An anti-I.C.E. protester in a frog costume holds a sign at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building on October 12, 2025 in Portland, Oregon. (Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images)
Down the street from ICE headquarters on the south Portland waterfront, a rainbow of costumes hung on a makeshift rack, a vertical banner with “FREE” in block letters attached. Available inflatables included a couple of sharks, a dinosaur or two, at least one cow and a banana, all ready to be pumped up for the cause. The cause, of course, is nonviolently protesting ICE while providing a maximally absurdist counternarrative to the assertion, first voiced by Donald Trump earlier this month and echoed near-constantly since by his administration and its media loyalists, that Portland is a war-ravaged burning hellhole.
You might have seen still photos and Instagram Reels of these creatures in the weeks since Trump announced that he intended to deploy the National Guard to “take back” the city’s teeming streets: The giant frog staring down a wall of ICE agents, the dinosaurs and raccoons shaking ass at a late-night dance party highlighted on “The Daily Show” last week. Those front-liners are just the start of the candy-colored confrontation ahead: A new crowdfunding initiative that launched last weekend, Operation Inflation, is taking donations to make sure every protester who wants to take part can do so inexpensively and enlargeably. From the outside, it might look like a deeply unserious set of tactics for a moment in which people’s lives are in real danger. But the media context in which that danger unfolds is a false narrative pursued by an authoritarian administration determined to wage war on blue cities. It’s necessary to fight fire with fire — and in this case, that means fighting performance with performance.
The protesters in Portland, after all, aren’t the only ones putting on a show. Since February, when Trump gave ICE the high sign to start rounding up and arresting people suspected of being in the country illegally, we’ve seen an awful lot of performative posturing. Men in tactical gear and face coverings — some of whom might actually be ICE and some who are likely just resentful civilians, and since many refuse to show ID when questioned, who knows? — have been captured on video harassing residents, attempting to grab delivery drivers and bikers, and being booed out of town. Arrests of civilians charged with impersonating ICE officers and detaining, attempting to detain, and in one case sexually assaulting people they believed to be illegal immigrants have proliferated, some involving unregistered guns and forged Department of Homeland Security paperwork…