By Victor Davis Hanson
Portland’s left-wing mobs and officials are waging a neo-Confederate-style rebellion—defying federal law, protecting illegal aliens, and turning the city into a sanctuary for anarchy.
In blue cities across America—Portland, Oregon, especially—often violent protesters now seek to surround ICE facilities to stop federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens.
Some 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. during the Biden years—illegally and thus without criminal or health checks.
Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such a flagrant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the legal enforcement of the law as they were earlier in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.
Much less did they care about the consequences of sending millions of foreign nationals into cities and counties where they swamped social services, spiked crime, and flooded emergency rooms and schools.
ICE has repeatedly presented data that show in its first rounds of deportations, it is concentrating on removing either criminal illegal aliens or those who have already been processed with deportation orders, somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of all current apprehensions.
No matter.
Left-wing protesters are swarming ICE headquarters in Portland to violently oppose all deportations, even those of known criminals and those who have already exhausted efforts to remain here illegally
Why? The Democratic Party apparat knows that the public wants both secure borders and deportations of illegal aliens. Indeed, in part, it lost an election by its open-borders advocacy.
But Democrat officials feel that if street thugs like Antifa can surround and besiege ICE facilities in Portland, Oregon, then deportations will stop. Then, a de facto amnesty will follow for millions who entered the U.S. illegally—and will soon become Democratic constituents.
As a result, they do not fully enforce the law when thugs attack federal law enforcement. Antifa and its spin-off groups favor the night, when they try to block all entries and exits of ICE vehicles and personnel, and can commit their violence with greater anonymity.
The masked rioters assault anyone in their way. They count on exemption from punishment for committing violence against federal officers through the goodwill or indifference of kindred local and state officials who hate the Trump administration more than they respect the law. An Orwellian scenario follows in which federal officers are attacked by Antifa, which in turn counts on the non-intervention of local police.
Summed up: the city of Portland’s armed officers are in a de facto proxy war with their federal counterparts—in our version of something out of 1860, on the eve of a real civil war.
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and Oregon Governor Tina Kotek feel their constituents want open borders and thus should have the right in their own city and state to do as they please—and federal law be damned.
But by doing so, both the Democrat Party officialdom and the street armies of Antifa are on the proverbial wrong side of history.
America for almost 200 years has already decided, in formal law and court rulings, that no local or state entity can disrupt the enforcement of federal laws or usurp Washington’s powers. To do so with impunity would unravel the American nation in short order.
We know that from our own violent history. Andrew Jackson, in 1832, like Trump, threatened to send troops to stop South Carolina’s nullification of federal tariff laws.
America fought a Civil War over Confederate states’ efforts to ignore federal law and confiscate or occupy federal property within their state jurisdictions.
As late as 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace thought he could nullify federal law by using his state guard to deny black students’ enrollment in the University of Alabama—until the Kennedy administration federalized all state troopers and sent in additional federal troops.
So what we are witnessing in Portland—and elsewhere—is a neo-Confederate attempt to supersede federal law and, in reactionary fashion, invoke states’ and cities’ rights.
Oregon and Portland believe that they are more moral than the federal government and thus have a natural right to side with street mobs by both not enforcing their own laws against Antifa violence and ignoring the innate civil rights of ICE personnel.
The latter are denied freedom of movement, association, and the ability to fulfill their job duties by what has turned out to be a near city-sanctioned siege of their facilities.
The Democrats are fine with all this. They think the violence against ICE will be portrayed daily as general chaos by their allied media. Thus, the proverbial people who keep clear of the siege and its detritus will simply want all the bother to go away—and supposedly blame those enforcing, not breaking, the law. In sum, the Democratic Party is the official face of the left. Antifa provides the street shock troops, and the media serves as its propaganda arm.
So, the left-wing logic is to allow the violence and siege to continue in a “safe space” for Antifa. A strapped ICE will supposedly eventually shut down operations and move on. And any violence that occurs can be chalked up to Trump’s federal government “baiting” Portlanders.
The reigning moralistic assumption is that ceding territory to terrorists, not enforcing local and state laws, and nullifying federal statutes are all small prices to pay for the larger projection of chaos and violence that can be blamed on Trump.
Such thinking entails utter indifference to any Portlanders who live near the siege and are nightly subjected to constant disruptions, harassment, and occasional violence. Do these law-abiding residents have fewer civil rights than the lawbreaking armies of the night?
contrast, the use of federal troops to stop the siege of ICE facilities will remind the violent protesters of the left that their neo-Confederate tactics will not work, but instead subject them to arrest and federal indictments
Bringing in federal forces to uphold the law will also protect the rights of ICE personnel and neighborhood residents to live in peace and security and have their constitutional protections secured. Not all American citizens are Portlanders, but all Portland citizens are Americans.
In other words, both Antifa and the appeasing Oregon officials are our new neo-Confederate secessionists. They feel that their states are now autonomous entities that are still entitled to federal money but not obligated to follow federal laws.
Portland also reminds us of the recent utter incoherence of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. On the one hand, she pleads for federal dollars to restore her city’s burned-out neighborhoods due to her own incompetence and neglect, while on the other hand actively obstructs the federal government from enforcing immigration laws in her own city.
For a party that has been quick to shout “insurrection,” it is ironic that Democrats and their useful, though violent, Antifa insurrectionists are in rebellion against the federal government and its agents.
It is hard to know which is worse—the Antifa thug who nightly tries to injure a federal officer, or the sanctimonious neo-Confederate official who empowers him to keep trying?
About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World
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