Feds are courting disaster at Portland ICE facility, Mayor Wilson warns

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson has offered a troubling portrait of workplace conditions inside the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building, depicting a high-stress and haphazard environment.

Those types of oversights and mistakes are an accident waiting to happen, he said.

Wilson issued the warning in a Newsweek editorial published Saturday in which he also accused the Trump Administration and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of needlessly courting disaster.

The alarming details and blistering broadside came nearly two weeks after Wilson met with Noem inside the immigration building during her visit to Portland earlier this month.

“The ICE facility was a mess of overflowing dumpsters, loose body armor and crowd control munitions and a broken HVAC air conditioning system that raised both temperatures and tempers in the aging building,” Wilson recalled, contrasting the scene with the “organized and clean” workplace he previously oversaw as a longtime trucking company CEO.

“It is little wonder why Secretary Noem has ignored or denied all regional journalists who have requested access to this facility, opting instead to fly in the least credible, most ideologically compromised hangers-on that MAGA social media has to offer,” the mayor continued.

A Homeland Security spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.

The facility, located two miles south of downtown on South Macadam Avenue, has been a flashpoint between protesters and federal law enforcement over President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown. In late September, Trump announced plans to deploy troops to Portland, claiming the ICE building and the federal officers who work inside it were under siege. Those troops have not yet arrived, their deployment held up by a series of court orders.

Trump’s rhetoric against Portland has escalated significantly since he first began calling out Oregon’s most populous city in 2018. He has supposedly authorized “full force” by federalized National Guard troops and routinely refers to the 145-mile-square city as “war-ravaged” or like “living in hell.”

Noem, following her visit, accused Wilson and Gov. Tina Kotek of covering up terrorism happening in Portland, saying they either “ignore what’s going on or they are helping antifa cover it up.”

In his op-ed, Wilson pushed back against those characterizations and instead cited recent reports of federal agents blasting a nonviolent demonstrator in the face with chemical spray, knocking down an elderly couple and threatening to shoot an ambulance driver.

“Can Noem, or any other administration official, credibly appear before Congress and state that Homeland Security still represents the values of ‘integrity’ and ‘service before self,’ given the dangerous behavior and outright lies of recent days?” the mayor wrote.

Wilson also lamented the fact that Noem during her trip to Portland did not offer any federal support on what the mayor called priorities that both of them likely share, such as curtailing fentanyl distribution and human trafficking.

“Instead, Secretary Noem’s visit was a blindly expensive, taxpayer-funded and ultimately unconvincing whistle-stop tour intended to prop up a ludicrous fable of domestic terrorism and conspiracy,” he said. “The path this administration is on, however, is deadly serious.”

Wilson’s comments in Newsweek mark the second time in recent weeks that the mayor has turned to a national publication to share his thoughts about the Trump administration’s continued focus on Portland. Earlier this month, he took to Time magazine to describe what he said was a “yawning chasm” between social media depictions of the city he leads and reality.