Thousands gathered in Portland for the No Kings protests against ICE actions and Trump's policies over the weekend, featuring inflatable costumes and large crowds. A federal appeals court decision on Monday allowed the deployment of National Guard troops to the city, reversing a lower court's ban. The ruling has drawn criticism for enabling suppression of peaceful demonstrations.
Portland's No Kings demonstration drew 40,000 people to the streets in solidarity against Trump's deportation policies, marking a high-profile event focused on protests outside ICE offices in a privately owned building on the South Waterfront near Oregon Health & Science University. The protests featured a loose group of inflatable costume wearers, including three frogs, one chicken, and glow-in-the-dark cows, who aimed to counter perceptions of the city as an urban war zone stemming from 2020 clashes between antifa protesters and police that lasted about 200 days. Those earlier events, amid a city that is 88 percent white and 6 percent Black, involved nightly street fights and heavy tear gas use by police, contributing to an economic downturn exacerbated by the pandemic.
Local businesses engaged with the spirit of the protests; for instance, sandwich shop Lardo offered free beer to frog costume wearers at its downtown location during the event, leading to its most popular social media post ever. The mood was described as bleak and cynical, with numerous livestreamers capturing dramatic angles, though the atmosphere felt more like a staged production than organic action.
On Friday night at midnight, heavily armored guards cleared a path for unmarked cars believed to carry ICE agents departing the facility. By Saturday, as the crowd peaked around midnight, Portland police deployed tear gas. The weekend's events culminated in a significant legal setback: On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in a 2-1 decision by two Trump-appointed judges, reversed a lower court's ban on deploying National Guard troops to intimidate protesters at the ICE facility, reinstating protocols associated with Stephen Miller.
Dissenting Judge Susan Graber called the deployment an 'illegal' action based on 'false pretenses,' 'fabrication,' and 'propaganda'—pure 'political theater.' In a concurrence, Judge Ryan Nelson argued that courts lack authority to review a president's National Guard deployments, citing the 1827 case Martin v. Mott, though critics note the modern statute limits such actions to insurrections or rebellions, imposing judicial oversight. This ruling echoes similar tensions in a pending Supreme Court case from Chicago blocking Trump's troop deployment there.