US president mistakes scale of anti-Ice rallies after TV report uses old footage from George Floyd demonstrations
Donald Trump told reporters on Friday that he might send national guard troops into Portland, Oregon, apparently because he was misled about the scale of small protests outside an immigration detention facility there by a TV report that incorrectly presented video recorded during a protest in 2020 as having taken place in the city this summer.
“I will say this, I watched today, I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable, what’s going on,” Trump said. He then claimed, incorrectly, that he had seen video evidence of “the destruction of the city”.
In fact, a handful of protesters have demonstrated outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in a remote area of Portland along the south waterfront this year, but the scale of the protests, which attract dozens at most, is nothing like the 2020 protests following the police killing of George Floyd that regularly drew thousands to tens of thousands of demonstrators to a central part of the city for months.
“Are you going into Portland?” a reporter asked Trump.
