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Teressa Barsotti’s daughter wanted to see her middle school teacher dressed as an inflatable animal. Instead, she tasted tear gas.
Barsotti, 45, and her daughter, 13, were among the thousands of Portlanders who gathered in Elizabeth Caruthers Park on Saturday for a march organized by more than two dozen labor unions to protest increasingly militarized immigration raids. The atmosphere soon deteriorated. Officers inside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility deployed chemical munitions into the crowd after some activists reportedly blocked the building’s security gate.
The Barsotti family was two blocks away. “I thought we were in a safe spot,” Teressa Barsotti recalls. “But then the smoke started blowing towards us.”
The scene that ensued—hundreds of people retching in clouds of tear gas—recalled the “No Kings” march last June, when the use of force by ICE agents spurred nightly protests outside the South Waterfront building. But on Saturday, the recipients of the munitions included dozens of children, according to reports from the scene.
Department of Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
City officials condemned the feds’ actions. Mayor Keith Wilson pledged to issue fines to ICE for using chemical munitions. The mayor said in a statement, “To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.” City Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane asked families whose children were subjected to tear gas to contact her office.
A day later, speaking with WW from her home in Montavilla, Barsotti said she had a constant headache and a sore throat that reminded her of smoking a pack of cigarettes or spending an afternoon outdoors during wildfire season. Her daughter reported feeling fine.
What follows is Barsotti’s experience, as told to WW. Her account has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I’ve been to a protest maybe every couple of months. Last month it was just a little neighborhood family thing. I’ve been to, I wanna say, two two No Kings protests. So not like every one, but I try to go.
I’ve never been to the ICE facility before. Well, actually, maybe during Trump’s first administration. I’ve never experienced tear gas anywhere. I’ve never been to a protest that had that kind of response.
I went Saturday because I come from a union family. My dad and my brother are both in the Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 290. So I’m a union kid. I was really excited about worker solidarity with immigrants. One of the things that’s really upsetting about the time that we’re living in is that it seems like people with power who are abusing their power are pitting groups against each other. So it felt like the opposite of that. It just felt really positive. And then my daughter thought she would see her science teacher there. She’s a middle schooler, and her science teacher had said, “Oh, you might see me in an inflatable costume.” So she was excited to go.
I really thought this was going to be a family-friendly event. Like, we are not people who are interested in throwing down with cops or getting ourselves in trouble. We did not come with a gas mask or anything. I mean, I wouldn’t have brought my kid to something that I thought was going to be dangerous.
We took the Division bus. We live up near Interstate 205, and so we had seats, but then the bus gradually filled up with people heading down to the protests. It was standing room only by the time we got there. And the bus pretty much emptied at Carruthers Park.
Seeing people there both as professionals and as citizens was really heartwarming. Protesting isn’t the kind of thing where you go and you’re like, “We did it. We effected change.” But it is heartening and gives you sort of more courage and more connection with people who feel the same way. Rather than reading the news and getting angry at home, it makes me feel like part of my community, like we are all struggling with this moment that we’re in. For the first hour we were there, I got out of it what I was hoping to: We saw a bunch of really great signs and, um, saw kids and elderly people. I heard somebody remark on how multi-generational it was. It felt really good. We were walking around Caruthers Park and we stopped in a convenience store and grabbed some water, which we ended up being really glad that we had later when I had to flush my daughter’s eyes.
And then the march started and we kind of walked through the park and then joined up with folks. We were on Abernethy and Moody, and I was texting with my dad—like, Hey, where are you? And as soon as we made contact, he was like, Did you hear those bangs? And we had. We heard loud bangs maybe two blocks up. After the bangs, we saw these big clouds of yellow smoke.
I was trying to make contact with my dad because that’s right where he was. And he’s 76 years old and has asthma. I was worried about him and I thought we were in a safe spot. But then the smoke started blowing towards us.
I felt shocked and confused. I was not prepared. I saw the smoke a way off and thought we were safe for a minute. I thought I had time to text my dad and figure out where he was and figure out how we could meet. And it wasn’t until my daughter said, “I can taste it,” and “My eyes,” that I was like, oh, we need to move faster. I hadn’t realized how much had come our way.
My skin burned, like above my lips, probably where I had some sweat that was burning and stinging. My eyes burned and, and stung. Both my dad and I wore glasses and didn’t feel like we got hit in the eyes quite as much as my daughter who doesn’t wear glasses. I don’t know if that would really make a difference, but maybe. My lungs burned. That didn’t last too long. I stopped to flush my daughter’s eyes with our water bottle because they were streaming, like running and burning.
It wasn’t until we met up with my dad about a block later that I felt relief. And then he and I both felt so much anger. “Those fucking assholes,” is what we both said to each other. Because as far as we could tell, it was completely unprovoked. This was a permitted march. It was relatively well publicized. People knew we were going to be there. The plan was to walk, to turn at the ICE building. It had just started—we were only a block away from the park and we weren’t at the front of the march, but we hadn’t been walking for all that long. It seemed like it happened really fast. And there just were so many babies and kids and elderly people among us. I felt really angry, shocked, scared, confused.
And then it was later, when I got home, that I was really sad. Like, this is our reality.
I could tell that my lymph nodes in my neck were pretty swollen when we got home. We immediately stripped and put our clothes in the washing machine and took showers and tried to get it off of us. I haven’t needed to use my inhaler.
My daughter says she’s okay. She doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. She did hear both me and my dad kind of swearing about it when we all met up. I didn’t want to tell my husband until we got home, until we were all safe. He was pretty upset. And I think she’s the kind of kid where, if grownups are having strong feelings, that’s enough feelings in the room and she’s not going to add to it. So she said she’s fine.
I feel bad that I didn’t move more quickly. When I saw the smoke a ways off, we should have booked it immediately. I didn’t know that it would reach us so quickly and, um, and that we would be feeling it even if we couldn’t see it right in front of us.
Yes, we were close to the ICE building, and so that’s off limits to us now. We’re not willing to go anywhere near there. I felt really sad for the people who live right there. My daughter has accompanied me to protest all her life, and I have always felt safe. My dad has been protesting in Portland since the ‘70s, or ‘60s. And he’s never been gassed. He has always talked to his neighbors about, “It feels safe. It’s all right, it’s peaceful.” We have always been people that felt very safe expressing our views.
I don’t know exactly what happened. The first bit of news that we saw is the Portland Police Bureau saying, “It wasn’t us.” And then I saw that supposedly some protestors had gotten too close or maybe stepped over a line or tried to climb a fence or something like that. I don’t know. But I don’t think anyone was violent, even the people they’re trying to blame, and certainly not this crowd of thousands of people of all generations. I don’t think tear gas should ever be used. It’s a weapon, you know?
Anyway. So my son was at a sleepover with a friend last night, so we didn’t tell him until today when we picked him up. And I had to tell him what happened, you know, and he was like, “So you were just assaulted.” And he’s 10 years old. I did not use that kind of word. I didn’t say that it was an act of violence even. But he called it. Yeah, we were. This crowd of thousands of people were just assaulted by their government.
