Thanks, Trump: ICE Just Gassed a Public School Into Submission
PORTLAND, Ore. — Donald Trump’s forces have tear gassed a public school into submission. Or at least into fleeing its longtime campus.
The local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) complex in Portland has become a near-nightly flashpoint this summer for local activists demonstrating against the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign — marked by masked agents snatching law-abiding non-citizens from court houses; Home Depot parking lots; garment factories; taco trucks; and city streets.
By day, protester signs, directed at passersby, carry messages like: “You’re not safe. You’re next.” After dark, demonstrators here square off with federal agents, in a cat-and-mouse conflict that often begins with protesters taunting ICE agents with verbal tirades, leading federal riot cops to respond with a disproportionate show of force.
Agents in gas masks burst out of a gated driveway amid curtains of green smoke and other crowd-control munitions. Protesters tell of agents raining pepper-ball rounds down on them from the rooftop of the facility. The demonstrators have been broadly nonviolent — although some agitators have been arrested and brought up on both minor and serious charges.
The habitual deployment of chemical irritants by federal agents has created fear in the neighborhood. Locals have posted biohazard warning signs: “This area has been sprayed with TEAR GAS & TOXIC CHEMICALS.”
As a new academic year approaches, a nearby public school has been forced to abandon its longtime campus, citing threats to student health. “We didn’t know if there are new gases being used. We didn’t even know how to identify them,” says the school’s interim executive director, Laura Cartwright, who committed to an “emergency move” amid cratering enrollment. “If we would have stayed, we might have lost our school because of people’s concerns around safety.”
The publicly funded Cottonwood School is a charter school focused on “civics and science,” serving students from kindergarten to eighth grade. Its now-former campus sits south of downtown, near the Willamette River, amid a jumble of apartments and warehouses, with a Tesla dealership squeezed in for good measure.
The ICE facility sits half a block away from the school, across old trolley tracks. The multi-story concrete complex resembles a minimum-security prison. Because of protests, the windows of its bottom two floors have been up-armored with plywood. The building is tagged with graffiti, including incendiary messages like “ICE=Gestapo.”
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When this reporter visited the area in late June, a laminated message hung on the fence of the Cottonwood School play area denouncing the “harm being inflicted on our neighbors, ecosystem, students and school.” It called on the feds to “cease the deployment of ‘less than lethal’ weapons,” including tear gas, “‘green’ gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets reported near our campus.”
The makeup and potential health impacts of the chemical munitions used by ICE in the neighborhood has not been disclosed. ICE did not respond on the record for this story, including to questions about its crowd-control arsenal. Anti-ICE activists have begun cataloging canisters collected from the streets outside the facility, posting pictures of munitions labeled “CS,” or tear gas; “Green Smoke”; and “Orange Smoke.” (A demonstrator on the scene also showed this reporter a spent canister of Green Smoke.)
In July, Portland’s city government disclosed it has received reports of “chemical munitions” being used against protestors, including “pepper balls, pepper spray, and… smoke grenades.” It described steps it has taken to prevent ICE’s chemical pollution from entering local waterways. (The city’s own police have been so trigger-happy firing chemical munitions against protesters that the bureau got written up by war crimes investigators.)
Cartwright described for Rolling Stone a years-long struggle to keep kids safe at school. “Munitions and tear gas — we aren’t new to this,” she says. “We’d been next to the ICE building the whole time.” She emphasized that the school has coexisted “harmoniously with the protesters,” but adds: “Our issue is the chemical weapons being used against them that were impacting our space.”
When the latest round of anti-ICE demonstrations kicked up in June, school officials thought they could ride it out with familiar due-dilligence, sweeping the school yard for any stray munitions. “We can’t have children picking up a plastic tear-gas ball that’s going to pop,” Cartwright says. “That was just part of our process.”
But as the intensity of the conflict rose, it soon became clear that the school would have to make a dramatic change. “We were getting nightly reports that green gas was enveloping our garden — our edible garden — and all of the different chemicals were impacting our soil.” Cottonwood faced the costly prospect of constant testing and remediation, or being unable to use its outdoor spaces. When the bottom dropped out of enrollment, the school chose to relocate to a recently vacant middle-school campus where Cottonwood could take over the lease.
For a school dedicated to civics, Cottonwood has a powerful advocate in Washington, D.C. in Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). In an interview with Rolling Stone, Wyden recalled tangling with the first Trump administration over the school’s safety. “I thought we wouldn’t have to go through this again at Cottonwood,” he says. “But if anything, they’ve given more power to ICE, more unchecked authority.”
In the monomaniacal campaign to deport as many people as quickly as possible, Wyden says, “the Trump people are willing to put kids and families at risk,” with weapons it won’t discuss. “Depending on what they’re using over there,” the senator says, “the kids can get sick.”