Portland Mayor Fears ICE: Not the Border, But the Optics
Newsweek highlighted Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler's opinion piece sounding the alarm over an ICE facility, calling it a 'disaster waiting to happen.' He warns of potential property damage and the cost to taxpayers from protests. While the Mayor ponders property, the actual 'disaster' of ICE’s treatment of migrants, well-documented by groups like the ACLU (see their 2021 report on detention
conditions nationwide), seems to be a lesser concern than potential broken windows. One might wonder if the 'crisis' isn't the policy itself, but the public's inconvenient reaction to it. This isn't about the conditions inside the facility, or the human rights concerns that fuel these protests, but the inconvenience they cause. It’s a classic move: frame the public outcry as the problem, rather
than the injustice fueling it. (After all, who wants to pay for broken glass when they could be funding, say, more surveillance equipment to catch the window-breakers?) It appears the real disaster waiting to happen, in some circles, is having to actually address the root causes of public unrest, instead of just managing its symptoms.