From New York I don’t hear much about what’s going on in Portland. I understand there has been a lot of protesting in Portland. Whether there has been much violence is hard to know. Right-wing media would have us believe the city is being burned to the ground. The rest of media reports that in 2025 homicides in Portland have dropped more than 50 percent.
I’m not going to say that the Portland protests have been without incident. In June some people in the No Kings event apparently got out of hand. Portland police made several arrests. I’ve been looking and looking for more recent incidents and not finding any, however. Oh, except for the guy who drove into a crowd of protesters a few days after No Kings.
Then last week there were reports that the city of Portland is considering shutting down the ICE facility. The Guardian reported,
Records obtained by Street Roots and the Guardian back claim from Oregon city’s mayor that Ice violated a land-use permit to detain people overnight
Portland authorities are in a standoff with the Trump administration over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in the Oregon city, after an investigation found the administration is using the facility for overnight detentions, in violation of its city-issued permits.
The standoff comes amid threats from Donald Trump to dispatch troops to the city, and residents protesting nightly outside the Ice field office in question.
The city office that oversees land use and zoning notified the owner of the building that Ice leases that the federal agency had violated a conditional-use permit approved in 2011. The permit limits the number of detainees Ice can hold at the facility each day to fewer than 15, and the duration for which they can be held to less than 12 hours. The permit also bars the agency from “housing” anyone overnight.
But Ice data the city obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, included in the official notice, shows 25 instances since January in which Ice held a person for more than 12 hours. On 26 January alone, agents held 16 people – listed as citizens of Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico and other countries – for more than 27 hours before transferring them, according to public records obtained by Street Roots and the Guardian.
The city’s notice also said the building was illegally altered when exterior windows were boarded up without proper approval. An Ice spokesperson did not respond to a question asking when the wood was installed, but photos and video taken at protests and posted on social media show the boarded-up windows first appeared around 16 June.
They boarded the windows up after No Kings on June 14, I guess.
A couple of days ago The Oregonian reported —
A Portland Police Bureau assistant chief said in court recently that federal police were “instigating” some of the clashes between officers and protesters outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland.
Naughty naughty. Anyway, now Trump is sending troops to “war ravaged” Portland.
President Donald Trump is directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to send U.S. troops to Portland, he said Saturday on Truth Social, making the extraordinary pronouncement that he is greenlighting the use of “Full Force, if necessary” in an American city.
“At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” he wrote.
I guess Trump is confusing the Portland city government with Antifa. If there were anything warranting this kind of response in Portland I believe Portland news media would have mentioned it. I’m not finding anything.
If ever there was a time not to normalize Trump’s authoritarian fever dreams, this is it.
This should be impeachable. ‘War ravaged’ Portland? He’s insane – & insanely power hungry. The script is set – call an imaginary group a terror group and then send in the troops.
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) September 27, 2025 at 12:25 PM
Trump is going to continue to pull stunts like this until there’s a Kent State-style massacre, or worse.
See also Trump’s Reign of Terror is a Sign of His Own Fears and Weakness.
Here's what's really going on in Portland, from someone who lives there. "He's so pathetically desperate for any city to take the bait and start a riot. Look at what LA did, what DC did – they didn't fall for it, and he had to leave"
So that's why they declared war on "antifa" last week – a vague, non-group which means they can arrest anyone. They had Portland in mind.
thanks for the link — very helpful.
tRump is a big fan of what the CCP did in Tiananmen Square, and wants his own massacre of anti-government protestors.
Are we sure his knowledge of history and international affairs extends that far? As far as I know he does not own a golg course in China.
I am away … on walkabout, can only report what my son, who lives, builds buildings and kids' are in school there, reports. Which doesn't add anything to what's already been reported. It is all as you say it is
Some of us saw this coming, he's only hinted at it for weeks. Bothersome is is they have done this before, it's no longer a dry run, a trial exercise. They did this here before and got at least one person killed
Unspoken is there are as many armed, angry yahoos in Portland as the rest of the state who are no more happy about this than we (at least my sons and me) are. This could have turned out to be a miscalculation
Violence is as likely trumpers as trumpers turning …
It's the red hats who feel betrayed by Trump, for economic reasons (farmers and others) and social-conservative reasons (baiting them with Epstein, then denying there is anything there).
Those of us who saw this years ago and have been waiting forever for this crowd to wake up, need to step back and figure out how to build bridges to these people. Some great, really important advice here.
The red hats will never betray their racism. Instead of bridges to them, why not motivate the millions who don't vote?
People are waking up. Not everyone, but give this guy a listen.
It seems there is quite a divergence between the demented one and the bored resident of Portland. He has AI but not Musk's AI. His is what he thinks is alternative intelligence, the one superior to even the greatest medical expert in (pick a pronoun) field. Musk has his artificial intelligence, which Maureen Dowd wrote about in the NYT.
