Feds demand Portland turn over protest data, say city is violating key use-of-force agreement
Published 12:27 pm Friday, October 31, 2025
By Zane Sparling
oregonlive.com
The U.S. Department of Justice is prodding Portland to turn over more protest records — by leveraging the decade-old settlement agreement between federal officials and the Portland Police Bureau.
In a Wednesday letter, the DOJ’s civil rights division chief Harmeet Dhillon warned that the city was “failing to comply” with terms of the 2014 settlement regarding the department’s use of force against the mentally ill.
Specifically, the letter said Portland violated a provision requiring the Police Bureau to provide “full and direct access” to all records necessary to enforce the settlement.
The federal government’s missive is the latest in their pledge to launch a “full investigation” into the Portland Police Bureau, which it claims engages in “viewpoint discrimination” by supporting left-wing protesters at the expense of counterprotesters and right-wing media.
Dhillon launched her probe Oct. 3 after Portland police arrested right-wing journalist Nick Sortor during a chaotic brawl outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in South Portland the night prior.
Sortor was released from jail hours later and Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez declined to file charges in the case a few days later, saying the journalist had acted in self defense.
City attorneys responded to the Civil Rights Division’s first request for documents on Oct. 6 and provided some files via a public records request, but gave no timeline for producing the rest, according to Dhillon. A confidential mediation session Oct. 8 was unfruitful, spurring the second demand for records.
The settlement agreement, crafted during the administration of President Barack Obama, does not particularly concern itself with protests, though the letter notes that it requires officers to “apply policies uniformly.”
U.S. District Judge Michael Simon of Oregon, who has presided over the use of force case since the federal lawsuit was filed in 2012, meets with both parties and an independently appointed monitor twice a year.
Neither side has filed a motion regarding the feds’ viewpoint discrimination investigation, records show. The next status check in the case is scheduled for Jan. 6.
In a Thursday statement, City Attorney Robert Taylor told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the settlement agreement was being used as a pressure point to pursue “unrelated political goals” and satisfy President Donald Trump’s “apparent fixation on our city.”
“The City Attorney’s Office believes this is unlawful and inappropriate, another clear example of federal overreach, and demonstrates the political weaponization of the Settlement Agreement by the U.S. Department of Justice,” he said.
An attorney for Sortor has vowed to sue over his arrest, but no lawsuit has been filed so far.
Since then, the Civil Rights Division has sought voluminous material from the city on topics far afield from Sortor’s arrest.
The requested material includes all communications by the mayor and police chief related to protests, immigration or ICE, all body-worn camera footage taken at protests and any communications from city officials regarding zoning enforcement at the ICE facility.
The new request imposes its own deadline of Nov. 28.
Dhillon is taking a vigorous interest in Portland’s “woke police practices,” as she wrote on social media Oct. 16, adding elsewhere that the city continues to “ignore the rights of citizens & journalists.”
The Department of Justice’s Civil Right Division didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though press communications have been limited during the government shutdown.
