This is an open letter to the federal agents trying to occupy Portland, Oregon. You should resign your post and leave. I’m going to cover here exactly why this is so. It involves some brutal truths about your position and your long-term prospects, which are very bleak.
In the first place, you are involved in an illegal operation. Your involvement in Portland has no legal basis, and is, in fact, contrary to the meaning and the text of the Constitution. The Constitution only allows this kind of operation pursuant to a request by the state legislature. It says:
The United States…shall protect each [state] against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
[Article VI, Section 4]
There’s a constitutional process for the federal government to help a state protect against domestic violence. The legislature asks the federal government for help. That means that the federal government taking it upon itself to do this without a request from the state legislature (since the Oregon Legislature is capable of meeting) is unconstitutional, and therefore illegal.
Agents of the federal government, like you, are allowed to help local police jurisdictions with their work, as long as you are helping find and apprehend individual criminals or criminal organizations, at the request of those jurisdictions. You are allowed to investigate well-founded allegations that persons or organizations are breaking federal law, and apprehend those who are probably doing so. You are not allowed to go into communities and battle with citizens, as you are currently doing. You are allowed to guard and protect federal facilities. You are not allowed to go well beyond their properties and sweep the streets, shooting people and firing tear gas.
Furthermore, the Constitution states people have the right:
…peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
[First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States]
You are interfering with the rights of people to peaceably assemble and petition our government for redress of the wrongs of police militarization and community oppression. You are interfering with their right to petition for redress for the murders of citizens by the police. You are interfering with the right of the people to get redress for racism.
You, federal agents, have no right to be in Portland, and you, federal agents, are committing crimes against the Constitution by your actions.
Since what you are doing is illegal, you have no rightful immunity from legal consequences, either prosecution by the state or civil actions seeking equity by the individuals you harm. You may be able to get courts to rule you can’t be taken to court, but you are operating under unlawful orders. The people of this country will never forgive you, even if the courts fail to hold you accountable.
And you will not be able to continue your careers much longer than six months. By then, a new administration will be in power. That administration will get rid of you. You signed up for this illegal operation, and thus you have demonstrated your loyalty to Donald Trump and against the United States of America. As such, you cannot be trusted by the new administration, and it will have to fire you.
Not only that, but the public will know who you are, individually, and you will not be welcome in polite society. You may think you can hide your identity by not wearing a name tag. But this is the twenty-first century. Technology will be applied to all the video of your operations. It will ferret out the identities of each person, and will tag them with individual acts of theft, assault, battery, and kidnapping. It will label each of you with your criminal acts. You will not be able to hide in your crowd, and you will have to individually face the consequences of your own actions.
When they issued you uniforms without your name that was an enormous clue that what you were about to do would be illegal. If you can’t show your face and hold your head up while you are policing, then it’s time to consider another line of work.
Get this straight: It is almost inevitable your names and faces will be tied to individual criminal acts. When that happens, the public will know exactly who you are and what you’ve done. Many of you will face individual criminal and civil trials, where your identities will be made public.
In fact, the next administration may well decide to publish your identities. That would be warranted to discourage employees of the federal government from taking part in this kind of activity in the future.
Oh, but are you a federal employee? You may well be a contractor. If you are a contractor, then you may not even be subject to any protections federal employees would have. If you are a contractor, your position is correspondingly weaker.
And if you are a company supporting this in any way, your brand will be stomped into the ground when your ties are revealed to the public. Beyond that, you may be financially liable.
Federal agents, you should also consider your physical position in downtown Oregon. You are in a very exposed position. If there were an actual violent uprising, you would bear the brunt of that assault. I don’t want you harmed, so I think you should take a realistic look at where you are.
Look around you. You see the tall buildings all around you? You are not safe. You think you are on solid ground? No, the streets around you are elevated. While your attention is focused on the protesters, you are vulnerable to attacks from above and below.
And if you had to withdraw, it would be a very long and dangerous operation. People in Manhattan might naively think Portland is a small city. It’s still miles from the U.S. Courthouse to the outskirts of Portland. To escape to the west, you have to either climb over a small mountain range or go through a tunnel, which could be easily closed. To escape to the north you have to cross the Columbia River. To the south, it’s miles to get even to the next town. To get to the airport, you have to cross the Willamette River and go several miles through urban Portland.
You attacked the city. You are unwelcome. You cannot count on assistance from any of the city’s residents.
You could be extracted by air, but that would be a difficult, expensive, and dangerous operation.
And, because you are isolated, it would also be very easy to cut off your supplies. It’s been around 100 degrees here. If the building you occupy loses electrical service, it will be stifling, especially in those clumsy uniforms. If it loses its Internet and phone connections, you will be almost totally isolated.
Fortunately, the protesters are not going to try to kill you. They want to protect lives, not take them. They just want you out of their city.
But you can’t count on your friends.
Trump may well decide the best use he can make of you is to pay someone to attack you. He would then blame your casualties on his opponents, and use the attack as an excuse to send more armed forces, maybe even the military, into our cities. He may well be planning to do that closer to the election, to prevent his loss at the polls. It is the next logical escalation.
But Trump isn’t all that competent. If I were you, I’d be more worried about his backers. They have more money, and they may be much better organized to pull off an attack. They have all the same motives, but with much greater ability to execute.
Even if they aren’t planning this, you can’t discount foreign actors. The Chinese are unlikely to mount an assault on you because disrupting our country disrupts one of their most valuable foreign markets. But, Russia doesn’t export all that much to the U.S., and they have a much bigger stake in getting Trump re-elected. Vladimir Putin has shown no compunction about killing people to further his political aims. It must be very tempting for him to use this situation to back his preferred candidate.
You should worry a lot about your friends.
Think about it. Your career as a paid militiaman has a maximum lifespan of about six months. You are breaking the law. You will have to pay for that sooner or later. You can’t count on anonymity or immunity for your crimes. And you are risking your life.
This is the moment when you should make a wise choice and opt out.
And finally, here is just a footnote for anyone else who is thinking about joining Trump’s troops and trying to occupy some other American city: Everything here applies to you, except possibly the raised streets and the actual distance to the city limits. Think very carefully before signing up for this kind of operation. It is CLB: Career Limiting Behavior. Remember: The public is watching, and the public will never forgive you if you blow our democracy.
Und alle, alle seh'n euch jetzt
Seh'n euch jetzt, seh'n euch jetzt
Everyone is watching you now.