The ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Riots Are Back

I t was a busy weekend for federal law enforcement. To read media accounts, it was a weekend replete with unrelenting evidence of ICE and Customs and Border Protection’s malevolence. They “gassed children.” They deployed “violent tactics” against peaceful demonstrators. The administration they serve has turned “America’s streets into a shooting range,” in which civilians find themselves in the crosshairs.

In fact, the civil unrest on America’s streets was limited to a handful of municipalities where violent anti-law enforcement “resistance” tactics have become commonplace.

In Portland, Ore., for example, Mayor Keith Wilson implored ICE agents to “resign” and “leave” the facilities they’re tasked with protecting. “Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame,” he declared in widely reported remarks. Indeed, the news media’s one-sided account of the events Wilson raged against suggested his ire was amply justified. Federal agents terrorized the public, “dousing” the crowd “with gas,” singling out children as well as adults with non-lethal crowd control ordnance, and training what looked like “rocket launchers” on the public.

That tidy narrative — one dutifully promulgated by left-wing outlets — doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. There were children present at the “union-organized protest,” though it is hard to say that their guardians did not suspect they were putting the minors in their care in peril. “I saw one kid in a stroller with a little helmet on,” one protester said of the protest-chic aesthetic to which the marchers committed themselves and their loved ones. The demonstrators were met with pepper-balls, chemical irritants, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets, but only after they had “enveloped” an ICE facility, “crossed the building’s property line, and approached its security gate.” Later, Jefferson Public Radio reported, “Some protesters directly outside the ICE building also appeared to throw objects towards the roof where federal officers fired crowd control munitions.”

Portland wasn’t alone. In Eugene, Ore., a Friday night demonstration fast descended into a melee. Police declared it an unlawful assembly shortly after nightfall, when protesters were observed “breaching” a federal building. It was at that point that the protests had moved “out of the peaceful realm and into riotous behavior,” said Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner. He felt compelled to intervene, despite the political incentives to avoid doing so, because “it just became too dangerous for me to be able to sit by” and sacrifice the handful of federal officers sheltering themselves from the rioters.

Los Angeles, too, experienced its share of riotous violence. There, hundreds of anti-ICE demonstrators converged on a federal building and ignored dispersal orders. “Some vandalized the building, a frequent site of confrontation since protests against ICE in the city broke out last summer, and threw objects at federal officers guarding the property,” the New York Times reported.

The shock force that broke away from the thousands of marchers who peacefully protested federal immigration enforcement officers engaged a “skirmish line” of police. “At one point, a group of demonstrators appeared to surround a woman, who was pushed to the ground,” CBS News reporters observed. “Police pulled the woman from the crowd and helped her to an ambulance.” Within 15 minutes of declaring the demonstration an illegal gathering, “federal authorities began taking bottles, rocks, and industrial-size/commercial-grade fireworks, and they have deployed tear gas into the crowd,” an LAPD statement read. At least 50 demonstrators were arrested and processed.

There was conspicuously less violence over the weekend in Minneapolis, the epicenter of the current outbreak of riotous violence. The lull might be attributable to the de-escalatory tactics that local law enforcement officers appear to be employing, up to and including what looks like a reprise of the tactics deployed in 2020 that culminated in the establishment of separatist enclaves like Seattle’s infamous “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” a.k.a. “CHAZ.”

Minneapolis police have spent the weeks since the ICE-involved shooting death of Renee Good periodically dismantling the improvised barricades demonstrators occasionally erect around their neighborhoods to frustrate the movement of law enforcement agents. Those barricades were left unmolested, apparently, as law enforcement officers were shown interacting with demonstrators manning the borders of their new statelet.

In one unsigned dispatch from the protests published on the far-left anarchist blog CrimetheInc (pronounced, aptly enough, “crime-think”), which presented readers with a ground-level view of the unrest that has prevailed for nearly a month in Minnesota, local Democratic officials, including Governor Tim Walz, and state-level law enforcement have betrayed their movement. “The road to fascism is paved with reforms that pacify people just long enough to tighten the vice,” the dispatch read. “The everyday anarchism of the Minneapolis revolution is its greatest strength.”

It is necessary to stress that these conflicts primarily involve local protesters clashing with local police. On Saturday, the president declared that “under no circumstances are we going to participate in various poorly run Democrat Cities with regard to their Protests and/or Riots unless, and until, they ask us for help.” Donald Trump’s directive instructing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to protect only federal property from rioters does not depart from the agency’s traditional remit. Indeed, the federal government’s argument is that its agents cannot police local agitators while simultaneously arresting deportation targets, and the Feds need support from municipal police forces to control crowds. In the drama that unfolded over the weekend, federal law enforcement played only a bit part.

If the hundreds of demonstrators who broke away from the thousands of peaceable protesters over the weekend, intent on engaging in conflict with law enforcement, got precisely what they wanted, so, too, did the activist press. “Thousands of protesters turned out for a mostly peaceful demonstration Saturday in Portland to speak out against increased immigration enforcement,” Oregon Public Broadcasting declared. Its reporters could not resist the temptation to resurrect that cursed phrase from the interment to which it was consigned in 2020 after it became a punchline. Well, it’s back, as is the violence it once mordantly described.