Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent a message Friday to the anarchist-abetting Portland Police Bureau (PPB) and Portland’s leftist city attorney: unlawful policing will not be tolerated.
Dhillon, who heads up the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said her office has launched an investigation into Portland law enforcement after Antifa thugs allegedly attacked independent reporters during increasingly violent riots at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Facility in South Portland.
Police arrested Nick Sortor on Thursday on disorderly conduct charges following an altercation with the leftist protesters. Earlier this week, Post Millennial reporter Katie Daviscourt said she was assaulted with a flagpole while covering the nightly mayhem at the ICE building.
In her letter to Portland Police Chief Bob Day and City Attorney Robert Taylor, Dhillon demands answers about the Portland Police Bureau’s handling of the incidents, specifically the “use of its policing powers in a manner that may be based on viewpoint discrimination.” It also suggests that the city may not be living up to its agreement with the Justice Department to cease activity that “deprives individuals of rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or federal law.”
On Friday afternoon, Dhillon posted on X that the Civil Rights Division, at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, launched the probe into Portland’s “highly questionable police practices.”
“We will not leave the people of Portland at the whims of criminals and woke cops. Govern yourselves accordingly!” the assistant AG vowed.
‘Tensions Are High’
Sortor’s arrest was caught on video. He told Fox News’ Bill Melugin that he was “jumped by Antifa thugs” just before Portland police removed him from the scene and ultimately arrested him.
“I get back up, I stumble away and go back toward cops where I think, you know, at least, all right, well, maybe that’ll be a safer place for me to go … never suspected that I was going to be the target of the arrest, that they were coming in to me,” he said.
Sortor told Fox News the Marxists threw multiple punches at him and broke his camera. He acknowledged that he “tried to swing.”
“I missed. I think I have every right to swing on somebody that has got me on the ground after punching me and after breaking my equipment,” the conservative reporter told the news outlet.
Also live at the scene, Daviscourt alerted her X followers that PPB officers “announced they were making targeted arrests following several scuffles.” She said, “Sortor was being targeted by Antifa shortly before.”
Portland Police arrested Sortor and two others, Angela Davis, 49, of Vernonia, Oregon, and Son Mi Yi, 43, of Portland. The leftist-led police force noted in an incident report that PPB “Dialogue Officers” originally observed two men fighting in the driveway of the federal building. The dialogue specialist then called for backup. The fight ended, according the report, after one of the participants was knocked to the ground.
The police department said it will continue to “monitor” the protests (riots).
“While PPB’s role is public safety and supporting constitutionally protected activity, part of our role is to address criminal acts. Officers may be seen in a larger group to make targeted arrests for specific crimes committed,” the police report took pains to explain. It added, “just because arrests are not made at the scene, when tensions are high, that does not mean that people are not being charged with crimes later.”
But myriad questions remain.
‘Policing Powers’
In her letter, Dhillon raised concerns that Portland police officers chose to arrest Sorter but not others. Sortor has been daily documenting the insanity of the Antifa-driven protests, footage that shows a police force so unwilling to keep law and order in its city that the president of the United States has committed to sending in the National Guard to restore it.
Dhillon asserts PPB reportedly failed to identify or arrest protesters accused of assaulting Daviscourt, even after detaining them briefly. And, the assistant AG wrote, the city “reportedly has attempted to use its policing powers through a zoning enforcement action to limit ICE’s use of the Portland facility.” The leftist city, seemingly at open war with the Trump administration, has used its conditional land use policy to ridiculously restrict the ICE facility from holding illegal immigrants longer than 12 hours or overnight.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made clear detention limitation commitments to our community, and we believe they broke those policies more than two dozen times,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said last month in a press release. Those commitments were made by the Obama administration, long before President Joe Biden kicked the U.S. border with Mexico wide open to millions of illegal aliens.
‘Consistent Theme’
Dhillon has instructed the city to turn over several documents, including the original body-worn camera recording of officers involved in monitoring, arresting, and processing Sortor, and the same for those involved in the alleged Daviscourt assault. The DOJ’s Civil Rights chief also wants all unredacted incident, force, arrest, general order reports, and after-action reviews on the incidents involving the reporters. Her document request seeks complaints received and all non-attorney-client-privileged communications “regarding the decision to target the ICE facility for zoning enforcement.”
The city also has been told to turn over directions to Portland police officers responding to the daily protests at the ICE facility over the past 30 days.
Dhillon wrote that the allegations “implicate the city’s performance under a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice. That original agreement was signed by the Biden DOJ in the final days of the Democrat’s regime, and, not surprisingly, includes liberal policing reforms on training, supervision, and practices in “the use of force, training, community-based mental health services, crisis intervention, employee information system, officer accountability, and community engagement.”
The Portland Police Bureau must do all of the above to “remedy a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that deprives individuals of rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or federal law,” according to the agreement.
That certainly would include protecting the individual rights of counter-protesters to the Antifa-driven bedlam and reporters letting the sane world know what’s happening inside the walls of Oregon’s biggest city and the radical leftists who have taken it over.
“While we have not reached any conclusions on these allegations, we note a consistent theme in these three allegations – all three would choose one viewpoint over another,” Dhillon’s letter states.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
