Amid weeks of nightly attempts to destroy a federal courthouse in downtown Portland, the bigger clash between the Trump administration and local city officials is overshadowing the initial issue of restoring peace in the Oregon city.
Portland’s Democratic Mayor, Ted Wheeler, has accused the Department of Homeland Security of overstepping its authority by sending in dozens of federal agents and officers amid the riots. The DHS employees have been observed seemingly arresting random people on the street and using tear gas to disperse people outside the Hatfield Federal Courthouse.
DHS data provided exclusively to the Washington Examiner revealed 20 people have been arrested by federal law enforcement in Portland this month for attacking personnel or the courthouse itself. Several federal law enforcement officials have been injured guarding the building, according to a senior administration official. Wheeler claims DHS is overstepping his jurisdiction’s authority and going after protesters, but three administration officials working on the issue told the Washington Examiner that the arrests were legal.
While countless people peacefully protested the death of George Floyd in late May, protests in Portland were taken over by fringe groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. political system, including by decimating different types of statues and buildings. One of the group’s targets was the federal courthouse, which was built in 1997, and as a federal facility, it is protected by federal law enforcement. DHS’s Federal Protective Service officers began guarding the building shortly after the department was created in the aftermath of 9/11.
“It’s not an unprecedented thing,” said one administration official. DHS’s Federal Protective Services officers “have been there for decades. [Wheeler] probably didn’t even know it.”
Officers on-site struggled to guard the building in June as mobs of people toppled nearby statues and grew increasingly violent. DHS responded in early July by sending in its most elite law enforcement from Customs and Border Protection, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The senior administration official said that under 40 U.S. Code 1315, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf has the authority to deputize other DHS employees to carry out other law enforcement duties.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, the courthouse was attacked with commercial-grade fireworks, and the federal employees guarding it were struck by frozen water bottles, beer bottles, frozen eggs, rocks, and bottle rockets. Following the arrest of one attacker Saturday night, agents found a pipe bomb, fused explosive device, machete, and knife on the man.
“As the scale of the threat goes up, three people can’t defend appropriately against an 800-person mob,” said a senior administration official. “That gets us to this cross-designation.”
DHS cross-designated CBP and ICE, which were then deputized by DHS to protect the building, not to respond to riots, which is the job of local police. The administration official said that its personnel are not there to retake Portland, but to maintain several federal buildings, and he cast doubt over whether Wheeler was aware of why federal agents are in town.
Wheeler, over the weekend, claimed DHS sending in its own reinforcements was antagonizing protesters. He lambasted DHS following reports last week that men in camouflage uniforms approached seemingly random people in the street and pulled them into unmarked vans.
The use of unmarked vehicles is a common law enforcement tactic to go after agitators physically without alerting the public of police movement. In one instance, an agitator who pointed a laser into a federal officer’s eyes was tracked down and then snatched from the street later that night. The 20 people arrested were suspects in assaults against federal agents or federal property.
These federal officers (?) just rushed up and arrested someone for no reason pic.twitter.com/xcFVuoMZmN
— Matcha chai (@matcha_chai) July 15, 2020
While DHS has explained the reason for its deployment of employees to Portland, Democratic Gov. Kate Brown has called it a “blatant abuse of power by the federal government.” Seven Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into the actions of federal agents. Wheeler called over the weekend for the Trump administration to remove “federal troops” from its streets, though no military have been activated or deployed to Portland.
President Trump has offered to send the military into any city, but Portland’s mayor and Oregon’s governor have not accepted the invitation.
“The president has a complete misunderstanding of cause and effect,” Wheeler told CNN on Sunday. “What’s happening here is we have dozens if not hundreds of federal troops descending upon our city. And what they’re doing is they are sharply escalating the situation. Their presence here is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism. And it’s not helping the situation at all. They’re not wanted here. We haven’t asked them here. In fact, we want them to leave.”
A second senior administration official said the Trump administration is not planning on abandoning the federal courthouse and will continue arresting agitators who assault federal personnel or the courthouse.
Nevertheless, Trump Monday seemed to undermine DHS’s rationale, suggesting federal law enforcement officers were in Portland as part of a larger effort to combat the disorder.
“Portland was totally out of control. The Democrats — the liberal Democrats running the place had no idea what they were doing. They were ripping down — for 51 days, ripping down that city, destroying the city, looting it,” he said during remarks at the White House.
“In Portland, they’ve done a fantastic job,” he said of federal law enforcement. “They’ve been there three days, and they really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time. No problem. They grab them, a lot of people in jail. They’re leaders. These are anarchists. These are not protesters. People say ‘protesters’; these people are anarchists. These are people that hate our country. And we’re not going to let it go forward.”
