Jeet Heer, The Nation,
July 17, 2020:
Donald Trump's war on protesters is escalating, with reports emerging out of Portland, Ore., that federal law enforcement officers, wearing camouflage but without any other visible insignia, have been rounding up American citizens.
On Thursday, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reported that "federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off." ...
"It's like stop and frisk meets Guantanamo Bay," attorney Juan Chavez told OPB. He added that these detentions were not following any rules of probable cause. "It sounds more like abduction. It sounds like they're kidnapping people off the streets."
On the face of it, what these federal officers are doing is illegal and unconstitutional. It's possible that they are acting under the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, signed by Barack Obama, which legalized the detention of Americans suspected of being terrorists. If so, then the War on Terrorism has truly come home.
The Trump administration used unidentified federal officers to patrol Washington, D.C., in early June when the scale of the protests forced Trump to go into the White House bunker. Those officers turned out to be guards from the US Bureau of Prisons who had been repurposed as ad hoc praetorian guards. ...
The deployment of unidentified federal officers is particularly dangerous in a situation like that in Portland and elsewhere in America, because it could easily lead to right-wing militias' impersonating legal authorities and kidnapping citizens. As former CIA counterintelligence analyst Aki Peritz notes, "All it takes is one of these similar-kitted out militiamen groups to start grabbing folks off the street as well, but then having their way with them, for there to be huge, possibly violent pushback for these tactics. ... We're quickly entering secret police territory now. DHS is becoming Trump's Mukhābarāt" (mukhābarāt being the Arabic word for intelligence agency, used colloquially to refer, for example, to the Egyptian or Iraqi or Libyan secret police). ...
There is every sign that Trump will continue to pound the drum of law and order until the election. Portland is likely a test case for a larger security crackdown that will be repeated in other cities.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown has been commendably blunt in attacking Trump's assault on protesters. On Thursday, she tweeted:
The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government. I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets. His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.):
Unmarked federal agents in combat gear are pulling protesters off the street and jailing them without charge. That is what a police state is all about. Now is the time to defend our Constitution. Now is the time to come together and defeat Trump's authoritarian policies.
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights:
This is terrifying and outrageous. Secret police are the purview of authoritarians. Trump is doing this months away from the election because he thinks it helps him. But imagine what happens if he gets four more years.
Jonathan Levinson and Conrad Wilson, Oregon Public Broadcasting,
July 16-17, 2020:
Federal law enforcement officers have ... left one demonstrator hospitalized with [facial and] skull fractures after shooting him in the face with so-called "less lethal" munitions July 11.
Officers from the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and Customs and Border Protection's BORTAC, have been sent to Portland to protect federal property during the recent protests against racism and police brutality.
But interviews conducted by OPB show officers are also detaining people on Portland streets who aren't near federal property, nor is it clear that all of the people being arrested have engaged in criminal activity. ...
In a statement, the U.S. Marshals Service declined to comment on the practice of using unmarked vehicles ...
"A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice," [Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf stated] ... "To attack it is to attack America." ...
Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkely said if Wolf is coming to inflame the situation in Portland so the President can "look tough," the acting DHS leader should leave. ... "These shadowy forces have been escalating, not preventing, violence."
Katie Shepherd, Washington Post,
July 17, 2020:
Federal officers from the U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security have stormed Portland's streets as part of President Trump's promised strong response to ongoing protests. Local leaders expressed alarm at news of Pettibone's detention and echoed calls for the feds to leave that have grown stronger since Marshals Service officers severely wounded a peaceful protester on Saturday.
"A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump's secret police," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wrote in a Thursday tweet that also called out acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf. "Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media."
Civil rights advocates suggested the Trump administration is testing the limits of its executive power.
"I think Portland is test case," Zakir Khan, a spokesperson for the Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Post. "They want to see what they can get away with before launching into other parts of the country." ...
After Trump sent federal officers to the city, allegedly to quell violence, tensions escalated. The feds have repeatedly deployed tear gas to scuttle protests, despite a newly passed state law that bans local police from using the chemical irritant except to quash riots. On Saturday, federal agents shot a man in the face with a less-than-lethal munition, fracturing his skull. Local officials, from the mayor to the governor, have asked the president to pull the federal officers out of the city.
"I am proud to be among the loud chorus of elected officials calling for the federal troops in Portland's streets to go home," Portland city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said in a statement shared with The Post on Sunday. "Their presence here has escalated tensions and put countless Portlanders exercising their First Amendment rights in greater danger." ...
Trump has cheered harsh tactics by officers in Portland ...
"We've done a great job in Portland," Trump said at a news conference on Monday. "Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail. We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we'll quell it again very easily. It's not hard to do, if you know what you're doing."
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