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.”
When Wright saw an elderly man near her struggling, she offered him her water bottle so he could rinse out his eyes. She had brought the bottle because she had recently seen a social media post advising protesters to bring them to rinse out their eyes if they were tear gassed.
Like Broeker, this was Wright’s first tear gassing. She had been to other protests throughout her life, like abortion rights protests, a march to commemorate Stonewall, anti-war demonstrations during the Bush era, as well as the two nationwide No Kings protests last year. But she didn’t think of herself as a radical. “I’m a pretty normie Democrat,” Wright said.
Most of the witnesses I spoke to had also seen a video of a child in a pink sweatshirt with purple butterflies weeping as volunteers flush her eyes out with water — the post went viral on social media on Saturday. The video is horrifying; the witnesses had all seen similar things in the clouds of gas, with children, teenagers, and the elderly having to have their eyes rinsed.
The crowd eventually made it back to Carruthers Park, where volunteers passed out water bottles, helped rinse out eyes, and administered medical attention where it was needed.
David Turnbull had come to the march with his family as part of the protest bike ride. His wife and his eight-year-old son were also on bikes; he brought his six-year-old daughter on the back of a cargo bike. He estimates that hundreds, maybe thousands of cyclists rode across the river to join the march. They met up with his mother-in-law, a 75-year-old retired nurse who was marching with the nurses’ union.
Turnbull’s family was at the park when it happened. “My son looked down the street and saw the cloud of smoke,” he said. He can still see his eight-year-old’s eyes getting wider as he saw the smoke billowing.
“We talked about how that’s not the way these things are supposed to go and, you know, how we were always going to make sure to keep him safe,” he told me on Sunday. It was not a talk he expected to have to have with his child. Fortunately, he said, his six-year-old was oblivious to what had happened.
Lydia Kiesling, a novelist who lives in Portland and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, attended the march with her 11-year-old daughter. When the tear gas was deployed, they were able to stay ahead of the cloud, managing to get away only with stinging eyes. Kiesling had been tear gassed before; her daughter had not. “She was very scared by the flashbangs, because she didn’t know what that was,” said Kiesling. The two of them ended up taking a long walk home across the Tilikum Crossing Bridge so that her daughter could talk through it and process what had happened.
Turnbull is a longtime climate activist and is no stranger to civil disobedience, having been to countless protests, including ones where he had been arrested. “This was not that,” he said emphatically. “There were thousands of people who were marching peacefully around the streets. And none of them expected, wanted, were prepared for that sort of action to be taken by ICE.”
“Nobody panicked. Nobody ran.”
In a video shot by Cassie Broeker just seconds after the tear gas went off, almost no one has a gas mask; as the gas spreads and protesters double over coughing, some resort to pulling their shirts over their nose and mouth.
“I was so impressed and kind of honored to be in that crowd,” said Broeker, when she reflected back on that afternoon. “Because nobody panicked. Nobody ran. Nobody was trampling each other. Everybody got out together.”
“We made room for the pregnant, we made room for the elderly, we made room for children,” she said.
The evening after the march, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson released a statement condemning the gassing of a “peaceful daytime protest.”
“To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame,” the statement reads. According to the same statement, the city government is getting ready to enforce a recently passed ordinance that imposes an impact fee “on detention facilities that use chemical agents.”
When I spoke to Councilor Green, he added that the city council was working on further pieces of legislation, such as a ban on masking for ICE agents and a ban on the use of tear gas. He called for his constituents to send him information about their experience at the march, saying that the next step was to “use our legal tools and prosecute, because I don’t think it’s legal to assault children in the street with chemical weapons.”
The protesters I spoke to had a wide range of opinions on what should be done about ICE’s presence in the city. Broeker was in favor of revoking the zoning permit for the building, though she also acknowledged that there was a complex balance of factors to consider. Wright was also concerned about the ripple effects of ejecting ICE from the city, saying that “just chasing them out” would have “a horrific effect in Oregon, especially if they build a new place in Newport.” For months, local publications have reported on various signs that DHS is planning to build a detention center in Newport, a coastal town that is a popular beach getaway for Portlanders. If immigrants have to attend appointments in Newport, or Tacoma, Washington, they might get snatched up by ICE while far away from Portland’s denser, more activated population.
“But this tear gassing, I feel like it can’t stand,” said Wright.
The size and scale of the tear gassing is hard to properly convey. Eight canisters or more is a massive amount of tear gas; a single canister is enough to send a street full of people into a panic. When I heard that the march had been tear gassed, I ran down to the ICE building to do some reporting; I arrived about an hour and a half after the first gassing, and was immediately tear gassed myself. The people from earlier in the day had long since dispersed; the protesters who were there now were, like myself, wearing gas masks. Even the Portland Chicken was wearing a full-face gas mask inside of his chicken costume. About 40 minutes later, I watched glowing munitions arc over my head and fall toward me. I ducked and held my helmet over my head; once again, tear gas billowed all around me. Some of the protesters had been collecting the spent munitions from the ground, and let me look through the bucket of sludgy, dented canisters. I found approximately 20 spent munitions in the bucket.
But it’s not just the number of canisters, or that the tear gas that afternoon covered several blocks. Portland is a relatively small city, and the impact of this gassing is still reverberating throughout the community. Organizers estimated that somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people attended the protest. Portland proper has a population of about 650,000; the larger Portland metro area includes about 2.5 million people. That means that at least 1 in 500 Portlanders were present; maybe even 1 percent of the local population. Nurses and teachers especially are more likely to come into contact with a large swath of the community. When Wright went to the gym later, other people there had also been tear gassed; they talked together about the children they had seen sobbing and rinsing their eyes out. I found one witness at brunch because I had accidentally overheard her talking to her friends about getting tear gassed. All across the city, people are hearing firsthand accounts of what happened on Saturday afternoon; they’re hearing about how their friends’ and neighbors’ throats still hurt or lungs still burn.
“These people are evil,” said Wright. “And this is nothing compared, obviously, to what they’re actually doing in their day jobs when they’re not sitting around firing off tear gas for fun.”
“My 11-year-old was like, ‘Well, fuck these guys,’” said Kiesling. Her daughter already disapproved of ICE — that was why she was there, after all — but it was still a radicalizing moment.
“You’re never gonna be able to tell that child, ‘Oh, well, you know, it was a riot, people were acting crazy, so there was no choice but for the officers to fire into the crowd.’ You’ll never be able to tell that to any of the kids who were there,” said Kiesling. “Good job. They’ve just made more young enemies for life.”
“I think they’ve made a tactical error,” said Broeker. “You just gassed a bunch of normal, boring people who have never been gassed before.”
When Broeker had first been tear gassed, she had been terrified. But the fear has since faded, leaving only rage.
“Next time, I’ll be back with a gas mask,” she said.
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