Posts published in September 2025

The Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Macadam Road south of downtown has become one of the best-known and most distinctive buildings in the city. When you drive by, it even looks, from all the people hanging around it, like a tourist destination.

Of course, what you see out there, most days, are protesters.

But look closer: They are various kinds of protesters. Alongside ICE “clients” (for lack of a better word), there are often a few people with clipboards are trying to assist them. And occasionally, not often, you might see an ICE agent or two.

The people are only part of what makes the place so easy to spot. The building is a blocky nondescript office set in a middling industrial district (though a Tesla car dealership is located next door), located between the south waterfront and Johns Landing, but it has three distinctions.

First, the lower areas that usually might include glass or plastic surfaces are covered instead by plywood, giving the sense of a shuttered structure. Second, most of it is cordoned off by heavy fencing. And the lower half of the building is covered with graffiti — mostly aimed at ICE and the Trump Administration and distinctly R-rated.

There’s no apparent way — no entry, even with security control — a citizen seeking simply to visit this federal agency can do so. The inside is shut off from the world.

A plywood-covered door facing Macadam appears barely used. Most ingress comes in through a gated driveway on a side street, where an unmarked doorway leads into the building.

The surest way to draw an ICE response from outside is to block that driveway, even for a minute, though that’s also where immigrants enter the building — and, some protesters said, seem never to come back out, at least not by the way they went in.

When incidents happen here, as they did earlier this month and likely will again, video reports and clips will suggest that what happens there is happening all over Portland. President Donald Trump has mentioned the idea of sending National Guard troops to the city to “wipe them (protester, presumably) all out.” He said at a news conference, “Portland, it’s unbelievable what’s going on in Portland. The destruction of the city. I’m going to look at it now.”

If he did, he would find no ruin or destruction. Travel around Portland this season and you’ll find a city that looks as prosperous and peaceful as it ever has. The downtown area, a couple of miles north of the ICE building, looks as normal as it ever gets.

In 2020, when Trump last sent a federal force into Portland, neighborhoods were filled with tear gas and people were grabbed from off the streets, well away from a then-violent core.

Current protests appear limited to the ICE building and the streets immediately around it, where traffic has been unimpeded. At least one apartment dweller nearby has complained about noise, and a sign was posted on an office building across the street saying, “Please do not vandalize. We are a nonprofit. We are not associated with the ICE building.” The building appears to be unmarked and undamaged.

Messages critical of ICE are all over the ICE block. A chalk sidewalk message says “Remember the taken.” A display on a Tri-Met rail post behind the building contains sheets showing people who have entered the ICE system, apparently in Portland, and evidently remain in custody, somewhere.

People who approach the ICE building side street entrance, in some cases as a requirement of monthly check-ins, are met outside by a few volunteers offering information. Most other people visible on the block are protesters.

But the protesters come in distinct types, most easily grouped as “day” and “night.”

On Monday mornings since January, an interdenominational religious group organized in part by local Quakers stands on the sidewalk in front of the building and holds up protesting signs. They are quiet — most of the sound comes from the honking of passersby car horns, generally in support of the protesters — and peaceful; most are seniors. About 30 were there this week; the group’s mailing list was said to include 60 people. Around noon, they packed up their signs and later other groups, at least one of them Buddhist, took their place. Most of the protesters come from a variety of religious groups.

People there say the scene is different at night, when a smaller and more hard-edged group — some of the day-timers called them “rowdies” — show up. They make noise, have left graffiti, and have thrown objects. In response, ICE troops, whose appearance usually is limited in the day, were said to sometimes emerge with tear gas. The usual number of people showing up at night, according to the daytime regulars, is small, usually fewer than two dozen.

One of the day protesters, Joe Snyder of Portland, said he doubted “we need a lot of federal troops for 15 or 20 people.”

Day or night, there’s little personal contact between the people inside the building and those outside. It’s become a routine. And none of the groups in or around the building seem entirely comfortable with the others.

