A new image of the federal response in Oregon has gone viral: a video showing 53-year-old Navy veteran Christopher David being struck repeatedly with a baton by a federal law enforcement officer.
Oregon Public Broadcasting reported Friday that federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles in downtown Portland to grab and detain protesters. In an interview Sunday with NPR, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler blamed the federal government for making things worse in the city. "We have an already heightened situation. It's already tense," Wheeler said. "But after nearly five weeks of demonstrations, we are starting to see that small handful of people who were engaged in criminal activity — it was dissipating. It was calming down. We believed a week ago it would be over by this weekend. But what happened instead is the feds stepped in with a very heavy-handed approach, and it blew the lid off the whole thing."
"With the federal government, they won't even identify who they are," Wheeler said. "We don't know why they're here. We don't know the circumstances under which they're making arrests. We don't know what their policies are or what accountability mechanisms there are, to the point where even the U.S. attorney here in the state of Oregon is calling for an investigation, wondering, where was the probable cause to pull these people off the streets into unmarked cars?"
On Friday, the U.S. senators from Oregon, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, as well as U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer and Suzanne Bonamici asked the Justice Department and DHS to investigate "the unrequested presence and violent actions of federal forces in Portland." Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed a lawsuit Friday against the DHS and other federal agencies and alleged that they have "engaged in unlawful law enforcement in violation of the civil rights of Oregonians by seizing and detaining them without probable cause." "The federal administration has chosen Portland to use their scare tactics to stop our residents from protesting police brutality and from supporting the Black Lives Matter movement," Rosenblum said in a statement. "Every American should be repulsed when they see this happening. If this can happen here in Portland, it can happen anywhere."