meIt took the murder of George Floyd to get Jane Ullman to finally pay attention to what the police were doing in the United States. But it was the sinister sight of camouflaged federal agents snatching protesters from the streets of Portland that prompted her to protest.
The chief financial officer of tech startups in the largest city in Oregon joined hundreds of other yellow-clad mothers in a “Moms Wall,” and presented himself every night as a human barricade between protesters and agents dispatched by Donald Trump. to aggressively break Black. Lives Matter demos.
Ullman, a mother of two, said it was her first rally in support of racial justice.
“As an upper-middle-class white woman in the whitest city in America, I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “I have been self-teaching a lot since George Floyd. Reading and learning. The feds part pushed me over the top. I wanted to take action. But it was the ‘Wall of Moms’ that brought me to light. ”
Ullman was not alone. What started as a small symbolic act of defiance on Saturday became the main rally two nights later, as thousands filled the streets and squares outside the county jail and federal court in downtown Portland for one of the largest protests. great to date.
In the background were hundreds of women dressed in yellow and singing “Hands up, please don’t shoot me,” evidence that Trump’s dispatch of federal agents has failed to stop the protests, but has reinvigorated them.
Video of unidentifiable federal officials, who look more like soldiers from an occupying army than police, hitting and snatching protesters from the streets angered a 35-year-old mother of two, Bev Barnum, who posted a message on Facebook on Saturday morning.
“As most of you have read and seen on the news,” he wrote, “protesters are being injured (without cause). And lately, protesters have been being stripped of their rights by being placed in unmarked cars by unidentifiable police. Moms are often underestimated. But we are stronger than we are credited with. “
Barnum called for a group to wear white and form a protective line between the police and the protesters Trump painted as anarchists.
“Let us make it clear that we will protect protesters without the use of violence,” he said. “We will shine a light on the unfair narrative being launched.”
The first group of nearly 40 mothers lined up that night, singing, “The feds are staying away, the mothers are here.”
Their line offered little protection once federal officials began shooting tear gas and explosions and carrying sticks. But they returned in large numbers the following night, this time dressed in yellow and with sunflowers. By Monday, the Wall of Moms had become the main event, as Ullman and hundreds of others decided it was time to stand up.
Jennifer Bradly, a grandmother, hesitated to join the protests before.
“I’m not crazy about the feds sweeping people off the streets,” said the post office mail carrier with a “Proud of the Union” badge. “I have been active with Black Lives Matter, but these demonstrations seemed too violent to me until I saw the Wall of Moms. It’s a great group of like-minded people. “
Bradly said many of the women were exposed by Trump’s intervention, but that it was important to keep the focus on the demand for police reform, including in Portland, where the force is under judicial supervision due to officers who shot homeless people. .
“It seems that people are not going to give up. This time it feels different, ”he said, reflecting on how little the police changed after other murders before George Floyd. He died in Minneapolis on May 25, after an office knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
The Portland protests have occurred every night in the nearly two months since then. After the initial surge, support faded, a few hundred appeared night after night. But outrage at Trump’s deployment of federal agents, many of them untrained in police surveillance, to end what he called anarchy, has rekindled the protests.
The Mayor of Portland and the Governor of Oregon denounced the deployment of officers from the Department of Homeland Security, the US Marshals Service, and the border patrol. The state attorney general is suing those agencies for “overstepping their powers and injuring or threatening peaceful protesters on the streets of downtown Portland.”
The “Trump troops,” as some protesters call them, have greater freedom than local officials. A court banned city police from using tear gas, but federal officials are not required by order.
For Margaret van Vliet, a former Oregon state director of housing who joined the Wall of Moms, it was too much.
“I was at home thinking I had to raise my voice,” he said. “So here I am.”
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