Guest Post: A first-hand account by Neal Milner, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, and a columnist and regular contributor to Civil Beat, now living in Portland, Oregon.
The agents on the roof did worse than that.
They targeted everyone.
My wife Joy and I were tear gassed at Portland’s Labor Against ICE demonstration on Saturday, January 31. So were a lot of others.
With no warning or provocation, ICE agents wildly and indiscriminately fired gas canisters and flash bombs into the crowd.
Several thousand people had marched the few blocks from a small park, where the rally started, to ICE headquarters.
Parents brought children, elderly people came with walkers, (there is a large retirement community across from the park). Families pushed strollers while others walked with dogs. Many cyclists too.
A surprisingly sunny Portland afternoon. Noisy but pleasant. Chanting. Calls and response. “Fuck Ice!”
No talk of violence or even confrontations. The organizers had not planned any purposeful civil disobedience. The only cops visible were a few directing traffic on nearby streets.
Overall, union based and family friendly—at least at first.
Joy and I were a couple hundred yards from the front of the crowd as it arrived at the ICE building. There was one agent observing from the roof. The crowd was across the street with no barriers, human or otherwise, between.
We were talking to two guys holding their small terrier when with no warning and no provocation, a few agents came onto the lower roof of the building and began firing the gas canisters and shooting off loud flash devices.
Before we even knew what was going on—remember there had been no warning—what we thought was smoke but was gas enveloped us and many people behind us. The stuff travels indiscriminately and really fast.
Joy and I immediately felt the effects of the gas. It’s very painful and disorienting. Fortunately, with some help we were finally able to walk on our own the few blocks to our building.
ICE didn’t target anyone. The agents on the roof did worse than that. They targeted everyone.
To make that more real, think of what that meant for three groups of people at the rally.
Older people who were less mobile: Who knows how they managed to navigate the crowd and move to shelter, trying to outrace the rapidly spreading tear gas. Our 80+ year old neighbor was hit blocks away.
Union people: besides their own struggles with the attack, how different it must have felt from picket lines where rules are so predictable.
The children: Parents brought their kids to teach them something about being a citizen and in a setting a lot more interesting than middle school social studies.
The Oregonian has a video of a little girl sitting on the ground, saying, “Owie, Owie.” That’s sure not the civics lesson her parents hoped she would learn.
There’s ongoing litigation about these Portland ICE tactics. A few days ago a judge ruled that ICE can’t act as arbitrarily as it did on that Saturday.
Good, it’s important to have a victory for freedom of assembly and the First amendment.
But what will linger with me most is the vision of that stunned, crying little girl in a pink sweatshirt covered with butterflies.
They tear gassed our children.
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This is getting ridiculous. First, the claim not too long ago that only “certain sources” show groups of confrontational or unlawful protesters mixed in with peaceful protesters at the ICE facility ignores that even mainstream coverage, including reporting from The Oregonian, shows a more complicated reality than the clean narrative being presented.
What frustrates me about pieces like this is the framing. No one forced parents to bring children, elderly relatives, or pets into the immediate frontage of the federal enforcement facility where the author himself says excessive force and police misconduct have been occurring. That is not a neutral setting. This was not a walk through the Portland Japanese Tea Garden or a cultural event somewhere else in Portland. It was a deliberate choice to enter a location already understood to be occasionally volatile. That “it should not be a volatile place in the first place” is irrelevant.
When adults choose to enter an environment like that, responsibility for who they bring with them matters. I understand the argument that it should not be a volatile location and that people should be able to protest peacefully. But the reality is that protests at this contested federal facility have repeatedly escalated and pretending that risk does not exist does not make it disappear.
The courts are already doing their job sorting out what tactics are lawful or excessive, and that process has been active for the last week. That is where those questions belong. Turning personal exposure to risk into a broader moral indictment of everyone on the other side feels less like journalism and more like advocacy presented as testimony.
If the goal was a family friendly civics lesson, the driveway of an ICE facility where allegations of police brutality and excessive force are already part of the conflict was never the place to bring grandma and the kids. Adults made that decision. Pretending otherwise shifts accountability away from where it belongs.
“They tear gassed our children”. WOW.
Thank you for posting this, Ian, and thank you, Neal, for writing about it. This is simply so outrageous. How do regular people fight back when government goes to such extremes?