Portland prepares for invasion The New Yorker

In early October, Keith Wilson, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, paid a visit to 4310 South Macadam Street, the address that put his city back in the national spotlight — and in President Donald Trump’s crosshairs. Since June, this location has been the local headquarters for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), has been the focus of daily protests, with activists rallying against, and often in conflict with, the Trump administration’s immigration policies Maga Counter-protesters. Although the demonstrations were colorful — a carnival atmosphere, with people wearing inflatable frog suits and other costumes — Ice The facility itself, a former data processing center for a regional bank, with boarded-up windows, was as camouflaged as the armed, masked federal officers who guarded it from the roof.

To the public, what was happening inside the building remained largely a mystery. No media outlets, except for influential right-wing figures friendly with Trump, were allowed inside. But Wilson was “called” to the building, as he put it, to meet with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who came to town after Trump announced, on Truth Social, that he would authorize “all forces necessary to protect war-torn Portland.” Wilson hoped to convince Noem that there was no need for federal intervention, and that the city’s protests were under control. But after visiting the building, he came to the following conclusion Ice In itself it lacks any discipline or control. “It’s a mess inside,” he told me. “It’s messy. It’s disorganized.”

It was a warm day, around eighty degrees, and the first thing Wilson noticed when he entered the facility was how hot it was inside. “The HVAC system was broken,” he said. During his visit, he saw full garbage containers. He saw tired and disturbed officers. In the empty offices, he saw crowd control ammunition and body armor scattered. “You can see they’re making it up while they’re doing it,” said Wilson, the former trucking company CEO. “There’s no plan. And if there’s no plan, you don’t know the goal. Without a goal, you’re just wasting time and money — and they’re wasting time and money.”

Noem’s visit to Portland didn’t go exactly as planned. The apparent purpose of the trip was to bolster the administration’s argument that the city had been overrun by leftist rebels, but while taking photos on the rooftop, Noem surveyed the site of the daily protests, supposedly the most war-torn part of the city, only to find the street below empty. Portland police, in accordance with their policy when dignitaries visit the city, cordoned off the area. A few protesters stood on the outskirts, including a man dressed as a chicken. Another protester criticized the “Benny Hill Show” theme, mocking Noem’s visit. In a video circulating online, Noem was expressionless. Maybe this wasn’t the war zone she came to capture. When she met Wilson, he deconstructed the plot and asked her to reconsider sending troops. “I objected to that,” he told me. “They’re trying to create a story. It’s a lie. It has no legs.”

You’ve seen this split screen before. When I covered the last wave of high-profile protests in Portland, in 2020, I discovered that the Trump administration’s characterization of the situation did not always match what was happening on the ground. This time, the contrast seemed more pronounced. She arrived in Portland last Monday, the same day a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the White House could federalize the Oregon National Guard to deploy to the city. Residents, including the mayor, seemed on edge. I asked Wilson: Was there a sense of concern about potential forces on the streets? “Every day,” he said.

Trump has been preoccupied with Portland since at least 2018, when he publicly rebuked then-Mayor Ted Wheeler for allowing an “angry mob of violent people” to confront federal agents. In 2020, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Trump referred to Black Lives Matter protesters as “radical anarchists” and deployed seven hundred and fifty-five Department of Homeland Security officers to Portland to protect federal buildings in the city, intensifying nightly clashes between protesters and law enforcement.

In recent weeks, Trump has reignited his battle with the largest city in Oregon. “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland,” he said in October, during a White House roundtable on antifa’s supposed dominance in America. “You don’t even have stores anymore.” (There are more than three thousand retail businesses in the city.) “When a store owner rebuilds a store, he builds it out of plywood,” he said at a news conference. (In four days of driving around town, I couldn’t see a store built out of plywood.) He claimed on multiple occasions that “Portland is burning to the ground.” (I couldn’t find any fires either.)