Three things leapt out at me in Maxine Bernstein’s writeup of today’s press conference (not, of course, in Portland where local journalists could raise questions) about the federal encroachment into Portland.
One: they’re now pointing to what they consider an ongoing “pattern” of local Portland police not assisting them in enforcement actions, rather than saying, as they did originally, that this was about federal property damage during the current wave of protests. Consider this part of the mission creep; if there’s a pattern (going back at least to 2018, they say), then they will exercise or create a right to continue having a federal police presence in Portland.
That is a post-hoc and pre-textual moving of the goal posts that presages nothing democratic.
Two: they are saying with a straight face that stalking a protester to a quiet area, throwing him into an unmarked van, driving him to the courthouse, throwing him in a room, and questioning him was not “a custodial arrest” but merely “a simple engagement”.
That is straight-up authoritarian undermining of the natural meaning of language itself.
Three: they now are pushing back against revelations that these officers are not trained in crowd control by saying they are (quoting Bernstein’s reporting; I don’t know what the actually phrasing was) “highly trained to respond to riot control in detention facilities”. Given that we all know how the federal government has been treating immigrants in its concentration camps for the past three years, there’s nothing reassuring about this argument.
That is the establishment of the idea that they can treat any American in the way that they treat the “other” locked up in immigration camps.