President Donald Trump said yesterday he plans to send law enforcement personnel to some major US cities, as a federal crackdown on anti-racism protests including use of unmarked cars and unidentified officers in camouflage in Portland, Oregon, angers people across the country.
“We’re sending law enforcement,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let this happen to the cities.”
Trump, a Republican, mentioned New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland, California, as possible places for sending in federal forces, noting the cities’ mayors are “liberal Democrats.” 
State and local leaders in Oregon, as well as members of Congress, meanwhile, have called for Trump to remove Department of Homeland Security officers from Portland.
“They’ve been there three days and they really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time, no problem,” Trump said of law enforcement sent to the historically liberal city to quell often unruly protests.
“They grab a lot of people and jail the leaders. These are anarchists.”
Federal officers last week began cracking down on Portland protests against police brutality and systemic racism, using tear gas and taking some activists into custody without explanation.
Despite a national outcry over the tactics, Department of Homeland Security officials yesterday said they would not back down and would not apologise.
Top officials said yesterday they had no intention of pulling back and defended the federal crackdown on anti-racism protests.
“DHS is not going to back down from our responsibilities. We are not escalating, we are protecting,” Chad Wolf, acting secretary of Homeland Security, told Fox News.
Protests began across the country after the police killing of African American George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May. In Portland, federal officers last week started cracking down on crowds, using tear gas to disperse protesters and taking some into custody in unmarked cars.
Portland Police yesterday provided details on another tense night between protesters and federal law enforcement in the city, saying federal agents used tear gas to disperse a crowd that had gathered outside a federal courthouse downtown.
Wolf said federal law enforcement was doing its job. “We’re not going to apologize for it,” he said. “We’re going to do it professionally and do it correctly.”
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deputy secretary, said the federal officers wore the same uniforms every day and the crowds knew who they were.
He also defended the use of unmarked cars as routine.
“Unmarked police vehicles are so common it’s barely worth discussion,” he told CNN.
Cuccinelli said if federal authorities receive the same kind of intelligence threat in other places, they would respond the same way. 
“It’s really as simple as that,” he said.
On Sunday, Democrats in the US House of Representatives demanded internal investigations into whether the Justice and Homeland Security departments “abused emergency authorities” in handling the Portland protests.
Portland’s mayor called the intervention an abuse of federal power and said it was escalating the violence.
Oregon’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the federal agencies, saying they had seized and detained people without probable cause.
Cuccinelli dismissed local leaders’ calls to leave the city.
“We will maintain our presence,” he said.