First Timer
A piece of Gonzo Journalism about the anti-ICE protests in Portland Oregon, June 2025
The first protest I ever went to was on June 14th in Portland, Oregon. The No Kings Day march, a worldwide planned event in opposition to Trump with all the proper paperwork filed beforehand. The cops I photographed there gave me the thumbs up and posed with shit eating grins. The next day, I was out front of the ICE detention facility. Those same cops, so jovial the day before, stood in balaclavas and helped ICE and Border Patrol with crowd control. My second ever protest.
Firsts come late for me as I’ve learned. I remember Christmas of 19, I had been 21 for months, and was a hard drinker for years at that point. While out Christmas shopping, my mom needed us to stop to use the bathroom, and she chose a bar because it was closest. By the time she was out of the restroom, I was already halfway through a pint of some ridiculous jet-fuel IPA, chatting with the bartender. I realized then that it was my first time in a bar. I was up to about a half of a bottle a night then, but I had never once visited a bar.
All through 2020 and the uprisings therein, I wanted to protest. I wanted, every day, to say fuck it to all my responsibilities–school, work, my relationship–and drive the couple of hours north from Corvallis to Portland and join the protests there. But I never went. I stayed mad and glued to my phone. I didn’t protest, and what I did do, what was accessible to me in Corvallis, didn’t feel as meaningful as being on the front lines.
Over the intervening years, I taught myself some basic skills, some more advanced shit too. Tactics and operational security and stop the bleed training. I promised myself that if I ever got the opportunity, I would join the front lines.
But then confronted with the opportunity, I don’t know if I would have gone if I didn’t have a camera to put between me and the fash. The first day, like a dork, I wrote PRESS on white name tags and pasted them on my hat and bag and helmet. Expecting the full wrath of the state, I arrived to a casual walk down the street, girded by smiling cops. I felt like a hard-on; there was no tear gas at the No Kings Day march, and I hardly needed to pretend to be press to keep safe from the cops. And was I really there as a neutral party? A journalist?
No.
I was there with a purpose. There’s a reason I only photograph the cops, DHS, ICE, and Border Patrol. Partially, it is to protect the identities of protesters. But it’s also to laser focus on documenting what the perpetrators are doing. Showing the ordinary, bored, young people behind the mask. You can see their faces; they may be behind masks, but they are right there on film. These are not monsters; they are human beings enacting an agenda. Same shit, different century. If more people took Nazi's portraits, in the act, it might not have been as easy for us to forget that, after all, they were just ordinary men.
I got to look into the eyes of Border Patrol the day after No Kings. I showed up in plain clothes, with no PRESS nametags adorning me or my camera bag. Based on my experience the day before, I figured this protest would be about the same as the last. It was not so. When I arrived, about four or five cops were milling about. Only one of them was in a balaclava, the one standing outside the ICE facility itself. The others didn't wear any headgear. They looked tired and a little like they would have rather been anywhere else. They stood in contrast to their buddy in the mask; he swaggered around with his thumbs in his belt loops. He looked like he was having a great little time.
The cops were all walking back and forth from a van someone had abandoned in the ICE facility’s driveway. Maybe the person who left the van was a dedicated protester, or maybe it was some rando completely unaffiliated, but it didn’t matter. Either way, that van tied up ICE for hours. They had to check it for bombs and such. I arrived at about 4 pm, and according to some of the other photographers, the van had been there all day.
The scene was calm then, only the local cops on the ground and a few DHS or Border Patrol agents on the roof. One on the roof had a paintball gun loaded with pepper balls. I can't tell from the pictures I took, but it looked like the other of the roof pigs, as I called them, had a rifle. An M4 or AR-15. I can’t say for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me. The night before, after the No Kings march died down, a couple hundred people made their way down to the ICE facility. Border Patrol and DHS pulled live firearms on the protestors. Only sidearms, from what I can confirm. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t pull rifles, or that it would make that big of a difference if they didn’t. A live firearm is a live fucking firearm. I was always taught you never point a gun at anything you do not intend to destroy.
