his Truth Social post announcing its end contained a plain fiction (that troops, who in fact had barely deployed to the city at all, had “reduced crime”).
Both proclamations landed in the real world, though. The announcement in late September revived the vigor of nightly protests that had in prior weeks been losing steam outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on Portland’s South Waterfront. As autumn wore on, demonstrators clashed with counterdemonstrators and jumpy federal agents as mainstream reporters and MAGA-world influencers documented the scene.
In time, the protests took on an absurdist flair. There was the emergency naked bike ride. There was the time Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Portland to bear witness herself to the devilish Antifa protesters, and an influencer embedding with her filmed her glaring down from the ICE facility roof at…Dickinson, in his chicken costume. Increasingly, viral videos juxtaposed demonstrators dressed up in massive inflatable frog or pony costumes against masked agents dressed up in (for some reason) military-style fatigues.
Still, if some Portlanders reveled in this media tactic, in the greater Portland area, ICE and its law enforcement partners were turning up the dial. Over the summer, the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition previously got about 50 reports a month of immigration detentions. By October, it was getting hundreds. And according to Alyssa Walker Keller, a coordinator with PIRC, the arresting agents had turned more violent, not only toward those they arrested, but toward bystanders observing and documenting the arrests.
“That was about the moment—September, October—where we really drew the administration’s attention,” Walker Keller says. “I think there was a lot of intentionality about terrorizing people here and making a big show of force.”
The arrests upended families and lives. Many people ceased to go to work. “We’re all scared,” a Venezuelan asylum seeker tells WW. A mother of three, she says in Spanish she’s been mostly holed up in her house for weeks.
The Oregon and California National Guard members meant to stand in the middle of this drama never really arrived. The troops were marooned instead on bases outside the city, where, according to U.S. Northern Command, they trained and trained for weeks, awaiting further instruction.
The problem was the courts. There are certain real world conditions—a “rebellion,” for example—under which the law says a president can commandeer a state’s guard against the wishes of the governor. In Oregon v. Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice argued that a court had no right to determine for itself whether such conditions had actually in fact been met: This was for the president alone to decide.
Judge Karin J. Immergut disagreed. After swiftly blocking the deployment, she held a trial to determine what had really been going on. Her determination—that the protests Trump officials had cast as lawless were in fact generally peaceful—was shaped in large part by her decision to favor the testimony of Portland police officers over that of federal agents, whose narration she found unreliable.
Asked about the conditions outside the facility, ICE referred WW to the Federal Protective Service for comment. An FPS spokeswoman set up an interview with the agency’s regional director, but then canceled it, and never sent along a promised statement. The White House did not respond to questions either.
Immergut’s judgment faces appeal. But in the meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court, reviewing a similar case out of Chicago, issued an opinion that greatly undermined the Trump administration’s legal argument.
A few days later came Trump’s announcement he would pull out the troops, though it came with a prediction: “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again.” (Later, at Mar-a-Lago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, his boss scowling behind him, praised Trump as an uncommonly serious man: “When he tells you he’s going to address a problem, he means it.”)
Trump and his associates have spent recent days casting themselves as masters of realpolitik, and making the case that government actions should be guided by strength, not rules. Yet, were he to follow through on his threat to return, and were he interested in making a legal argument to justify it, Trump’s best bet is probably the Insurrection Act, according to legal scholars, like Tung Yin of Lewis & Clark Law School. The law puts more explicit emphasis on the president’s analysis of a situation, meaning judges might be even more reluctant to look out the window to determine if what Trump says is happening is real.
What is happening now is that with the winter rain, the protests outside ICE have greatly if not entirely diminished. As Dickinson sees it, the Trump administration is “no longer utilizing Portland to generate content in the way they were.” Still, he says, while the point of protests is not to get the president’s attention, it would be misguided to stop protesting to avoid it. He hopes future demonstrations would focus less on one location than the broader community, where many detentions are actually taking place.
For now, though, during this lull, some demonstrators are feeling that they, and the city, came out ahead.
“I didn’t really know if protests mattered until recently,” says Kelly Clark, a Gulf War veteran who has been a frequent attendee at the demonstrations for months. She feels Trump’s decision to call off the guard was in some ways a matter of timing. And yet, she says, “I do feel we have had a part in it. We did hold it at bay.”
