In early October, Keith Wilson, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, visited 4310 South Macadam Avenue, an address that brought his city back into the national spotlight and into the presidential crosshairs. Donald Trump. Since June, the site has been home to the local headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has been at the center of daily protests as activists rallied against the Trump administration's immigration policies, often clashing with MAGA counter-protesters. Although the demonstrations were colorful – there was a carnival atmosphere, people wore inflatable frog costumes and other costumes – ICE The facility itself, a former regional bank data center with boarded-up windows, was about as incognito as the armed, masked federal officers guarding it from the roof.
For the public, what was happening inside the building remained largely a mystery. No media except Trump-friendly right-wing influencers were allowed inside. But Wilson, he said, was “summoned” to the building to meet with Kristi Noah, the secretary of Homeland Security, who came to town after Trump announced on Truth Social that he would authorize “all necessary troops to defend war-torn Portland.” Wilson hoped to convince Noem that federal government intervention was unnecessary and that protests in the city were under control. But after visiting the building, he came to the conclusion that ICE in itself had no discipline or control. “It’s disheveled,” he told me about the conditions inside. “It's unkempt. It's disorganized.”
The day was warm, about eighty degrees, and the first thing Wilson noticed upon entering the facility was how hot it was inside. “The HVAC system was broken,” he said. During his visit, he saw overflowing trash containers. He saw tired, worried officers. He saw crowd control ammunition and body armor scattered in empty offices. “You can just see they're making it up as they go along,” said Wilson, a former trucking company CEO. “There's no plan. And if there's no plan, you don't know the goal. Without a goal, you're just wasting time and money, and they're wasting time and money.”
Noem's visit to Portland didn't go quite as planned. The apparent purpose of the trip was to bolster the administration's narrative that the city had been overrun by left-wing insurgents, but during a rooftop photo op, Noem surveyed the site of daily protests, supposedly the most war-torn part of the city, only to find the street below empty. Portland police, as is their policy when dignitaries visit the city, cordoned off the area. A small number of demonstrators stood around the periphery, including a man in a chicken suit. Another protester criticized the theme from “The Benny Hill Show,” mocking Noem's visit. In the video circulating online, Noem is expressionless—this was probably not the war zone she came to take over. When she met with Wilson, he further disrupted the plot by asking her to reconsider sending troops. “She didn’t agree with it,” he told me. “They're trying to create a story. It's a lie. It doesn't have legs.”
I've seen this split screen before. When I covered the latest wave of high-profile protests in Portland back in 2020, I found that the Trump administration's characterization of the situation didn't always match what was happening on the ground. This time the contrast was even sharper. I arrived in Portland last Monday, the same day a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the White House could federalize the Oregon National Guard to deploy to the city. Residents seemed on edge, including the mayor. Was there any feeling of concern about potential troops on the streets, I asked Wilson. “Every day,” he said.
Trump has been concerned about Portland since at least 2018, when he publicly berated then-Mayor Ted Wheeler for allowing an “angry mob of violent people” to confront federal agents. In 2020, following Murder of George FloydTrump called Black Lives Matter protesters “radical anarchists” and sent seven hundred and fifty-five DHS officers to Portland to protect the city's federal buildings, beefing up night clashes between protesters and law enforcement agencies.
In recent weeks, Trump has renewed his fight with Oregon's largest city. “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland,” he said in October during a White House roundtable on Antifa’s alleged dominance in America. “You don’t even have shops anymore.” (The city has more than 3,000 retail businesses.) “When a store owner remodels a store,” he said at a news conference, “they build it out of plywood.” (In four days of driving around the city, I could not find a store built of plywood.) “Portland is burning to the ground,” he declared repeatedly. (I also couldn't find any fires.)
