Kristi Noem's Fool's Errand
There may be no instance in which the gap between reality and the regime's narrative is as vast as it is in Portland, Oregon.
Kristi Noem, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and cosplay aficionado, made a visit this week to Portland, Oregon — a city that her boss has disparaged and mischaracterized for years. She was dispatched to prop up his most recent delusion — that Portland is a “war zone,” a “city on fire,” a “hell hole” — but she failed miserably.
The reason she failed is that there is no war and no war zone. There are no fires, except in some in the wood burning pizza ovens of certain restaurants. The most hellish thing about Portland these days is when the food co-op runs out of locally sourced chanterelles.
Social media has been full of photos taunting the so-called president with Portland’s natural beauty and glorious recent spell of weather. It’s not a difficult task. It’s a beautiful place with a long history of being laid back and progressive — traits that orange guy in D.C. despises.
There’s literally one city block, fairly removed from most of the city, where there have been mostly peaceful protests against ICE. The protests have consisted largely of a few people carrying signs and occasionally making some noise. With the exception of a few arrests handled by local law enforcement, the protests are nothing out of the ordinary.
There have been costumed characters. There has been a protest high tea, complete with formal tea service, in front of ICE headquarters. There’s been the omnipresent guy in the duck onesie. Let’s not forget the guy in the inflatable frog suit. (ICE’s response to ward off this evil, scary airbag amphibian? They sprayed pepper spray into his vent hole.)
Since Trump’s mandate to deport 3,000 people a week, there have been a handful of incidents that qualify as violence, some of which have been instigated by ICE agents themselves — i.e., spraying people in the eyes with pepper spray because they were shouting at them, shooting rubber bullets, tossing tear gas canisters into the crowd. They’ve even managed to pepper spray an 86-year-old woman for simply standing there. (With this regime, the word “violent” has been doing some pretty heavy lifting.)
Into the midst of all of this walks Kristi Noem, cosplaying her tough guy image to the max but avoiding any direct connection with what’s truly going on in Portland as a whole. She didn’t want her predetermined conclusions to be challenged in any way. Right-wing podcasters and influencers were allowed to accompany Noem during her visit, but members of local media were not. She even arrived into Portland safely sequestered in a private airport terminal, unable to get a glimpse of the recent magnificent renovation of the main airport terminal.
Her view from the ICE headquarters allowed her to put eyes on the edge of one section of the Interstate (I-5) to the west and The Old Spaghetti Factory chain restaurant to the east — not what anyone would consider a thorough or even representative view of Portland. The ICE facility is located at one of the lowest points in the city (about 25 feet above sea level) so, even on the roof, Noem didn’t have a sightline into anything other than the sides of the buildings that surrounded her — hardly a vantage point that would provide her with even the most basic ability to understand how minuscule the scope of the protests are in relation to the rest of the city and region.
Nevertheless, Noem got her made-for-TV footage, ominously shot from the street below, of her peering from the roof of the ICE building. She wasted no time hopping onto Fox “News” that evening to continue her boss’s insulting lie-filled narrative:
“One of the things I’ve been dealing with all day here in Portland is a bunch of pansies who were elected into political office who won’t make a decision to keep their citizens safe.”
— Kristi Noem, Oct. 7, Fox News (Jessie Watters show)
She continued her prevarication when she returned to D.C.:
Speaking Wednesday at a White House roundtable, Noem once again told the president that the city she observed from the ICE facility, where a person in a chicken suit and a handful of other people stood behind police barricades watching her on the building rooftop, needed intervention.
“I was in Portland yesterday and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon and the mayor there in town,” Noem said. “They are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”
— OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting), Oct. 8, 2025
These are not the words and actions of someone who is interested in working toward a common goal of reducing the supposed threats to her beloved ICE goons. This is someone who is intent on escalating the situation in any way she can in order to make the situation worse than it is so that she could provide her boss with an excuse to send in troops. Her primary goal is to continue Trump’s narrative of the “city on fire,” of the “war zone.”
Like so many in this regime, she’s speaking to an audience of one: the delusional blob who sits in the Oval Office.
On the one hand, Noem and the regime she represents are attempting to present their incursion into U.S. cities as a safety measure. On the other hand, they’re doing everything they can to inflame the situation. They’re eager to incite a violent response so that the Golfer-In-Chief can use the Insurrection Act to justify taking over “blue” U.S. cities militarily. As always, Robert Reich brings his usual clarity to the insurrection issue:
It’s crystal clear that Noem’s visit to Portland was in no way intended to collaborate with city officials to address an issue of mutual concern. It was a ham-fisted attempt to badger and intimidate and embarrass the city and state officials who have had the very small number of illegal incidents well under control using local resources.
The regime’s focus seems to be as much on preventing constitutionally protected protest as it is on solving any real or imagined criminal activity.
You can be forgiven if you have lost track why ICE is present in these cities in the first place, because the specter of military troops patrolling U.S. cities entirely overshadows their supposed reason for being there. DHS’s stated premise was to arrest the “worst of the worst” of undocumented immigrants — gang members, rapists, murderers. What we’ve witnessed, however, is heavily armed, masked ICE thugs rounding up farm workers, separating families, tearing apart communities, imprisoning immigrants who are legally showing up for their immigration hearings, mistakenly (or perhaps intentionally) arresting U.S. citizens.
It’s an understatement to say that the ICE approach to immigration enforcement and deportation in Portland and elsewhere is not at all commensurate with the actual number of criminal undocumented immigrants. Similarly, the proposed response to the protests — augmenting the ICE presence by sending in National Guard troops — is in no way commensurate with the handful of illegal incidents that are already being managed by local law enforcement.
As of this writing, we’re awaiting a ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit as to whether the deployment of National Guard troops in Portland will be allowed. There has already been a ruling in a similar case in federal court in Chicago preventing the deployment of National Guard troops in that city, at least temporarily.
It’s pretty clear that, no matter which way the courts rule in any of these cities, the Trump regime’s approach to immigration enforcement will continue to be one with an abundance of overzealous and outsized brute force and a complete lack of humanity.