The South Dakota governor, who holds the position of the homeland security secretary, inspected the ICE office in Portland on Tuesday. While there, she witnessed a modest protest outside, which stands in stark contrast to the intense "siege" alleged by former President Donald Trump.
Governor Noem was joined by a group of right-wing figures who were transported from the Portland airport to the facility in her motorcade. DHS has published more aggressive social media content featuring federal personnel performing enforcement operations and deploying crowd control measures at demonstrators.
Officers cleared the street outside the ICE office in the city’s south waterfront neighborhood before the secretary’s visit. Several individuals, among them one dressed as a chicken and another as a baby shark, were kept at a distance.
Music played loudly from a demonstration site nearby, with words referencing Trump and Epstein files. One protester shouted to a federal recorder filming from the top of the building, challenging whether the homeland security had been referred to as the "propaganda department".
Journalists from independent news outlets were also restricted to the police line outside, while the MAGA-aligned figures in the secretary's group—three right-wing influencers—posted digital content of the secretary participating in federal officers in religious observance inside, delivering a pep talk, and advising a individual of the militia to "Be ready".
Governor Noem has supported the Trump's assertions that the handful of individuals—who have assembled in their limited groups outside the site since the summer, including one in an inflatable frog costume—are "extremists" who have placed the building "in a state of siege", making the sending of DHS agents essential.
However, on a recent weekend, a court official in Oregon blocked his effort to federalize Oregon’s National Guard, stating that the president’s claims that the mostly calm city was "burning to the ground" were "without evidence".
The next day, the judge, Karin Immergut—who was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump—extended the decision to prohibit state militia from elsewhere from being sent in Oregon. The judge ruled after Trump answered to her initial ruling by seeking to send members of the California National Guard to Portland.
Following Trump highlighted the limited yet ongoing demonstration outside the site and made unsubstantiated allegations that the city is "in a state of war", a growing number of his supporters, including right-wing figures, have appeared to face the demonstrators.
Some of these clashes have caused altercations and physical fights, leading to apprehensions by the Portland police. One influencer was taken into custody after he attempted to push through a gathering on a sidewalk near the ICE facility and was involved in a scuffle over an national banner. Sortor had earlier removed the flag from a demonstrator who was destroying it.
Criminal counts against the influencer were eventually dismissed after an protest in partisan press induced the leader of the civil rights division of the DOJ, the division head, to threaten an investigation of the local police over supposed political bias.
Female protesters the influencer was involved in an altercation with still have pending accusations.
Over the weekend, Governor Tina Kotek, the governor, accused government personnel in the office of trying to antagonize the crowds by using excessive quantities of crowd control agents in a residential neighborhood and including partisan figures to record the crowd from the roof of the site. "Their actions are meant to provoke," she commented.
Several of those MAGA-aligned figures were described in a law enforcement document last month as "opposing demonstrators" who "constantly return and antagonize the protesters until they are attacked or subjected to spray" and resist "frequent warnings from officers to keep clear of" the protesters.
Benny Johnson, a previous media worker who changed careers as a Christian nationalist influencer after being dismissed from a media outlet for content theft, published a clip of the secretary observing from the upper level of the ICE facility at the small group of individuals below, including a protest organizer who sports a fowl suit to taunt the former president. Johnson described the video of the secretary inspecting the calm environment below: "Secretary Noem confronts Antifa militants and a costumed protester".
Despite the contrast between the allegations from Trump and Noem that this facility is "under siege" from "domestic terrorists" and clear visual evidence of a small number of individuals in harmless costumes, the personalities with Noem continued to label the protesters as threatening extremists.
While in Portland, Governor Noem also held a discussion with the Portland police chief, Bob Day, who has been portrayed as "woke" in conservative media for permitting his personnel to detain Sortor. In a digital announcement on the engagement, Benny Johnson stated that the chief had "sided with violent ANTIFA militants assaulting journalists and officers outside ICE facility".
The secretary's convoy then drove out the office past a small group of demonstrators on the street outside, including one in the costume of a bear wearing a sombrero.
