“The tactics the Trump administration is using on the streets of Portland are abhorrent,” Mayor Ted Wheeler told CNN’s Jake Tapper about “State of the Union.”
“Apparently, people are being taken off the street to unmarked trucks, rental cars, apparently. They are denied probable cause. And they are denied due process. They don’t even know who is putting them in the trucks. people are not identifying themselves. And as far as I can see, this is completely unconstitutional, “Wheeler said.
Protesters in Portland have been protesting racial inequality and police brutality for the past 50 nights, US Attorney Billy J. Williams said in a statement. Federal authorities have protected the United States Courthouse Mark O. Hatfield and, at times, the interaction between protesters and the police has turned violent. Last weekend, a protester was seriously injured after the man was shot in the head with impact ammunition.
Recent videos of the protest scenes show that Department of Homeland Security personnel arrest protesters and put them in unmarked SUVs. In one of those videos that was shared on Twitter by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, two masked individuals camouflaged with generic “police” patches, detain a person dressed in a black suit and place them in an unmarked van before leave.
The Times said the memo was dated Thursday and was prepared for Chad Wolf, the department’s acting secretary, before a trip to the city that day to see the site of the ongoing protests.
“In the future, if this type of response is to be the norm, specialized training and standardized equipment should be implemented in response agencies,” the memo read, according to the Times, which noted that the document appears to anticipate “future encounters with protesters (and federal agents) in other cities. ”
The newspaper said some of the DHS agents sent to Portland “include officials from a group known as BORTAC, the Border Patrol equivalent of a SWAT team, a highly-trained group that is normally tasked with investigating smuggling organizations drug instead of protesters in cities. ”
The presence of federal agents in Portland has created a confrontation between city leaders and Washington, DC. Oregon Governor Wheeler and Merkley have demanded that federal officials be removed.
“We are demanding that the President withdraw these additional troops that he sent to our city. He is not helping to contain or reduce the situation, he is obviously having exactly the opposite impact,” Wheeler said last week.
When Wolf visited the city last Thursday, he defended his officers’ actions and said in a tweet: “DHS officers were attacked with lasers and frozen water bottles by violent criminals trying to shoot down federal property. 2 officers were injured.”
“Our men and women in uniform are patriots,” he said in another tweet featuring uniformed officers who looked similar to those shown in last week’s video.
CNN’s Amir Vera, Konstantin Toropin, Josh Campbell and Alta Spells contributed to this report.
.
