Videos circulating on social media purport to show National Guard troops engaged in altercations with demonstrators in Portland, Oregon. One post from September 29, which features two such videos, claims, “Federal agents begin making arrəsts of Antifa militants in Portland. Law and order is coming to the great state of Oregon.” An X post from RT, a Russian state-owned media outlet, says, “Federal troops in FIERCE stand-off with Antifa.”
On September 22, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating Antifa, an informal coalition of left-wing activists, as a domestic terrorist organization. And on September 27, Trump announced that he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland” from attacks “by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”
However, while the videos are genuine, they do not depict ongoing protests in Portland. Trump has successfully deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.; and Memphis, Tennessee; to support federal law enforcement officers carrying out the administration’s immigration enforcement policies. He attempted to order National Guard troops to Portland—but the city and state sued. (Trump’s attempted deployment of the Guard to Chicago is also currently blocked by courts.) U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut has issued two temporary restraining orders blocking that deployment, and on October 15, she extended those orders for two weeks. On Monday, the 9th Circuit overturned one of those restraining orders, but the National Guard was still not present when the videos were posted to X.
The videos are actually from Portland protests that broke out in response to the death of George Floyd while in police custody in May 2020. The Dispatch Fact Check ran key stills of the videos in question through Google’s reverse image search. The Google search leads back to independent journalist Andy Ngo’s X post on July 26, 2020, portraying the original footage. The videos in the social media posts also appear similar to videos available through Getty Images’ coverage of the 2020 Portland protests, which shows law enforcement agents dressed in camouflage clashing with protesters. By contrast, the latest protests in Portland have been largely peaceful, often featuring demonstrators wearing inflatable costumes.
As protests spread nationwide after Floyd’s death, demonstrators in Portland took to having nightly gatherings outside the Multnomah County Justice Center. In July 2020, as Oregon Public Broadcasting reported at the time, “[T]he Department of Homeland Security sent officers to Portland, Seattle, Gettysburg National Park in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection memo dated July 1 noted that the executive order created a DHS task force to ‘surge’ federal law enforcement resources to protect against potential civil unrest.”
While Trump claimed in September that Portland is “War ravaged,” Immergut wrote in an October 4 ruling that, “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.” She had noted that there were outbreaks of violence in June in response to a presidential memo from Trump announcing his intentions to call the National Guard into service to protect federal agents but “After June 25 … the protests were generally peaceful in nature with only sporadic incidents of violence and disruptive behavior. By late September, these protests typically involved twenty or fewer people.”
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