The city's actions against ICE and the No Kings demonstration have gained widespread attention, but still cannot match the impunity of the MAGA deportation state.
(Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images)
Last week, the ever-hip Portland sandwich shop Lardo posted an image on its Instagram feed of a man in a frog costume drinking beer. On the surface, it was pretty funny, but the caption told an entirely more nuanced story: If you showed up at a restaurant downtown that weekend during the No Kings protest in an inflatable costume, you could drink a beer for $3, but if you wore a frog costume, you could drink a beer for free. It was the most popular post in the history of Lardo's social media accounts.
In a few months, maybe even weeks, none of this will make any sense to anyone. But it struck a chord locally, if not nationally, because on these streets, no one was hotter than Portland's inflatable suit protesters—a loose group of three frogs, one chicken, a few glow-in-the-dark cows, and whatever stray costumes well-wishers donated to the area. They tried, in a vague way, to push back against Trump's perception and characterization of Portland as an urban war zone by wearing funny costumes to protest outside the ICE office, located in a private building on the south waterfront near the sprawling campus of Oregon Health & Science University, the apple of the state's medical eye.
It was a much-needed resounding victory for a city whose image and real worldview had been destroyed by the now almost unbelievable (in retrospect) clash between antifa protesters and the Portland Police Bureau that raged through downtown Portland every day for about 200 days at the end of 2020. Chiron. However, they were not completely wrong. It's hard to overstate how strange it is for a highly militarized police department to be involved in a massive street fight, heard from across the city, every night for 100 days – ostensibly out of a need to protect black motorists from police brutality in a city that is very white (88 percent white, to be exact, and only 6 percent black). When the smoke cleared, if not stunningly powerful and the copious supply of tear gas that the police department doused protesters with at the slightest provocation, the city became a seedy entry in the catalog of horrors of the American right.
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While the pandemic was as much to blame for Portland's sharp economic downturn as the protests, the latter have made it nearly impossible for the city to shake the perception of Portland as a place mired in a dystopian tailspin, perhaps of its own design. The police used their role in cracking down on protests and the long accumulation of overtime hours as leverage in labor negotiations, which resulted in virtually all of them receiving hero-level bonuses simply for being on the force during this difficult time. They then virtually disappeared from the streets for a year, refusing to even enforce traffic laws, let alone do anything about the open-air drug market spreading through what was left of downtown Portland. The only bright spot was that almost everyone had Narcan, which meant that if your heart stopped during an overdose, the cops could immediately revive you without having to try too hard to find anyone who had it.
Now that Portland is in the news for a good protest, the city's PR elite may see an opportunity to revamp their battered brand. Nothing looks more like a black bloc trying to kick cops in the knees with various steampunk torture devices than dumb bums spending long hours outside ICE offices, wearing ridiculous costumes and turning the other cheek without ever pretending to be anything other than a huge pain in the ass.
The No Kings protest was a huge success in Portland, judging by the size of the turnout and the aerial photos. Forty thousand people lined the streets in an open-ended show of solidarity, albeit in a self-conscious flourish that maximized virality rather than tangible civic victories. Despite being the birthplace of the inflatable costume heroes who redefined Portland's place in the media imagination, the mood at the protest was decidedly somber; rather, it was dark and strangely cynical. It was more like a sound stage than a city block, with dozens of streamers fanning out in every direction of any action, trying to get the best, most dramatic angle. To the streamers' credit, they've done a very good job of making a fairly unremarkable city block feel like a sprawling canvas of action. It also meant that watching highlights and scrolling through the stream on your phone along the way was a lot more fun than standing around watching streamers find their perfect shot. Some of the most viewed content came from creators who are unabashedly pro-Trump and pro-ICE. But their messages were largely shared after the fact as social copy. They were there to gather footage of unruly protesters, not to mix them up and make a story out of themselves.
Saturday's No Kings crowd included a decent number of no-punch protesters and possibly costumed protesters. As the proceedings reached a climax around midnight, Portland police officers returned to their uniforms and began throwing tear gas. By early Sunday, ongoing ICE protests had returned to levels seen before the weekend, and on Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a lower court's injunction on Trump's plan to send National Guard troops to intimidate protesters at an ICE facility, reinstating Stephen Miller's shock and awe protocols.
It may have been a disappointing ending to the latest chapter in Portland's protest art scene, but it was preceded by something much more telling: On Friday, the first night of the protest weekend, at the stroke of midnight, a group of heavily armored security guards emerged from the gate and cleared the way for a long convoy of unmarked cars to drive out into the cold, damp, dark, slightly ominous night. It looked like there was a battalion of ICE agents presumably intent on doing whatever it is that makes everyone so angry at ICE in the first place, to the point where they have to dress up as a chicken or a frog and protest.
The strangest thing, however, was how completely unfazed everyone at the protests looked as these machines were about to threaten, detain and betray the people they wanted to protect. It was as if the real fight for them was over the cement, concrete and asphalt on which they would stand until they could no longer stand there. The actual deployment of ICE agents seemed a secondary issue.
As I watched this scene, I got the unsettling feeling that the protesters' provocations had less to do with the ability of individual ICE officers to keep their cool or provoke the agency's new mass deportation targets to push the protesters without getting in trouble for it. It was an institutional tool for the very injustice that the protesters were supposedly trying to prevent. As the vehicles drove off into the night, it was difficult not to perceive the apparent nighttime deployment as a maneuver whose meaning was completely lost on the intended audience. The idea of where a single car was going, what the agents inside it would do, and how it could upend people's lives, and how little anyone would ever know about what happened, was a chilling prelude to the weekend's No Kings counter-flex.
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