{"id":445678,"date":"2026-02-03T01:54:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T01:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/445678\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T01:54:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T01:54:12","slug":"us-judge-weighs-restrictions-on-federal-agents-use-of-force-after-portland-ice-protests-portland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/445678\/","title":{"rendered":"US judge weighs restrictions on federal agents\u2019 use of force after Portland ICE protests | Portland"},"content":{"rendered":"

A judge is considering temporarily restricting federal officers\u2019 ability to use of force during protests in Portland<\/a>, Oregon, after agents used teargas on a crowd that included children during a protest over the weekend.<\/p>\n

Thousands of protesters gathered outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)<\/a> facility on Saturday in what Keith Wilson, the city\u2019s mayor, described as a peaceful demonstration \u201cwhere the vast majority of those present violated no laws, made no threat and posed no danger\u201d to federal agents.<\/p>\n

The protest was part of a wave of demonstrations across the US in response to the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown and the killings of two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents in Minneapolis. In Portland, agents used teargas, pepper balls and rubber bullets on the crowd outside the South Waterfront facility.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re teargassing children. They\u2019re teargassing elderly people. They\u2019re teargassing families,\u201d attorney Matthew Borden said during a hearing on Monday, according to Oregon Live<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Monday\u2019s hearing was part of an ongoing court case that began in November when the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of protesters and journalists. The suit aimed \u201cto stop the Trump Administrations\u2019 retaliatory violence \u2026 that has been a sustained feature of the federal officers\u2019 activities at the Portland ICE building\u201d, the ACLU of Oregon said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At Saturday\u2019s demonstration, one witness said she was about 100 yards (91 metres) from the ICE building when \u201cwhat looked like two guys with rocket launchers\u201d started dousing the crowd with gas. One of the teargas canisters broke the window of an apartment, Oregon Live reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be among parents frantically trying to tend to little children in strollers, people using motorized carts trying to navigate as the rest of us staggered in retreat, unsure of how to get to safety, was terrifying,\u201d Erin Hoover Barnett wrote in an email to the outlet.<\/p>\n

In a statement after the incident, the city\u2019s mayor urged ICE agents to leave the city and said: \u201cThrough your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.\u201d<\/p>\n

During another demonstration on Sunday, protesters marched from city hall to the ICE building where they were met with chemical munitions fired by federal officers.<\/p>\n

The ACLU of Oregon<\/a> and other attorneys pointed to these events in legal filings submitted to the court over the weekend as part of the ongoing case.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter a small group of individuals stood in the driveway of the Portland ICE Building, Defendant DHS officers emerged deploying flash bangs, detonating large volumes of tear gas at the front and toward the back of the crowd, and shooting munitions from the lower roof down into the crowd,\u201d one filing said, adding that the violence followed \u201ca pattern of retaliatory force\u201d.<\/p>\n

The filings included declarations from witnesses to the weekend\u2019s protests. One demonstrator said: \u201cIt seemed as though the federal agents wanted to hurt the people protesting because they continued to throw teargas at us when we were trying to get away.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US district judge Michael H Simon said he will rule on whether to issue a temporary restraining order on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Teargas has often been used in Portland protests. In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, the Portland Police Department (PPD) made use of an excessive amount of the toxic chemical , raising concerns about the effects on health. A subsequent investigation on a June 2020 incident<\/a> concluded that the city\u2019s downtown was blanketed with gas at more than 50 times the level federal regulators consider \u201cimmediately dangerous to life or health\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press contributed reporting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A judge is considering temporarily restricting federal officers\u2019 ability to use of force during protests in Portland, Oregon,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-445678","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}