The Blade of Perseus by Victor Davis Hanson 10/6/2025
In blue cities across America—Portland, Oregon, especially—often violent protesters now seek to surround ICE facilities to stop federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens.
Some 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. during the Biden years—illegally and thus without criminal or health checks.
Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such a flagrant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the legal enforcement of the law as they were earlier in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.
Much less did they care about the consequences of sending millions of foreign nationals into cities and counties where they swamped social services, spiked crime, and flooded emergency rooms and schools.
ICE has repeatedly presented data that show in its first rounds of deportations, it is concentrating on removing either criminal illegal aliens or those who have already been processed with deportation orders, somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of all current apprehensions.
No matter.
Left-wing protesters are swarming ICE headquarters in Portland to violently oppose all deportations, even those of known criminals and those who have already exhausted efforts to remain here illegally.
Why? The Democratic Party apparat knows that the public wants both secure borders and deportations of illegal aliens. Indeed, in part, it lost an election by its open-borders advocacy.
But Democrat officials feel that if street thugs like Antifa can surround and besiege ICE facilities in Portland, Oregon, then deportations will stop. Then, a de facto amnesty will follow for millions who entered the U.S. illegally—and will soon become Democratic constituents.
As a result, they do not fully enforce the law when thugs attack federal law enforcement. Antifa and its spin-off groups favor the night, when they try to block all entries and exits of ICE vehicles and personnel, and can commit their violence with greater anonymity.
The masked rioters assault anyone in their way. They count on exemption from punishment for committing violence against federal officers through the goodwill or indifference of kindred local and state officials who hate the Trump administration more than they respect the law. An Orwellian scenario follows in which federal officers are attacked by Antifa, which in turn counts on the non-intervention of local police.
More:
https://victorhanson.com/reactionary-neo-confederate-portland/
