As we’ve reported here, for over 50 days federal facilities in Portland have been under increasingly violent attacks by Antifa (who are anti-democracy and hardcore fascists) their strap-hangers. (Our most recent posts on this are
Watch: Antifa Torch Portland Police Association, Break Into Federal Property, Threaten Police, Oregon Attorney General Sues To Stop Feds From Making Arrests Connected to Protests at Oregon Federal Courthouse, Portland Organizer Reveals the Real Goal of the Actions There, and People Need to Hear It, ACLU Sues Homeland Security Over the ‘Cuff-‘Em-and-Stuff-‘Em’ Policy for Antifa Goons in Portland, and Portland’s Mayor Tries to Blame Trump for Riots, Gets Fact-Checked in Real Time; but they all contain links to other RedState articles on the subject.) These attacks are continuing because the city government is hugely sympathetic to Antifa and supportive of mob violence and hostile to law enforcement. Homeland Security has deployed specialized units like BORTAC and the US Marshals Service has also deployed specialized units.

The Nation has reported BORTAC’s presence in Portland and that, you’ll see, is a critical point in demonstrating that the inference this article draws is, at least, mistaken but probably a deliberate lie. This is from The Border Patrol Was Responsible for an Arrest in Portland

The Portland arrest of Mark Pettibone, first reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, followed several similar arrests involving officers from a Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC)—CBP’s equivalent of a SWAT team—as well as the US Marshals Special Operations Group.

Oddly enough, the New York Times also mentioned BORTAC in Portland, as shown from the Google search results below, but has since deleted the reference with, as we will see, good reason:

There is no doubt that they are effective and feared because of the level of feces-squirting going in on the left. The Portland government, in particular, feels threatened because the mayor’s favored street-fighters are now being hauled into federal court to face real consequences rather than being given a pass by the local prosecutor.

Now The New York Times has entered the fray and is working hand-in-glove with the terrorist forces in Portland to try to force the removal of federal law enforcement from that city. Their lead effort was this: Federal Officers Deployed in Portland Didn’t Have Proper Training, D.H.S. Memo Said. This headline was picked up on by the left and passed around as an accusation that the federal law enforcement personnel currently acting as the bulwark between Antifa goons and Western Civilization in Portland are not trained for the job. But what doe it really say?

The federal agents facing a growing backlash for their militarized approach to weeks of unrest in Portland were not specifically trained in riot control or mass demonstrations, an internal Department of Homeland Security memo warned this week.

The message, dated Thursday, was prepared by the agency for Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, as he arrived in Portland to view the scene in person, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The New York Times. It listed federal buildings in the city and issues officers faced in protecting them.

The memo, seemingly anticipating future encounters with protesters in other cities as the department follows President Trump’s guidance to crack down on unrest, warns: “Moving forward, if this type of response is going to be the norm, specialized training and standardized equipment should be deployed to responding agencies.”

In over 1300 words that is the sum total of reporting on the training of federal law enforcement. The rest is terror-sypathizers sniveling because their pets are being bested.

What the memo seems to be responding to is the intent by DHS to deploy federal law enforcement to protect federal facilities in any of the Third World sh** hole cities where the local authorities have allied themselves with leftist street toughs. It seems to be saying that the agency needs to start training now in anticipation of that increased mission.

But, there is more. Factually, as someone who has actually participated in a large scale civil disturbance exercise with some very aggressive role-players as part of a unit with an actual GARDEN PLOT mission that resulted in its deployment (after I’d departed) to Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots, I can tell you that crowd control is not really rocket science. The basic tactics have been used since Gustavus Adolphus kicked ass at Breitenfeld. Your biggest challenge is ensuring your troops understand what they can and can’t do is the way of escalation of force. It is safe to assume that the federal officers in Portland have been brought up to speed on crowd control. All it would have taken would have been a very small training cell plus the daily on-the-job training they have received in dealing with the anarchist trash on the streets to bring them up to a very high level of proficiency. And the restraint they show in the confrontations with the would-be insurrectionists demonstrates that competency.

But there was never any doubt. BORTAC is highly trained in crowd control (see Defending the border: Field exercise prepares agents when crowds turn hostile), they have been involved in crowd control operations in San Diego and other areas. And they are the official trainers of the Border Patrol for crowd control. This is from a 2013 article on the subject:

With horses, shields, fake and real tear gas, and one biting dog, about 90 U.S. Border Patrol agents from the San Diego Sector trained for crowd and riot control atop Spooner’s Mesa in the Tijuana River Valley on Thursday, December 12. The exercise was refresher training that had been moved up on the schedule after the recent Tijuana River channel incident on November 24.

Sector chief Paul Beeson confirmed that the training was originally scheduled for January 19–21 for about 90 local agents who are part of the agency’s Mobile Response Team, which can be deployed locally or anywhere in the U.S. to support other law-enforcement agencies.

“The agents were trained in groups of 30 by our BORTAC team, [emphasis mine]” Beeson said. (BORTAC is the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, much like police SWAT teams.) “San Diego is one of four sectors in the country that have mobile response teams organized, trained, and equipped to respond swiftly to a variety of events — not just riots but events like Hurricane Katrina.

Far from sending untrained law enforcement officers to Portland, Homeland Security actually sent the elite. They sent the unit that is trained in crowd control and trains the rest of the Border Patrol in those operations. I suspect that is why the NYT deleted the BORTAC reference because it revealed their entire story to be a blatant lie.