...
By Keith Wilson
Mayor, Portland
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
On Saturday, a daytime labor union demonstration numbering in the thousands peacefully marched past Portland's controversial ICE facility. Federal agents responded with heavy waves of chemical munitions. Upwards of a thousand people may have felt the effects, which hospitalized not just protestors but medically vulnerable people in the surrounding apartments. With cold weather and little wind to disperse the gas, symptoms were reported as far as a mile away.
We see ourselves in pictures and videos of choking union families, just as we see ourselves in images of Renée Good, her glove compartment overflowing with stuffed animals. We see ourselves in footage of Alex Pretti attempting to help a woman to her feet in the final moments before his life ended. We see our own children in Saturday’s video of a little girl in a pink sweatshirt dotted with butterflies sobbing as adults desperately try to wash crowd-control munitions out of her eyes.
To my fellow mayors: the Trump administration is attempting to twist our arms. In one breath, they lie about the tinderbox they’ve lit, and in the next, they demand we crack down on demonstrations and capitulate on our community values. They forget the job of a mayor isn’t to control our populace, but to represent them.
Read More on Opinion
...
In response to Saturday’s events, I wrote the following:
To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame. To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children. Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets.... Our nation will never accept a federal presence where agents wield deadly force against the very people they are sworn to serve.
I ask that every mayor, in every major city, call for ICE resignations. I also ask that my fellow mayors stay the course. We’ve already accomplished a great deal together by centering peace, purpose and the law. Cities have prevailed in court, over and over. The National Guard has left our communities, and we’ve exposed the administration’s justifications for invoking the Insurrection Act as nonsense.
Stay the course. Keep our coalitions together. Know that public frustration with the limitations of our offices will continue to invite provocateurs and opportunists. They’ll insist that local police can impede or arrest federal officers at will, or that wielding civil land use laws and implementing fines can effectively remove ICE from our communities.
There is something quintessentially American about these demands. Like my fellow mayors, I, too, have wished that we could find a loophole or dust off a forgotten law. Portland’s attorneys have certainly looked. We all want to meet the moment, and that means using every tool we can. After all, in the story of David vs. Goliath, David is supposed to win in the end.
That said, we don’t need to pull a legal rabbit out of a hat to win. We need only stay the course. Public support for the administration is in tatters, even among many of its closest ideological allies. Activism centered on peace and purpose has delivered legal victories that lashing out and inflicting harm in our community would only undermine. We want every voter to see proud communities standing up to help their neighbors and doing the right thing on the streets, and we want every voter to support them.
We know full well that every new misstep and outrage from the federal government will fuel greater public pressure, including popular pushes to violate the law. Let me be clear to my fellow mayors: the law is on our side, and if we stick to the law, midterm momentum will be on our side as well.
Come January 2027, imagine what we can do with a newly empowered Congress. We can pursue justice and accountability for the wrongs and violence our neighborhoods have faced. We can set budget priorities that center community and affordability, rather than overreach and oppression. Make this win possible by staying the course, keeping our coalitions intact and working together for the future of our cities.
Keith WIlson is the mayor of Portland, Oregon.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines