PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Over the past few weeks, more and more protesters at the ICE facility in Portland have been wearing costumes — the frog, a dinosaur, Barney.
Part of that is due to a new organization, Operation Inflation, which is purchasing more than 100 inflatable costumes with help from online donations and giving them away for free.
“Donald Trump is trying to say that this is a war zone. Donald Trump is trying to say that he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act. He wants to send troops down here to squash the terrorists,” Jordy Johnson with Operation Inflation told KOIN 6 News. “And we want to make it clear that this is not a war zone and that if he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act, he’s going to have to point at people in inflatable chickens and inflatable frogs and inflatable unicorns.”
Johnson said Operation Inflation “started a couple of days ago when we saw the frog guy kind of making the rounds in the media, and we decided, you know what? These things aren’t super expensive and a lot of people are going to want to help out with this project. So we just started a website, and I started spreading it around.”…