Trump threatened Portland with troops to suppress demonstrations. The mayor says that it is not necessary

Portland, Oregon. – A suspended gas mask of the DEIDRA WATTS backpack while they joined a few dozen other people outside the American immigration and customs building in Portland, just as it has been several nights since July.

The demonstrators raised a blue line painted on the alley of the building. “Government goods do not block,” read his white and stencil letters. When they dwell too closely, which seemed to be pepper balls that liked them with officers displayed on the roof of the building.

No one was injured on Wednesday and part of the crowd started to dissipate around midnight around midnight.

While disturbing the nearby residents – a school in Charter moved this summer to move away from the crowd control devices – night demonstrations are far from the troubles that seized the city after the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in 2020.

However, they attracted the attention of President Donald Trump, who often fought with the city mayor at the time.

Last week, Trump described to live in Portland as “like living in hell” and said that he was planning to send federal troops because he recently threatened to fight crime in other cities, including Chicago and Baltimore. He deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles during the summer and as part of his takeover of the police in Washington, DC

Most violent crimes across the country have in fact decreased in recent years, notably in Portland, where a recent report by Major Cities Chiefs Association revealed that homicides from January to June decreased by 51% this year compared to the same period in 2024.

“There is a propaganda campaign to give the impression that Portland is a hellish landscape,” said Casey Leger, 61, which is often outside the ice building trying to observe the transfers of immigration prisoners. “Two blocks of houses, you can simply go to the river and sit and sip a soda and watch the birds.”

The building is on a very popular road leading to Portland from the suburbs, and next to an affordable housing complex. During the day, Leger and a few other lawyers put and offer copies of the “Know Your Rights” leaflets with a hotline number to report ice arrests.

At night, Watts and other demonstrators, much dressed in black and wearing helmets or masks, arrive. She called Ice an insensitive and cruel machine.

“Faced with this, there must be people who will get up and make it known that it will not steal, that it is not something with which people agree,” said Watts.

The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comments.

The night demonstrations culminated in June after the “No Kings” markets nationwide when the Portland police said a demonstration. Since then, at least 26 demonstrators have been accused of federal offenses linked to the ice building, including the assault of federal officers, according to the Oregon prosecutor’s office.

“Like other mayors across the country, I did not ask – and I do not need – federal intervention,” said the mayor of Portland, Keith Wilson, in a statement according to Trump’s threat. The city has protected freedom of expression while “approaching occasional violence and destruction of goods,” he said.

There have been smaller clashes since June. The Labor Day, some demonstrators brought an accessories guillotine – an exhibition that the Ministry of Internal Security has decontulated “disarticulated behavior”.

Wilson expects the demonstrations to remain concentrated on the region by the building, he said.

Some residents of adjacent apartments are upset about this. One continued to try to ensure that the city applies noise prescriptions. She said that she believed that the noise of the inferior, speakers and “piercing whistle sounds” seemed to aerial sirens had burst her eardrum, and the gas that entered her apartment made her sick. The judge who heard the case rose to the side of the city.

Rick Stype, who has lived there for 10 years, said that he accompanies some neighbors outside because they fear being harassed by demonstrators.

“I just want them to leave us alone,” he said. “I want them to go.”

A Charter School next to the ICE building, the Cottonwood School of Civics and Science, has moved during the summer, saying that chemical agents and crowd control projectiles put the safety of students in danger.

Many parents and students were regular coffee customers near Chris Johnson, he said. He deplored the school move and the national story that the demonstrations were more important than them.

“I think people are very, very opinionable on each side,” he said. “It just creates a ditch, which is unfortunate.”