Federal agents retreat to Portland base as
protesters control streets
Donald Trump’s shadowy police taskforce has given new
life to protests and may not be succeeding in PR terms either
Chris
McGrealin Portland, Oregon
Wed 22 Jul
2020 19.24 BSTLast modified on Wed 22 Jul 2020 20.48 BST
Night upon
night the chant goes up in front of Portland’s federal courthouse: “Whose
streets?”
The answer
depends on the hour of the day. After Donald Trump sent federal agents to take
control of a city he said had been abandoned by its mayor to anarchists and mob
rule, the protesters still turning out in support of Black Lives Matter can
make a legitimate claim that these are, as the chant goes, “our streets”.
Department
of Homeland Security taskforce agents were again out firing waves of teargas
and throwing stun grenades against a hard core of a few hundred demonstrators
in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The confrontation centered on the
courthouse at the heart of several blocks of downtown Portland that have
effectively fallen under the control of the protesters after the city police
withdrew.
But after
pushing back demonstrators, many of them kitted out in helmets and gas masks,
the federal agents retreated into their courthouse citadel to mocking jeers and
women who were part of the “Wall of Moms” protest linking arms and chanting:
“Our streets.”
This ritual
was played out three times on Wednesday morning but the end result was the same
as every other night. The DHS officers dispatched by the president to put down
the demonstrations have instead become prisoners of the building they are
ostensibly there to defend.
“The feds
don’t have control of the streets,” said a woman holding a sign, “100% not a
terrorist”, who gave her name only as Shannon. “I think they’re more scared
than us. They’re hiding in there. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
On Monday,
the president declared the deployment of the DHS taskforce a success.
“In
Portland, they’ve done a fantastic job. They’ve been there three days, and they
really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time,” he said.
The view
from Portland’s streets tells a different story.
The arrival
of the federal officers, drawn from several agencies including the US Marshals
Service and the border patrol, fleetingly sent a wave of alarm through the
demonstrators after men in camouflage began snatching people off the streets in
unmarked vans.
Those
detained said they were dragged into the courthouse without being told why they
were being arrested or by whom and then suddenly let go without any official
record of being held. It smacked of police state tactics. So did some of the
violence meted out by federal agents who looked more like an occupying army in
a war zone.
But if the
intent was to intimidate the protesters into abandoning the few square blocks
of downtown Portland under their control, it backfired spectacularly.
Residents
of a city with a long history of radical street protest were outraged at the
tactics which suddenly revitalized a protest movement that was waning after
more than 50 nights of demonstrations.
It is now
the federal agents who appear under siege, reduced to defending the courthouse
from attempts to break in or set it on fire. In a visible surrender of ground,
the DHS taskforce has even abandoned bothering to re-erect a fence around the
federal building torn down on Saturday night.
Meanwhile,
the protesters range free over several city blocks where businesses were first
shut down by coronavirus and then boarded up after some shops were smashed in
the initial protests that swept the country following the death of George Floyd
in Minneapolis in May after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine
minutes.
The
ubiquitous graffiti on stores, the county jail and the courthouse – including
portraits of Floyd and violent denunciations of the police – mark out the
protesters’ territory.
If Trump’s
intent was to calm things down, he has failed. But if, as some suspect, the
president wanted to ratchet up confrontation for political gain, then it is not
clear that it has been a success either.
“It’s a
power play by Trump. He thinks he’s going to get his base all riled up by
pitting the forces of law and order against the anarchists,” said Josh O’Brien
who travelled from Seattle to join the protests. “But he’s fucked it up like he
fucks everything up. Look who’s here with us. Grandmothers. Doctors. Because
like most Americans they don’t think people should be abducted from the streets
by the president’s secret police.”
The video
of unidentifiable agents bundling Americans into unmarked vans may indeed not
play well with some of Trump’s rightwing supporters for whom incidents such as
the FBI’s killing of a woman and her teenage son during the 1992 siege at Ruby
Ridge have come to represent what they see as an authoritarian federal
government.
While the
federal agents play out their nightly ritual, the city’s police are visibly
absent. Although the Portland police bureau headquarters is in the building
next to the federal courthouse, its officers appear to have abandoned any
attempt to police the demonstrations after the mayor, who serves as police
commissioner, sided with the protesters against the president. On top of that a
court order limited the city police’s use of teargas and other means of
restraint.
That has,
in the eyes of some of the demonstrators, created a “liberated territory”
similar to the “autonomous zone” in Seattle until it was cleared earlier this
month
The federal
court and neighboring county jail are opposite two parks that serve as the
demonstrators’ base, and where a food stand has come to symbolize the endurance
of the protests. Riot Ribs dispenses sustenance, including a vegetarian option,
free to demonstrators. Members of the collective preparing the food have been
targeted by federal agents charging out of the courthouse but have returned to
cooking after each encounter.
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