President Donald Trump said Saturday that he instructed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem not to respond to protests or riots in Democrat-led cities “unless, and until, they ask us for help.”
“We will, however, guard, and very powerfully so, any and all Federal Buildings that are being attacked,” he said on Truth Social. “Please be aware that I have instructed ICE and/or Border Patrol to be very forceful in this protection of Federal Government Property.”
State and local governments, Trump went on, have to protect their own property, though said it is also their obligation to protect federal property as well.
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“We are there to protect Federal Property, only as a back up, in that it is Local and State Responsibility to do so,” Trump said.
Noem, in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, said “the president is exactly right” and accused people on the left of perpetuating violence in these cities.
In his post, Trump mentioned an instance where protestors in Eugene, Oregon, broke into a federal building Friday. While he claimed that “local police did nothing in order to stop it,” the Eugene Police Department said they were present in the area and declared a riot around 6 p.m.
Police Chief Chris Skinner said Eugene officers were keeping “a close eye as that unfolded.”
“At some point, it got to a place where it just became too dangerous for me to be able to sit by and not have EPD intervene in some respect,” he said. That, he said, is when they decided to move in and create a barrier between protestors and the building.
Eventually, Skinner said, Eugene Police left and turned over control of the scene to federal agents. Some federal agents used smoke and potentially tear gas, he added.
Mayor Kaarin Knudson said on Facebook that before the riot, the protests earlier in the day had been peaceful, with “hundreds of young people, elders, and even small children attending.”
The National Guard, as well as federal immigration agents, were sent by the Trump administration to blue cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and Washington, D.C. However, this move has been met with legal challenges and protests in these cities. Protests have particularly intensified in Minnesota, especially after the shooting and killings of two Minneapolis residents, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal immigration agents.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a lawsuit along with the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul asking the courts to end the deployment of 3,000 federal immigration agents to the state, saying it has caused widespread fear in the community, including job sites, businesses, schools and hospitals. A federal judge, Katherine M. Menendez, on Saturday denied the request to temporarily halt what the Trump administration’s is calling “Operation Metro Surge.”
Menedez did, though, earlier this month issue an order barring federal agents from arresting or retaliating against peaceful protestors or using pepper-spray or other non-lethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools against them.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said if Democratic-led cities want help, “they have to ask for it.”
“Because if we go in, all they do is complain,” he said. Protestors who do “anything bad” to federal law enforcement officers “will have to suffer,” Trump said, and “will get taken care of in at least an equal way.”
