Portland’s protest frogs are dead serious about absurdity

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.

And Kristi Noem, of course, wasted no time making herself the face of this operation: In March, she staged a photo op at a notorious El Salvador prison, instructing prisoners to remove their shirts and face masks for the cameras to capture their grim faces, shaved heads and heavily tattooed torsos. Despite having no previous experience that qualifies her to hold it, Noem has embraced the tough-gal aesthetics of her position with both extravagantly manicured hands. Standing with her back to the prisoners, her white T-shirt echoing their prison garb, Noem recorded a video addressing immigrants with the warning, “[K]now that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

National outlets like Fox have spent weeks misrepresenting the character of Portland’s ICE protests by running footage from anti-police demonstrations in the summer of 2020 that involved aggression, vandalism and property damage. The administration itself has begun deploying right-wing influencers like Benny Johnson — best known for being fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism — as hype men for stunts like Noem’s ICE-rooftop appearance (the intended gravitas of which was ultimately ruined by the crowd below blaring a recording of “Yakety Sax”). These, too, are performances, and the more they embellish their fictional tales of war-torn Portland and bloodthirsty antifa marauders, the more comically visible the protesters grow. (A side benefit? More business for local suppliers of costumes and party supplies.)

“When you grow up in Portland, you grow up feeling like loud, creative aesthetic expression is how you participate in politics and in things like protest,” says Claire Aubin, a historian of the United States who lectures at Yale and hosts the history podcast This Guy Sucked. “Fighting optics with optics is a longtime protest strategy [here], but the media and even people who know protests often see Portland’s as anomalies.”

Seth Todd, the 25-year-old protester who initially donned the concerned-looking frog costume told Le Monde that it was “a strategy to cut the narratives of the Trump administration, which says we are extremely violent.” Viewers who see a line of guns pointed at mouthy, black-clad activists and think, Well, they do look violent just can’t make the same argument about those same guns drawn on an oversized, silent frog. The costumes work not just by refuting the president’s characterization of Portland as a city of violent anarchists, but by refusing to grant ICE a level playing field on which to perform their strongman (and woman) cosplay: Nice body armor, champ, but you’re going to look stupid when you’re photographed trying to take down an inflatable frog.

(Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images) An artist paints a picture of an anti-I.C.E. protester in a frog costume at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building on October 12, 2025 in Portland, Oregon.

It helps that federal agents in Portland haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory thus far: Their most notable “peacekeeping” efforts to date include knocking an 84-year-old Vietnam veteran and his wife — both protest bystanders — to the ground and pepper-spraying them, and impeding the exit of an ambulance from the ICE compound while threatening to shoot its driver. Pepper-spraying an air vent in Todd’s costume made agents look petty; the fact that it didn’t deter him (“I’ve definitely had spicier tamales,” he told The Oregonian) made them look bumbling and ineffective.

If there were ever a rational way to respond to the president’s nonsensically grandiose fearmongering — “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have sewers anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows” — that time has passed, especially since he’s achieved enough media capture that he’s never pushed to provide specifics for his wild claims. