President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to send federal law-enforcement officials into cities like New York and Chicago following his deployment of such forces to Portland, Oregon, over the weekend to crack down on protesters.
“New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore and all of these—Oakland is a mess—we are not going to let this happen in the country, all run by liberal Democrats,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you.”
In defiance of both state and local governments, Trump over the weekend escalated operations against protesters in Oregon, with Customs and Border Patrol agents snatching demonstrators off the streets and putting them into unmarked vans for detentions. The state’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the feds, accusing them of unlawfully detaining protesters. The ACLU has also sued federal agents and local law enforcement, calling the situation a “constitutional crisis.”
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Nevertheless, Trump on Monday cheered the feds’ encroachment into Portland while threatening to do the same in other cities: “They’ve done a fantastic job, been there three days, and they have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time, no problem. A lot of people in jail, these are anarchists. These are not protesters. These are people that hate our country. We are not going to let it go forward.”
