After more than a month,
federal law enforcement agents are finally leaving Portland.
For weeks, federal agents
have occupied downtown Portland.
They’ve refused accountability,
and brought violence and strife to our community.
Masked, heavily armed, unidentified men have beaten, shot at and teargassed protesters.
They’ve abducted people off the streets, using unmarked vans to take them to unknown locations.
These paramilitaries were sent by President Trump,
despite pleas by local elected officials for them to leave.
But Trump’s order would likely not have been possible
without the legal framework
created by the almost 20-year-old “War on Terror.”
Portland is a story of how that war has come home —
Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization
and been turned against Americans.
Some might say that unidentified federal agents abducting and teargassing protesters
could only happen under a Trump presidency.
But this moment has been a long time in the making.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks,
the U.S. government launched what it called the
Global War on Terrorism.
This was, the government claimed,
a new type of war
that needed new rules and tactics.
Abroad, that meant the U.S. used torture,
assassinations and extraordinary renditions —
that's abducting suspects and sending them to other countries for interrogation.
At home, the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security.
The [Homeland] Security Act of 2002
takes the next critical steps
in defending our country.
The continuing threat of terrorism,
the threat of mass murder on our own soil,
will be met with a unified
effective response.
22 different federal agencies were folded into DHS.
It was the biggest government reorganization in decades.
But it also reset how U.S. policy was made —
especially regarding immigration.
After 9/11, immigration comes to be
seen as the handmaiden of terrorism,
as a path by which America is under threat.
And all of a sudden, immigration becomes
not part of a glorious American history,
but as part of a continuum of American danger.
- he’s been reporting on the War on Terror
for almost all of its duration.
He’s currently writing a book called "Reign of Terror,"
about that war’s influence on U.S. culture.
The term you heard a lot around the 2002,
2003 era when DHS gets set up
is that terrorists have used
America’s open society against it.
What went often unsaid, but got entrenched into the architecture
of American institutions, was that America was going to give up in important
ways on having that kind of open society
for a very long time.
The loss of some civil liberties was felt by certain communities — especially Muslims — right after 9/11,
with widespread surveillance, arrests and deportations.
But by turning immigration into an issue of national security,
the enforcement of immigration policy inside the U.S. would become militarized.
One of the agencies created within DHS was
Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE.
And so where the effects of this go quickly
is to take whomever is in the country in undocumented status
and subject them to really strong crackdowns.
A lot of the sort of terror that you've
seen people on the streets of American cities
experience from federal agents,
that was felt very acutely as early as 15 years ago.
ICE and another DHS agency, Customs and Border Protection,
targeted immigrants and their communities with heavy force.
Now the U.S. Constitution protects Americans from random and arbitrary stops and searches.
But the U.S. government says these protections don’t fully apply at the border,
where CBP is in charge.
But here's the issue:
CBP’s jurisdiction actually spreads 100 miles inside that border.
What’s crazy is that: 200 million Americans
more than two-thirds of the population –
live in this zone.
In other words, agents from a government department set up for the
War on Terror can operate against much of the U.S. population.
The creation of the war on terror,
whether it's the ability to launch
unconstitutional and illegal bulk surveillance,
to detain people without charges on
understandings of them as enemy combatants
and in extreme cases, particularly at the beginning of the War on Terror, to torture people.
All of these authorities that began after 9/11 have never gone away.
The way that executive authorities operate is
that unless they're aggressively checked, they spread.
The War on Terror was designed
from that spread from the start.
By design, it's unlimited.
That spread hasn’t just come in the way heavily armed
law enforcement agents deal with people in the street,
but in the language that U.S. politicians use.
Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization.
Is being burned by essentially
improvised explosive device,
being blinded by lasers,
is this something that typically happens with federal marshals?
I've reported from Iraq. I've reported from Afghanistan,
I've seen from people I've interviewed the effects of IEDs on people,
the devastation that they cause. There's just nothing like this in American protests.
And I think they know that.
I think the point of using this language
is the same purpose that always happens in wars: dehumanization.
The language of counterterrorism has gone from being used against foreign enemies
to immigrants, and now the Republican Party’s domestic opponents.
And that’s one thing that has accelerated under the Trump administration:
The president and his allies frequently ridicule leftist or anti-Trump
or Black Lives Matter protests as organized by “antifa.”
Antifa isn’t an actual organized group - it represents an ideology of
anti-fascism.
That’s what the word "antifa" stands for.
When President Trump announced that he was going to officially declare antifa
a domestic terrorist organization,
a lot of people pointed out that legally he couldn’t really do that.
Ackerman thinks there’s still an important message in his threat:
It showed that our cultural understandings
of these issues have merged together
in a way that makes it extremely conducive for
politicians to crack down on domestic dissent.
This is something that at the beginning of the 9/11 era was seen as paranoia,
and right now we're seeing it manifest.
In fact, DHS documents leaked to The Nation show
the department is trying to tie some activists it considers antifa to foreign organizations.
The use of War on Terror language and the normalization of raids,
abductions, family separations and deportations reached a confluence this summer.
As protests against police brutality and systemic racism took place across the country,
the president signed an executive order
deploying federal agents to ostensibly protect monuments and federal buildings.
And with Portland’s protests focusing on the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse,
paramilitaries from ICE, CBP and other DHS agencies entered the city.
We came out here dressed in T-shirts and doing the hula-hoops and stuff,
and they started gassing us.
So we came back with respirators, they started shooting us.
So we came back with vests and they started aiming for the head.
So we started wearing helmets.
And now they call us terrorists.
It's like a tailor-made process for
an authoritarian like Donald Trump
to come and decide that to now use
these authorities that are available to him.
With the Department of Homeland security, when it gets set up in 2003,
there isn't a sense that its mission has anything to do primarily with protecting federal buildings,
let alone having any kind of a role against protests.
As footage of people being abducted off the streets spread, the Trump administration
threatened to send the same forces to other places, like Chicago and Cleveland.
And despite the protests of local officials,
DHS agents continued to battle protesters for weeks in Portland.
Earlier this week, I called not only the mayor but the governor.
I offered DHS support to help them locally address the situation that's going on in Portland.
And their only response was, "Please pack up and go home."
That's just not going to happen on my watch.
The legitimacy of American institutions is supposed to come from the consent of the governed.
And now we're seeing that consent revoked, seeing it treated as conditional,
seeing it ultimately treated as disposable
when it comes into contrast with the Trump administration's agenda.
Unless this is actively rolled back, this is going to
be a very powerful precedent for future administrations.
In less than 20 years,
the War on Terror’s tools have been honed and developed
by both Republicans and Democrats.
They’ve gone from being seen as needed only for extraordinary threats,
to being deployed on unarmed protesters on America’s streets.
If elected officials don’t change these rules soon,
could we see more of these tools used on Americans?