Report: Homeland Security Secretary Who Sent Federal Agents to Quell Portland “Lawlessness” Held His Office Unlawfully

Here’s something worth 10 minutes of your weekend: Portlander, journalist and Harvard-trained lawyer Sarah Jeong has a fantastic piece in The Verge about Chad Wolf, the former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security who sent federal agents into Portland to quell the George Floyd protests.

Those agents, a mishmash of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, U.S. deputy marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, are most notorious for dragging protesters away in unmarked vans. Their effect on the city ranged from the civic scale—nightly countdowns to tear-gas clouds at the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse—to personal terrors, like the Residence Inn maintenance worker who went to unclog a toilet and found a semi-automatic handgun pointed at his chest. Arguably, no arrival in the past decade changed the city as much as these agents.

Jeong argues it wasn’t the protesters the feds should have been going after. It was Wolf himself.

Yes, Jeong writes, thanks to the gross incompetence of the Trump administration, Wolf was in office illegally. “These brutal yet ineffective tactics were a response to the supposed ‘lawlessness’ of the George Floyd protests in Portland,” she writes. “But Wolf’s own lawless occupation of the secretary’s seat would go largely unchecked.”

It’s a hilarious, horrifying read. While you’re at it, read our 2019 interview with Jeong in which she discusses the ill effects of the internet on public life and weighs the odds that humanity is hopelessly garbage.