Militarized federal agents deployed by Donald Trump to Portland, Oregon, fired tear gas at protesters again late on Friday night, even as the city’s mayor demanded the agents be removed and the state’s attorney general vowed to seek a restraining order against them.
Federal agents, some wearing camouflage and some wearing dark Department of Homeland Security uniforms, used tear gas at least twice to break up crowds, the Oregonian/OregonLive reported.
Portland mayor Ted Wheeler earlier demanded the agents be removed, after some detained people far from the federal property they were sent to protect.
“Keep your troops in your own buildings, or have them leave our city,” Wheeler told the president at a news conference on Friday.
The Democratic governor, Kate Brown, said Trump was looking for a confrontation in the hopes of winning political points elsewhere, and for a distraction from the coronavirus pandemic, which is causing rising numbers of infections in Oregon and across the nation.
Brown’s spokesman, Charles Boyle, said arresting people without probable cause was “extraordinarily concerning and a violation of their civil liberties and constitutional rights”.
The Oregon attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said she would file a lawsuit in federal court against the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Federal Protection Service, alleging they have violated the civil rights of Oregonians by detaining them without probable cause. She will also seek a temporary restraining order against them.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Oregon said the federal agents appear to be violating people’s rights, which “should concern everyone in the United States”.
“Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street we call it kidnapping,“ said Jann Carson, ACLU interim executive director. “The actions of the militarized federal officers are flat-out unconstitutional and will not go unanswered.”
Federal officers have charged at least 13 people with crimes related to the protests, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on Thursday. Some have been detained by the federal courthouse, the scene of protests. Others were grabbed blocks away.
The protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have often devolved into violent clashes between smaller groups and the police. Tensions have escalated since an officer with the US Marshals Service fired a less-lethal round at a protester’s head, critically injuring him.
“This is part of the core media strategy out of Trump’s White House: to use federal troops to bolster his sagging polling data,” Wheeler said. “And it is an absolute abuse of federal law enforcement officials.”
One video showed two people in helmets and green camouflage with “police” patches grabbing a person on the sidewalk, handcuffing them and taking them into an unmarked vehicle.
“Who are you?” someone asks the pair, who do not respond. At least some of the federal officers belong to the DHS.
Customs and Border Protection said in a statement its agents had information indicating the person in the video was suspected of assaulting federal agents or destroying federal property.
“Once CBP agents approached the suspect, a large and violent mob moved towards their location. For everyone’s safety, CBP agents quickly moved the suspect to a safer location,” the agency said.
However, the video shows no mob.
In another case, Mark Pettibone, 29, said a minivan rolled up to him around 2am on Wednesday and four or five people got out “looking like they were deployed to a Middle Eastern war”.
Pettibone told the Associated Press he got to his knees as the group approached. They dragged him into the van without identifying themselves or responding to his questions and pulled his beanie over his eyes so he couldn’t see, he said.
“I figured I was just going to disappear for an indefinite amount of time,” Pettibone said, adding that he was put into a cell and officers dumped the contents of his backpack, with one remarking: “Oh, this is a bunch of nothing.”
After he asked for a lawyer, Pettibone was allowed to leave.
“Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters,” the Democratic US senator Jeff Merkley said in a tweet.
US attorney Billy Williams in Portland said on Friday he has requested the Department of Homeland Security’s office of the inspector general to investigate the actions of DHS personnel.
In a letter, Oregon’s two senators and two of its House members demanded that the US attorney general, William Barr, and the acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, immediately withdraw “these federal paramilitary forces from our state”.
The members of Congress said they would be asking the DHS inspector general and the US Department of Justice to investigate.
“It’s painfully clear this administration is focused purely on escalating violence without answering my repeated requests for why this expeditionary force is in Portland and under what constitutional authority,” Senator Ron Wyden said.
On Thursday night, federal officers deployed tear gas and fired non-lethal rounds into a crowd of protesters. Wolf visited Portland on Thursday and called the demonstrators, who are protesting racism and police brutality, “violent anarchists”.
He blamed state and city authorities for not putting an end to the protests. But Portland police said on Friday they wound up arresting 20 people overnight.
At least two protests occurred Thursday night, one near the federal courthouse and the other by a police station in another part of the city. Police told protesters to leave that site after announcing they heard chanting about burning down the building. Protester Paul Frazier said the chant was “much more rhetorical than an actual statement”.
Portland police chief Chuck Lovell told reporters his officers are in contact with the federal agents, but that neither controls the others’ actions.
“We do communicate with federal officers for the purpose of situational awareness and deconfliction,“ Lovell said. “We’re operating in a very, very close proximity to one another.”
