Kristi Noem's Visit To Portland

According to KATU,

After meeting with Portland Mayor Keith Wilson on Tuesday during a visit to Portland, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Fox News that if the mayor did not meet some of her demands for more security at the ICE facility “we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers” to the city.

Noem’s remarks to Fox's host Jesse Watters contrasted with a more muted statement from Wilson on Tuesday evening that did not mention any ultimatum issued by the secretary.

“I continue to maintain that the tactics used by federal agents at the ICE facility are troubling and likely unconstitutional,” Wilson said. “In terms of recent rhetoric, we still do not know what ‘Full Force’ against Portland means, or how the administration plans to use our city as a military ‘training ground.’ Because of these deeply concerning situational unknowns, I intend to explore options to protect our community and our right to free expression.”

Portland Mayor Wilson comes from a very similar background to his predecessor Ted Wheeler, from a wealthy Oregon family, who was mayor from 2017 to early this year. His father was was executive vice president at Willamette Industries, a Fortune 500 lumber company formed in 1967, through merger of other Wheeler family interests. For several years, he presided over both right- and left-wing ptotests and riots. Wilson himself runs his family's trucking business, which he took over from his father, in addition to being mayor. Wilson seems just as unable to deal with Antifa and similar groups.

Of yesterday's meeting, Secretary Noem said on Jesse Watters's show last night,

“Just met with the mayor, and I’m so extremely disappointed. He’s continuing to play politics, did not commit to any of those promises and said that he’d give me an answer by tomorrow, and I’m hopeful that he will,” Noem told Watters. “What I told him is that if he did not follow through on some of these security measures for our officers [that] we were going to cover him up with more federal resources. And that we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers here so that the people of Portland could have some safety.”

The YouTube report from The National Desk embedded at the top of this post suggests that there seem to have been changes, however reluctant and minimal, since Noem's visit. Reporter Victor Park said,

There are at least a dozen Portland police officers who have the one-block area surrounding the ICE facility blocked off. We are also seeing far less protesters than we have seen in months. Earlier tonight, Police Chief Bob Day met with Secretary Noem, and Chief Day says that the envioronment and behavior outside the ICE facility needs to change.

Just this morning, I found a lengthy and detailed report from Victoria Taft on actual conditions in the several-block area surrounding the ICE headquarters. It makes plain that Portland politicians, abetted by media, have been seriously minimizing what's been taking place. She embeds this X video documenting her experience trying to film the encampment there:

Besides the filth of the "mutual aid" station, which is illegally blocking the sidewalk (resupplied from their nearby storage unit) and then laughably being told I couldn't film there, here's my biggest shock at the #Portland #ICE facility. When confronted by some umbrella… pic.twitter.com/JDT08NaydW

— Victoria Taft, The Adult in the Room, FITF Squad (@VictoriaTaft) October 7, 2025

She notes in particular that the area controlled by the protesters is much larger than the one block surrounding the ICE building normally cited, and the protesters are much better organized:

My friend HunnyBadgerMom (her X handle), C.K. Bouferrache, tells me that Antifa works in shifts. They go back to their safe house nearby, which is well known, and get a little R&R before they start their next shift at night, where the violence takes place. I caught the shift change in a photo.

So that makes block number three overtaken by this group.

. . . Since Antifa marches to their daily activities from their assembly spot at a nearby park, that makes at least four blocks they have taken over. And then there's the ICE facility itself. It is a fortress, but easily surrounded. Antifa has taken positions in front of it, across the street from it, and down the block. This makes the zone at least a five-block takeover at times.

. . . How many blocks can a terrorist group take over before the city begins to send the police to keep the peace? Trick question. The answer is: When President Donald Trump orders the National Guard to protect ICE agents, forcing the local cops to show up.

The crazies out on the streets in the middle of the day provide one of the multi-pronged Antifa distractions. The people in this bunch looked like they were mentally ill, on drugs, or under the influence of some other mind-altering belief system. Nighttime is when this place gets more dangerous.

For years, the Portland Police ignored the Antifa threats and assaults, and complaints by Portland independent media. Antifa chooses reporters to target because they want to rule the streets without being unmasked.

At least up to Noem's visit, there seems to have been a tacit agreement between Antifa and the police to pretend the takeover wasn't really happening:

Craig Dobson, an assistant chief with the Portland Police Bureau, stated the protests have been persistent, though never so out-of-control that local officers couldn’t respond.

“Portland is not under siege, war-ravaged, or otherwise a particularly violent or unruly major city,” Dobson wrote in a Sept. 28 signed declaration. “In fact, on any given weekend, the nightlife in Portland’s entertainment district has warranted greater PPB resources than the small, nightly protests in front of the ICE facility.”

The police bureau set up a dedicated team when the protests against Trump’s deportation plans started appearing regularly outside the ICE offices on South Macadam Avenue. The bureau made 25 arrests from June 11 to June 25, Dobson wrote. The protests receded enough, Dobson wrote, that police deactivated the dedicated team and made no further arrests until late September. The latest arrests by Portland police occurred when protests flared the same day Trump called-up the Oregon guard.

But the protests are neither small nor nightly. As Victoria Taft put it, there's a clown show in the daytime, with curious tourists and Trump supporters part of the crowd, but things turn dangerous at night. The whole routine is organized and scripted, with gathering points and safe houses. But the official line continues to be that the problems all took place last June, and since then, things have been peaceful. After Noem's visit,

[PPB Chief Bob] Day acknowledged the past "disturbances" at the ICE facility, singling out events in June for a "significant amount of damage committed against the building and variety of assaults," but said over the past few months, there has been a "significant decrease in violent activity." He and Noem did not discuss troop deployments, he said.

Day alluded to briefly discussing with Noem "the need for a change in the environment and a change in behavior down there," with the "energy level going up over the past 10 days."

What nobody in Oregon seema to acknowledge so far is that the protests are well-organized and well-funded, they're here to stay, and it's almost as though there's a tacit agreement with the wealthy, old-money politicians that they can operate at will as long as they leave the bourgeoisie alone. This really needs serious investigating. Maybe Noem's visit will raise visibility.