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Like many elected officials in Oregon, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson on Monday decried the decision by a federal appeals court panel to overturn a judge’s order and clear the path for President Donald Trump to deploy national guard troops to the South Waterfront.
Wilson in a Monday afternoon statement said, as he’s said before, that the city will “use every lawful tool to prevent this overreach.”
In the days leading up to the ruling by the panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Wilson has tried to find his own path to fight the deployment. One tactic he’s used in recent weeks is through the power of the pen, now having written opinion pieces in both Time Magazine and now Newsweek.
In a Sunday opinion piece in Newsweek, he lambasted the Trump Administration’s deployment of federal agents to the Southwest Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility from a novel angle: workplace safety.
Wilson wrote that the ICE facility, as a workplace, is a disaster waiting to happen. He based the description off of a meeting he took at the ICE facility with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski in early October amidst a fight between Oregon and Trump over the deployment of Oregon National Guard members to Portland.
Wilson wrote in his piece that the “ICE facility was a mess of overflowing dumpsters, loose body armor and crowd control munitions and a broken HVAC air conditioning system that raised both temperatures and tempers in the aging building.”
He wrote that as the former CEO of a trucking company before becoming Portland’s mayor, he learned that “an ‘accident chain’ is a collection of small mistakes or oversights that, together, can lead to an accident, injury or death.” He said the ICE facility is a chain rife with safety gaps, and that an accident—he did not specify what type of accident would be worst-case scenario, though death seemed to be the suggestion—is bound to happen. This month, federal agents have teargassed and tackled peaceful protestors and even threatened to shoot an ambulance driver that was trying to transport an injured protestor to a hospital.
“It is little wonder why Secretary Noem has ignored or denied all regional journalists who have requested access to this facility, opting instead to fly in the least credible, most ideologically compromised hangers-on that MAGA social media has to offer,” Wilson wrote.
On Monday, Oregon lost the latest battle in the legal war to prevent Trump from deploying members of the Oregon National Guard to Portland. A three-judge Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled in a 2-1 vote that Trump was operating within the bounds of the law when he ordered the deployment of 200 guardsmen to Portland, a move that U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut temporarily blocked earlier this month. Monday’s order overrules Immergut’s previous ruling. State and city officials have filed a motion requesting that a larger panel of the 9th Circuit Court reconsider the decision.
Trump so far has made no public statement about the Ninth circuit’s ruling and what his next move will be.
“If I may say something directly to Secretary Noem, it would be this,” Wilson wrote in his Newsweek piece. “Every accident is preventable, and you are running out of time to prevent one in Portland.”
