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"Portland: It's FO time. Buckle up."
On October 3, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, vowed to avenge a right-wing activist who’d been arrested there the night before. She accused police of discriminating against him based on his “conservative” viewpoint.
But last week Judge Michael Simon called her out for her ”threat and attempted intimidation” of officials in Portland, Oregon, refusing to allow his court to be used as a vehicle to punish a blue state for daring to stare down the Trump administration.
The case highlights the abject disintegration of the Justice Department under the leadership of internet-poisoned ideologues who think Elon Musk’s house of horrors is real life. And yet being terminally online is their Achilles heel, constantly undermining their quest to weaponize government against their so-called enemies.
Civil rights are woke
Under Dhillon’s leadership, the Civil Rights Division has shrunk by about 75 percent and now devotes most of its energy to harassing trans students and attempting to bully election officials into handing over state voter rolls.
But back in 2012, when it was run by people who actually cared about doing the job, the Civil Rights Division sued Portland, alleging a “pattern or practice” of excessive force by local police against people with mental illness.
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That lawsuit resulted in a 2014 settlement agreement in which the Portland Police Bureau committed to a set of reforms and ongoing monitoring, supervised by the court.
It was one of many such consent decrees entered into by the Obama and Biden Justice Departments. But during both of his terms in office, Trump has worked to dismantle them. One of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s first orders of business was attempting to end the consent decree in Baltimore inked after police killed Freddy Gray. And in 2025, Bondi tore up consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville entered into after police murdered Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
“The weaponization of consent decrees ended when I took over this @CivilRights Division,” Dhillon crowed on social media. “Under @AGPanBondi’s leadership, we support our law enforcement and we are terminating outdated consent decrees. Less red tape, more safety!”
But after Trump’s immigration surge, she took a different tack with Portland.
Crisis monetization
Last summer and fall, the Department of Homeland Security descended on city after city, grabbing non-white people off the streets and deliberately antagonizing residents. The widespread protests were almost uniformly peaceful, but Trump cited sporadic violence as a reason to unleash the military on America’s streets.
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