(zipper sound) - This is the backpack I usually bring.

And then my megaphone.

This is the second one.

The first one, I had a lot cooler stickers on.

This is a windmill that we use for the flashlights, so, they really don't like this.

But you know, the Antifa terrorist backpack.

(Leilani chuckles) (engine whirs) - [Narrator] This is the ICE facility in South Portland.

For much of 2025, demonstrators gathered here, protesting the president's immigration crackdown as it spread across the Pacific Northwest and the country.

- [Protestors] Immigrants are welcome here.

- [Narrator] The building sits on a corner city block more than a mile from downtown.

Some protests were quiet.

- Look at this person clowning around.

- [Narrator] Others escalated into clashes (explosives bang and pop) all while Trump described the city like this: - It's like living in hell.

Portland, Oregon where it looks like a war zone.

- [Narrator] And threatened to send federal troops.

- There's no mistaking that this is not a war zone, you know?

- [Narrator] We're taking a look at President Trump's ongoing immigration crackdown.

In this first part, how the protests grew into a test of federal power.

(protesters chant) (boom sound) - I think the story of these protests, you can just go back to Election Day.

We had anticipated that there would be protests.

- [Narrator] Portland made national headlines in 2016 when Trump was elected the first time, and there were historic protests in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered.

- [Troy] There were protestors down there ready to go, but they never quite had the numbers.

- [Narrator] In the spring of 2025, the president's large scale immigration enforcement campaign ramped up, following through on his central reelection promise.

- We are delivering mass deportation, and it's happening very fast.

- The basis for what we've seen in Portland with the clashes between law enforcement with protesters, the root of that are people that are very angry with what have felt like very aggressive tactics when it comes to immigration enforcement.

- My name is Jocelyn from Cicero.

They don't have a warrant.

They didn't ask for one.

They forcefully opened the door of the truck, and it was locked.

- In June, one thing the Trump Administration was doing in Portland and in other cities was arresting people at immigration court itself.

The Department of Homeland Security would have the list of people who were showing up to court that day and were making arrests at court, like right after hearings, right outside the building.

- That was in the news and drew a lot of protests, too.

(music) And then Trump took the extraordinary step of sending the federalized National Guard to Los Angeles.

- [Reporter] Tear gas, flash bangs, angry crowds and heavily armed and armored US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents marked a volatile Friday in the heart of Los Angeles during a series of immigration sweeps.

- Donald Trump, without consulting California law enforcement leaders, commandeered 2,000 of our state's National Guard members to deploy on our streets illegally and for no reason.

- As a reporting team, we kind of knew it was a matter of time before we would start to see protestors taking their demonstrations to the doorstep of the ICE facility at the Portland waterfront.

- [Protestor] They're backing up, guys.

They're backing up.

- You would see the uses of force like chemical munitions, tear gas, pepper balls, flash bang style grenades, all used as like dispersal tactics.

But they're also what law enforcement would call like indiscriminate force.

- In June, there was a No Kings protest, and that came at the same time the Trump Administration was announcing that they were ramping up immigration enforcement.

There was a lot of pressure to kind of step up efforts that had already felt pretty aggressive, I think, to a lot of folks.

- No hate, no fear.

Immigrants are welcome here.

- [Conrad] Those protests were really big.

(crowd cheer and chant) - [Narrator] In Portland, most demonstrators gathered downtown.

After that march ended, some joined up with protestors outside the ICE building.

It was the largest crowd to show up there since Trump returned to office.

(crowd shouting) (projectiles pop and fire) - And we know now from court records, too, that in that moment, federal law enforcement were saying that they were prepared to use lethal force on demonstrators that day.

- [Protester] That MPX is in his hands.

- [Protester] Hey, put your weapon down.

Why do you have a live weapon on civilians?

Put your weapon down.

- [Narrator] In court records, Homeland Security officials described injuries sustained during the protests.

- Protests in Portland don't dissolve overnight.

It was happening sort of like stubbornly, intermittently.

But we can tell you just from firsthand experience that July and August were considerably quieter than what we saw in June.