Could that change? Snyder told about one day when ICE officers — appearing on the roof of the building — and both types of protesters were present, and conditions grew tense. Then some of the religious protesters started singing and walking around the area. The tension eased. After a time, the “rowdies” relaxed, and so did the ICE officers.

The chasms are large, but they might be breached. If they are, that’s not likely to happen by an overwhelming show of force.

This column first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

If Oregon has a “brand,” protection of its environment has to be integral to it. Probably no political figure in the state’s history more represents it to the rest of the world than former Republican Gov. Tom McCall, the champion of pioneering Oregon laws that kept beaches publicly owned, charged deposits on bottles and cans to reduce litter and blocked cities from sprawling.

More than for anything else, McCall is known for his crusades — not always perfect but often effective — to protect the natural condition of the state. While other western states, including Idaho and Wyoming, have been the scene of hard-fought contests over preservation against development and use, Oregon for generations has weighed in clearly on the environmental preservation side.

The Trump administration has begun weighing in on the other side, and Oregon likely will be putting a lot of civic effort into maintaining its course. While some efforts from the national capital — such as Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s call for mass selloff of federal lands — have hit speed bumps, others are underway.

The argument in favor of that new direction, implicit or explicit, will involve expansion of resource industries and the jobs that have been attached to them. Forest industries were for generations the bedrock of the Oregon economy, supplying much of its wealth and many of its jobs.

It is a smaller component today. The state’s forest sector today takes in about 62,000 direct jobs, a large number but just about 3% of jobs overall. The economic  impact of wood products now is less than that: By one recent estimate, the subcategory of “logging” — as opposed to manufacturing wood products, work in nurseries and associated work — accounts for 5,736 jobs.

The number of Oregon mill jobs fell by about 500 over the last year, and one reason given for that was a lack of timber supply. But specific types of timber would be needed to supply the more specialized mills of today: Not just any stock would do. Even if more forests were opened to cutting, the number couldn’t increase dramatically soon, because a large economic infrastructure would have to be built up to support it. And even if those problems could be solved, the weak demand for timber and in recent years difficulties finding an adequate work force would remain as major obstacles.

Whatever the rationale, the pressure against preservation from the nation’s capital is clear and accelerating.

The most dramatic recent instance is the Trump administration’s published intent to scale back — exactly how much is unclear — the roadless rule from 2001 affecting vast stretches of forested land in backcountry areas nationwide, including in Oregon. The Sierra Club said the change “threatens nearly 58 million acres of undeveloped backcountry forestland, jeopardizing crucial drinking water sources for communities across the nation”

That includes 2 million acres of land now protected from development in Oregon — a big chunk of the 14.5 million acres in the 11 national forests in the state, and some of the most prized recreational areas.

That follows up on a pair of presidential executive orders earlier this year aimed at increasing timber production on national lands and bypassing rules that protect critical wildlife habitat.

There’s much more from the White House affecting the Northwest specifically, such as the abrupt reversal of a long-negotiated deal — the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement — to restore salmon runs along the Snake River.

More narrowly, the Friends of the Columbia Gorge said last month that “The Trump administration’s FY26 budget proposes redirecting roughly $387 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund’s (LWCF) federal land acquisition budget to fund “deferred maintenance” — that is, repairs to trails, visitor centers, and infrastructure, in addition to logging — directly contradicting the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA) that President Trump himself signed into law in 2020.”

Taken together, this along with still more examples amounts to a massive reversal of national policy developed over decades and in some cases even in the first Trump Administration. It’s easy to lose track of the larger developing picture amid the wash of daily news.

Resistance to it in the Northwest is just beginning to develop. But it will emerge visibly soon.

In addition to a supportive political environment, Oregon has an especially large number of environmental action groups (owing in part to the large and often influential Friends network) but much of their activity — the Oregon Environmental Council is a good example — has been focused on state government activity, where reception to their efforts has been relatively (albeit not always) positive.

Expect the focus to change to the national level, alliances to shift, and legal and political conflict to ramp upward, in the next few months if not weeks. The environment is about to become a flashpoint in Oregon in a way it hasn’t been in decades.

This column first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.