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- New War in Portland
Donald Trump has ordered the deployment of the national guard to Portland, Oregon, authorizing “full force, if necessary”, ignoring calls from local and state officials who say the president has been misinformed about the scale of a protest outside a federal immigration office.
The president says that he has directed all necessary troops to be deployed to protect “war ravaged Portland”, claiming that immigration facilities were “under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists”.
Officials in Portland have pushed back against the decision and rejected the president’s characterization.
“There is no insurrection. There is no threat to national security and there is no need for military troops in our major city,” said Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek.
This is obviously terrible, but I also see it as Trump testing another place to see what he can get away with. The demonstrations that are happening in Portland at an ICE detention facility are also happening in Chicago, and Trump was ready to deploy the Texas National Guard there, but he quit after Pritzker made some noise. In fact, the Portland protests are smaller than the Chicago protests:
There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”.
Anybody who really cares about “the troops” should realize that deploying some other state’s National Guard leads to them wasting time standing around, as they have in DC. It also removes them from the state when they could be helping with natural disasters. Overall, it’s unpopular, just as most of the Trump Administration’s actions. I hope Tina Kotek is up to the task of taking this on, and I hope she gets some help from other Democrats.
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