I think it's important to kind of set the stage there that there was this narrative struggle going on.

- [Narrator] Even as things were calming down on the ground, the narrative that Portland was out of control was gaining momentum online.

The city's reputation loomed large nationally.

- Around September, President Donald Trump started really putting a microscope on Portland again.

- What they've done to that place is just like living in hell.

They just burned the place down.

And you know, the shop owners, most of 'em have left, but the few shops that are open, they just use plywood and just like three quarter inch plywood.

- Either the Trump Administration or sympathetic media, the narrative that they were trying to spin, that this was a war ravaged community on fire and violent and in need of federal intervention.

- [Narrator] Some outlets were misrepresenting the situation on the ground using footage from 2020 in news about 2025.

In September, the focus on Portland amplified and city officials got word that federal officers were flooding in.

- On September 27th, that morning, the president put on social media that he was sending troops to Portland.

Calling the city "war ravaged," under attack from domestic terrorists and authorizing what he said was "full force if necessary," but didn't really say what he meant by that.

- There is no insurrection.

There is no threat to national security and there is no need for military troops in our major city.

- [Narrator] The state and the city of Portland filed a lawsuit, challenging the legality of the deployment.

They asked a federal judge to block the troops.

- It's not that Oregon's governors have been resistant to using the National Guard for public safety when it's required it, and Kotek basically said as much, you know.

I would use them if I thought we needed them and we simply don't need them.

And communicating with the president himself, saying local law enforcement has this under control.

Arrests have been made when we've had to make arrests.

Other local leaders said, "We don't need this."

And in fact, it may make the situation more dangerous.

- City of Portland's about 145 square miles.

This is one city block.

And even the events that are happening down there do not rise to the level of attention that they are receiving.

- [Narrator] Like he did in California, Trump wanted to take control of the National Guard and send them into a US city.

That's something that's only been done a handful of times.

- We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military.

Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone.

And I get a call from the liberal governor.

"Sir, please don't come in.

We don't need you."

I said, "Well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War II."

- [Narrator] The Trump Administration said Portland was out of control and local leaders weren't doing anything to stop it.

Some people agreed.

- There's a right to protest, but there's a difference between protesting and a difference between impeding and obstructing.

- For a while when the police weren't here in the beginning it was like, you know, people were doing whatever they want out here.

And if Trump wanted to send out the National Guard, I would welcome him to do that because it was very bad.

Burning flags, right, you know, on the sidewalk, you know, right next to a building, just things like that.

You know, really anti-American behavior.

- [Troy] In late September, early October, we were starting to see agents that were being sent there that weren't there before.

When they see someone in the crowd who steps on federal property, it won't be very long until you see federal law enforcement come out and try to detain that person.

(crowd chattering) (popping sounds) - [Protestor] Get back.

Get back.

- We've seen people get shoved who aren't doing hardly anything.

- [Crowd] Hey, hey, hey.

- [Protestor] ... didn't do anything.

- [Troy] We've seen many times when they've pepper sprayed somebody and then just walked away, somebody who wasn't necessarily appearing to warrant that kind of reaction.

- It was really early that night, maybe not even nine o'clock.

I was standing up at the front, like usual, doing my thing, yelling with Finn.

I'm going.

There's two DHS officers and then a third DHS officer here.

The third guy comes through and I hear him go, "Step back," and I go, "I am exactly where you told me to be."

And he goes, "One, two."

And then on the count of three, he maces me and Finn.

- [Reporter] We witnessed this female protestor get maced in the face by a federal agent for unknown reasons.

She had been yelling at agents, but we didn't see anything physical.

- And I sit down and then I just scream 'cause it's all in my throat and my mouth and going down into my stomach and it burns so bad and I just try to like scream it back out.

And I stopped wearing PPE 'cause it gotten really quiet, so I was just like, there's really no point of like wearing anything.

I'll be okay.

And then I got maced and I was like, oh, okay, cool.

I'm never gonna wear PPE again, and I'm just gonna keep on coming down here and see what else happens.