About half an hour later, a tow truck showed up to take the van away. The driver got out of his truck and talked to one of the cops. Then he hooked the van up in a few practiced movements and drove it away. I was over by the encampment after they took the van, getting some supplies I neglected to bring. I didn’t pack my helmet for one, and I’d completely neglected goggles. I did bring my half-face respirator, but without a helmet and goggles, if they tear gassed us, I would just be blind and concussed while breathing a little better, I guess. I grabbed a helmet, donned my gas mask, and put on a pair of kids’ swim goggles. I didn’t even get the chance to take off the Please Remove Protective Film stickers before the gates opened, and soldiers poured out of the breach.
I say soldiers, but not literally–these were a mix of DHS and Border Patrol–but they may as well have been soldiers. They certainly looked the part in plate carriers, full-face gas masks, and desert tactical clothing. The only difference between them and real soldiers is that they were holding paintball guns. Some carried 40mm gas launchers, squat little guns that look like if a submachine gun and one of those tennis ball launchers for dogs had a baby.
I scrambled over to the front line, where one protester sat holding a sign as the BP and DHS rushed them. BP and DHS tried pulling the protester up, but they did not move until a couple more agents got involved, bodily throwing the protester to their feet. Two more agents went after me and some other protestors. I got eyeball to eyeball with this Border Patrol agent who shoved me back again and again. I got back in his face and took his portrait.
“Please don’t take photos of me,” he said.
“Fuck you!” I said and snapped another photo.
Then the cavalry arrived. Why the BP and DHS came out in force was revealed. A caravan of five or six vehicles screamed around the corner. They whipped into the driveway, now free of the abandoned van and cleared of protesters by the DHS and BP goon squad. Once all the cars were in behind the fence, the soldiers began their retreat. Protesters harassed them as they did. I hurled some choice words at them as I continued to get close and snap as many photos as I could. I had to retreat once to swap film, then dove back in and followed them until they were behind their fence. They closed and locked the gates behind them.
After the confrontation, my heart was pumping, and I tasted bitter adrenaline in the back of my throat. I had, if in a minor way, confronted the violent arm of the state. I felt proud, I felt good about myself. I had high ideals going in—still do—and having that experience was almost like a coming of age for me. My second protest ever, and I got shoved around by fucking Border Patrol as I took their portraits.
Satisfied with myself, I took off my borrowed gear and left. The encampment was big and well supplied. They had food, water, medical supplies, extra helmets, and goggles. They had a cadre of trained street medics giving protesters advice on how to deal with tear gas and pepper spray. They had about fifty people, maybe more. I felt that my presence was no longer needed. So I left and went to hang out with my friends, regaling them with my tale as if I were now some expert on protest photography.
Shortly after I left, the DHS and BP came back out from behind their fence and gassed the whole neighborhood with tear gas tinted green. Possibly an experimental cocktail, like they used in 2020. A mix of cops, DHS, and BP beat a few protesters, arrested a few more. I saw all this from the Instagram accounts of other photographers, more dedicated than I was.
Part of me felt left out. Like I had missed the party and wasn’t able to get any shots of the real action. Then I remembered that great Bo Burnham quote:
“Why do you rich fucking white people insist on seeing every socio-political conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization?”
I may not be rich, but I agree with Burnham’s point, and I see myself in the kind of people he’s lambasting. Maybe I’ll go to more protests, maybe I’ll get that hard-won experience I so desperately crave; bathing myself in tear gas as a form of baptism. But for now, I wake up early, I go to work, and sometimes I go around taking pictures of flowers. The closest I’ve gotten to protesting in the last month is riding by the ICE facility on my bus ride home from work.
The encampment has been coming and going ever since I visited it. The front of the ICE facility is now covered in graffiti and plywood, all the windows now broken. Most of the time, I only see a few dedicated people there with signs, still keeping it going. Sometimes it swells on weekends. Like on the Fourth of July weekend, where protesters threw fireworks at the feds. But the fact remains that ICE is still in the city, taking people from their homes and putting them in that building. Then sending them who knows where.
I may be a greenhand, I may be self-important, but I know a genocide when I see one. I know where I stand. But, all I know how to do right now is take pictures and hope it does something.