Portland, Oregon, mayor calls for ICE to leave after children are tear-gassed
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
By ANNA GRIFFIN and AARON WEST
The tear-gassing this past weekend in Portland, Oregon, of a protest billed as “family friendly” has prompted Portland’s mayor and City Council to consider dramatic new steps, including financial penalties, to try to force Immigration and Customs Enforcement out of the city.
Several thousand protesters — including children, older residents and pets — had marched on Saturday to the ICE building 2 miles south of downtown Portland in a daytime demonstration organized by Oregon unions. But when more than a dozen demonstrators at the front of the march crossed a no-trespassing line at the building’s driveway, federal agents fired a barrage of pepper balls and so much tear gas that the police had to briefly close nearby roads engulfed in the plume.
The tear gas reached people, including children, in the back of the crowd, and videos by attendees showed several children crying and retching as medics tried to help them.
That has pushed Mayor Keith Wilson, elected in 2024 with promises of a less confrontational approach to federal officials, to declare he has had enough.
“To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children,” Wilson said in a statement this past weekend. “Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets. No one is forcing you to lie to yourself, even as your bosses continue to lie to the American people.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, defended the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and other crowd dispersal weapons.
“Over 250 rioters violently stormed an ICE facility in Portland forming a shield wall with umbrellas while they attempted to tie the vehicle gate shut with ropes and moved a dumpster to block the front gate,” she said, though she was referring to an episode that had occurred hours after the agents initially deployed tear gas.
Confrontations between demonstrators and federal immigration agents in Portland have gotten less national attention since President Donald Trump ended his efforts to deploy the National Guard to the city and ICE raids began sweeping through Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
But the frequent use of crowd dispersal weapons, including gas, since protests began at the Portland ICE facility in June has prompted increasingly loud calls from left-wing activists for the city to take a stand.
In September, city leaders issued a land use violation notice for the ICE facility, the first step toward potentially revoking permission for federal officers to use the south Portland property to detain immigrants. The notice accused ICE of holding people for too long and too often. The property owner argued his case to city regulators in December, and a decision is imminent.
The Portland City Council has also created a new annual impact fee to be paid by private property owners who lease buildings used as detention centers. Unlike in many other American cities, ICE rents space in Portland from a private landowner, rather than another government agency or a for-profit prison firm.
The stated goal of the new fee is to offset the costs the ICE facility creates for city taxpayers for services such as traffic management, environmental cleanup and emergency response. The political goal is to make it cost prohibitive for private owners to rent to ICE.
City leaders have not set the fee yet, but after Saturday’s violence, Wilson, a business owner known for his relative moderation, told city staff to speed the process of putting the charge in place. He also said that the city was “documenting” the weekend’s events and “preserving evidence.”
“The federal government must, and will, be held accountable,” he said, joining other Democratic mayors, prosecutors and governors in vowing consequences for federal actions.
The Trump administration already faces two lawsuits over the agents’ use of tear gas in Portland, including one by residents of an affordable housing building across the street from the ICE facility who say the frequent use of chemical weapons is endangering the health of people who live nearby.