Jonathan Blitzer writes:

In early June, after the killing of George Floyd, when tens of thousands of mostly peaceful demonstrators assembled in cities across the country to protest police brutality, the Department of Homeland Security sent hundreds of its agents to patrol the crowds. They cleared space for a Presidential photo op in front of St. John’s Church, in Washington, D.C., by forcibly removing demonstrators, and in New York City they reportedly made at least one arrest at gunpoint. The legal rationale for their being on the scene was a statute from 2002 that gave them broad authority to protect federal property and personnel. This mandate sounded just vague enough to escape mainstream notice at the time, when police officers were being filmed tear-gassing and beating protesters. But a pressing question remains, which the D.H.S. leadership can’t easily answer: What are agents from Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing in the streets of U.S. cities nowhere near the border, policing citizens who have broken no laws?

Earlier this month, D.H.S. went further, sending swat teams from C.B.P. to Portland, Oregon, to quell ongoing protests in front of a federal building downtown. “We do not want you here,” the state’s Democratic governor, Kate Brown, said that she told D.H.S. officials when she learned of their plans. “It provokes confrontation to have federal troops on the streets.” Chad Wolf, the acting head of the department, ignored her, and held what a former official described to me as a “pep rally” with agents before deploying more of them to the city. In a statement, Wolf said, “The city of Portland has been under siege for forty-seven straight days by a violent mob, while local political leaders refuse to restore order.” He added, a few days later, as opposition to the D.H.S. presence grew, “we will not retreat.”

By mid-July, federal authorities had made about forty arrests in Portland, and there were news reports and video footage of agents beating protesters, including a fifty-three-year-old Navy veteran, who was left with a shattered hand. In a widely circulated video, two agents dressed in military camouflage were shown pulling a protester into an unmarked gray minivan. “The nightly disturbances in Portland were not national news until now,” a former D.H.S. official told me. “Department leadership is putting officers in a very difficult position by not explaining what they’re doing and why. If this mission was supposed to be about assisting Federal Protective Services”—the agency in charge of guarding federal property—“then what are they doing pulling people into minivans rented from the Portland airport? How does protecting federal property become pepper spraying and batoning people?” [Continue reading…]