Staff Reports
I just spent the day in Portland with ICE and watched firsthand what happens when a once-great city is allowed to rot under soft-on-crime leadership and cultural surrender. Benny Johnson’s account of riding along inside the DHS operation was raw and unfiltered — a reality check the national media refuses to show ordinary Americans who want their neighborhoods kept safe.
What greeted Secretary Kristi Noem and the team outside the South Waterfront ICE facility was not the apocalyptic mob the left tries to sell, but it also wasn’t peace — it was an entitled, performative disorder that keeps federal workers and local residents on edge. Costumed pranksters and virtue-signaling protest groups treat the sidewalks like stages while the real work of law enforcement is obstructed and vilified.
Federal courts have already had to step in to sort out who has authority and who’s playing politics with public safety, with a judge blocking a National Guard deployment after finding the administration hadn’t proven a threat to justify it. That ruling doesn’t erase the nightly harassment and the targeted intimidation of ICE personnel; it simply shows the legal hurdles conservatives face when standing up for law and order in liberal-run cities.
True patriots should applaud Noem and the agents who show up to do the hard, messy work of enforcing the law, even when social media influencers and cable TV pundits try to twist image into outrage for clicks. Reporters were kept behind police lines while conservative creators documented the scene up close — and that reality matters to citizens who are tired of one-sided narratives.
Local leaders like Governor Tina Kotek insist there is “no insurrection” and that Portland can handle this itself, but their soft rhetoric hasn’t fixed the problem and only signals permissiveness to radicals who escalate every week. The people who live next to these federal facilities deserve protection, not moral lectures from officials more interested in headlines than results.
If America is to survive as a civilized country, we must stop ceding our streets and institutions to performative protest and restore common-sense enforcement of the law. Support our agents, back leaders who will restore order, and refuse to let liberal elites dismiss the lived experience of working Americans who see the decay every day.
