Portland's nightly protests at the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse ran for months, and in July 2020 the administration escalated: Operation Diligent Valor deployed DHS tactical teams — Border Patrol's BORTAC among them — who blanketed neighborhoods in tear gas and, in the episode that defined the operation, seized protesters off streets into unmarked rental vans without identifying themselves. Oregon's governor and Portland's mayor demanded the federal force withdraw; the courthouse deployment instead became the model the president threatened to extend to other "Democrat cities."
More than a hundred protesters were charged federally in Oregon that summer — civil disorder, assault on officers for shining lasers or throwing water bottles, failure to obey — and prosecutors offered dozens of unusual "deferred resolution" agreements once the political moment passed, with a large share of cases ultimately dismissed. The operation's legacy was less its convictions than its precedent: a federal paramilitary response to local protest over local objection, held together by charges that mostly evaporated — force first, law afterward.