Because if they're willing to target somebody with no PPE and a young woman, I mean, you know, I look young.

They knew exactly what they were doing.

I'm just a girl out there just protesting and anyone can do it.

I'm not gonna stop until people are treated like human beings.

Yeah.

- [Narrator] Trump stationed hundreds of troops outside of Portland, but a federal judge blocked their deployment.

- For most of October, all of the litigation was focused on this thing called a temporary restraining order and basically, you know, blocking the National Guard from deploying to the building, from even being federalized under the president's control.

We think the law's on our side, the city and the state argued.

There's a lot of harm that could happen if the Guard is deployed.

- [Crowd] Why are you escalating the situation?

Why are you escalating things?

- I arrived an hour or two after the judge had ruled temporarily to block the Trump Administration from sending in the troops.

That suddenly, we started to see just that one night in particular, very aggressive and strange tactics.

It wasn't a particularly unique crowd at the time.

Federal law enforcement, they started pushing protesters out.

They would kind of push the crowds ten yards away, stop, do nothing, let the crowd sort of loudly ask questions.

- What are you doing?

- Wonder what was going on, and then get pushed back ten more yards.

The tear gas was so thick you couldn't even see the pepper balls coming at you.

You could only hear the loud, rapid fire click.

The whole time that this is going on, as we're getting pushed down the street, you could see videographers behind law enforcement.

You could see drones kind of swooping overhead.

I think we saw two.

- Our streets.

- The drone.

You guys needed a drone to figure this out?

- We are peaceful protesters, but we will not be brutalized.

- At the time when we know that the narrative of the city was really in question, it was just very striking to see how much resources they were putting towards content creation in that particular night.

(music) (music) It's an interesting question to think about tactics.

If you listen to federal law enforcement when they testified about what they were seeing in the crowd, it was a lot of people wearing black, covering their faces, people with homemade shields, people in football pads.

There's an image that opponents to the protest wanted to paint of, you know, a battle ready protestor.

- [Narrator] In October, flanked by cameras and influencers, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem visited the ICE building.

- [Reporter] Kristi Noem.

Noem arrived in Portland just hours ago to get an up close look at the ICE facility on - - [Narrator] Days later, Noem led a White House round table on Antifa.

- I was in Portland yesterday and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon and also the mayor.

They're in town and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.

- The Portland politicians are literally willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these Antifa terrorists.

- There's been a pretty irreverent tone in that crowd.

One of the main images of the protest throughout the summer was a guy in a chicken suit who was there at the driveway, opposing ICE on a nightly basis.

Somebody someday dressed up in an inflatable frog costume.

You also started to see a lot of people in various other inflatables and that became a story kind of in and of itself.

- I don't know, it makes me feel like I'm happy to bop around, so, yay.

But it shows that we're peaceful.

- Trump's impression of Portland is that it's this, you know, full of these rioters and people that wanna burn things down.

And so he expected that, you know, he could generate a situation that's going to kind of trick people into taking the bait and burning it down and then getting footage of it and then saying, "This is why we're sending the National Guard."

It's a working strategy to keep the militarization out of Portland and to not empower ICE to go after our neighbors and to go after immigrants in our community.

You know, so silly as it is, it's very serious.

- [Narrator] These questions of whether the protests were out of control domestic terrorism in need of military intervention, or an exercise of First Amendment rights.

- We're gonna have Portland police officers down here.

We're gonna be monitoring what's going on just like we have been.

And we're gonna try to uphold First Amendment rights of everybody involved.

- [Narrator] Would continue to play out in Portland and across the country.

And those competing narratives would go on trial in late October.

While protests outside the ICE building were holding steady, immigration enforcement was escalating.

For many families, the consequences weren't debated or chanted in the streets.

They arrived quietly at home.

- Oh.

- Good morning.

- Good morning, Dad.

Yeah.

- Good morning.

- Que hiciste?

- Nada.

- Just the house.

- Just home.

- [Narrator] In the next episode, we turn from the protests to the communities living at the heart of the crackdown.

(music)