The day after the second general strike in Minneapolis, the labor unions of Portland, Oregon, marched in solidarity. It was the warmest day that Portland had seen in a while, with sun peeking out from the clouds here and there. Many people had brought their entire families; not just older children, but toddlers in strollers and wagons, too. Some brought their dogs. The chants were typical: “ICE out of Portland” and “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” But the children were so visible that City Councilor Mitch Green felt a slight twinge of awkwardness. “There’s some other folks saying, you know, ‘Fuck ICE,’ but, like, there’s children in front of me. I don’t want to say the F-word, you know?”
But that was very soon the least of his concerns, as tear gas engulfed the protest at approximately 4:30PM. He and other witnesses recalled hearing six loud bangs; a video posted on social media recorded eight, as well as countless smaller pops. At least eight arcs of smoke flew far over people’s heads, as though aimed at the back of the crowd.
“I know they would do anything, that they would hurt people, that they’ve murdered people and shot them in the back 10 times,” said Cassie Broeker, a Portland resident who came to protest with friends. “I know that intellectually. But I still did not expect them to gas a chill, friendly protest full of nurses and teachers and children and the elderly.”
Broeker had joined the protest on Saturday for a large number of reasons, though the treatment of Minnesotans by the Trump administration was her primary motivation. The next nationwide No Kings protest, scheduled for March, felt too far away for her. “I’ve always been the kind of person who goes to the larger, more peaceful protests,” she said. And the labor march had matched the energy of the No Kings protests she had been to, right up until she was tear gassed for the first time in her life.
She was standing right across from the ICE building when it happened. “They gave us no warning,” she said. The feds shot munitions from the roof as well as the ground level. There was so much gas that the crowd had to walk for blocks to escape. Broeker estimated that it was about a three-to-five-minute journey to escape out of the clouds. “I was pretty incapacitated by the gas. I almost passed out a couple times. The only reason I got out safely is because my friends and I locked arms and walked out together.”
The ICE facility is where the most-photographed protests in Portland took place last year — this is where DHS attempted to pepper spray the Frog and where Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem paraded on the roof to menace a man in a chicken suit. Right before the tear gassing, the unions — including the nurses’ union and teachers’ union — had just met up in nearby Caruthers Park, merging with a protest bike ride that had come from across the river.
The area in front of the ICE building tends to be fairly quiet during the day. Given the general tenor of the crowd — “normal, calm, boring,” one witness called it — protesters felt comfortable looping around the blocks in front of the building while waving signs reading “ICE out now!” or “This is a country of immigrants.” Nobody expected to be tear gassed.
Mitch Green’s segment of the march had just turned a corner into a street flanked by high-rise buildings. “It all just really billowed down that canyon,” he said. [Disclosure: Prior to his election, the author was Councilor Green’s DM in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.] Green’s immediate instinct was to turn and walk into the gas to help others. “I don’t know, maybe it’s latent PTSD,” he said. Green is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan; he was also tear gassed during the 2020 protests. With the number of elderly protesters, he was worried that there might be people struggling in the clouds. But as the gas overwhelmed him, he “realized quickly that that was a dumb idea.” Green turned his denim jacket into improvised PPE and joined the others in their orderly exit out of the gas.
Julie Wright, a 60-year-old teacher, was still “quite a ways away” from the ICE building when the tear gas struck her. “I actually didn’t see it as much as I could feel it,” she said. “And then I couldn’t really see anything because, you know, my eyes were streaming and stuff.”
“It was very crowded, so you couldn’t move very fast, and also nobody could see very well,” said Wright. “So people were still moving slowly and coughing and tearing up.” She was doing better than the people around her because she was wearing an N-95 mask; others were coughing “really violently.” She saw a mother with a baby in a sling; to her surprise, the baby seemed to be taking the tear gas in stride. “She just looked very, very solemn.”
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