Yes, this seems off topic but please be a bit patient. We are needing to think about this with human intelligence which is not either type of AI.
This human (identified as Byron from Minnesota) got over 1200 other humans to recommend his thinking for:
Another human (Judi with an I from North Carolina) with 1200+ recommendations for:
Another human (Identified as CD only) with about 500 recommendations wrote:
Are there two parallel worlds or many more? Are they even parallel or quite divergent? One thing for sure, it makes many humans very unsettled.
Not the ones with type II AI of the alternative intelligence type. The one Maureen Dowd was not writing about. The authoritarian one that seems to have run amok like Hal in 2001. That one too defies regulation and with the who knows what is controlling it or not controlling it.
Portland: You have a problem. A divergent and unregulated reality appears to be threatening you. Type II AI. or we could go with AAI as in authoritarian alternative intelligence.
Just one more human from Peter in Madrid if I could add:
Let's just close with that.
Keep Portland Weird, complete with John Williams' Stars Wars music as backdrop. The march can be heard in its full glory, here, with Williams conducting the Vienna Philaharmonic
There's a tightrope act that ICE and the Administration is walking. Maha mentioned there will be another Kent State, which old people like us remember as a pivotal event where four students were gunned down by National Guard troops who were at Kent State University to quell Vietnam protests.
I say pivotal because (IMO – there are no polls that prove my point) that's when the war in 'Nam became too expensive for the conservative American voter. I think some in Trump's orbit are aware that if/when a domestic troop operation goes 'Kent State', it can pull all legitimacy from Trump with everyone who's not in-the-tank MAGA. Others have (correctly) observed that Trump wants to provoke riots against him that will excuse the invocation of the Insurrection Act with the support of the USSC.
And that's the thing, let ICE (likely) murder a few old protesters, or a paramilitary thug operation. spill blood, the USSC will back away from Trump's military coup fantasy. History is balanced on the inevitable event – will somebody who wants to cosplay Captain America, with "ANTIFA" on his red, white, and blue shield, shoot up some ICE station? That gives Trump what he wants. Or will some ICE unit go off the deep end and slaughter unarmed protesters? That will end the excuse that ICE needs military support. I think it will come down one way or the other. I have no idea which way.
Well a small cadre of the masked NAZI storm troopers carrying automatic weapons showed up in downtown Chicago yesterday. These are "border patrol' pigs. I guess they are looking for the thousands of migrants that the Governor of Texas rolled on up here last year. Funny how the GOP uses millions of taxpayer dollars to ship migrants to "sanctuary cities" all over the country and then diaper don uses billions of taxpayer dollars to round them up again. Quite a lucrative scam those "fiscal conservatives" have going!
https://media.nbcchicago.com/2025/09/border-patrol-downtown-2.png?fit=1920%2C1080&quality=85&strip=all&w=975&h=548&crop=1
I'm a Portland resident, and, no. There's not "much violence", or really "any violence".
There are tiny protests outside the ICE gauleiter's office in South Waterfront, which is about as middle-of-nowhere as it gets in Portland. Nobody – even most lefty people who loathe ICE – really give a shit. This is Felon Fats' weird brainworm from 2020 squirming around.
The way this DOES go south is if the damn Black Bloc people show up. That'll give Whiskey Pete the jolt he needs to go full on Odessa Steps. We'll see.
What's kind of odd is that the latest reports suggest that these will be Oregon Guard activations. To use Portland-based units seems fraught; a lot of these guys will have local friends and relatives, so how possible it is that they'll Kent State a protest seems iffy. I suppose Pete could import one of the redneck-y units, say one of the 1/186 Inf companies from Medford or Roseburg. Those yick-a-hoos might enjoy shooting up latte-sipping Portland soyboys. Still…I figured they'd import a unit from Idaho or Utah. Hmm.
"There are tiny protests outside the ICE gauleiter's office in South Waterfront"
It's about the same here in Chicago. ICE is using a facility in Broadview (suburb of Chicago), There have been protests daily a few have gotten a little out of control but nothing too awful. I'm sure diaper don and Hoghead are just waiting for one of their masked thugs to get a scratch or a blister so they can send in the Calvary!
It sounds like they almost needed to send troops to Bethpage and the Ryder Cup for crowd control. Way over the line crowd behavior was quite a concern at what has been quite a friendly rivalry.
Fans gone fanatic with jingoism. Have they no sense of decency? Have we lost all sense of decency?
Yes, we have done it from the top-down IMO. As they say in less than polite circles the fish rots from the head-first.
Ryder Cup: Rory McIlroy calls out ‘unacceptable, abusive behavior’ from fans at Bethpage Black after win – Yahoo Sports
I heard about the rowdiness at the Ryder Cup. That's awful. Golf fans are usually a pretty sedate crew. I'm wondering if a bunch of MAGAts bought tickets because Trump had been talking it up a lot.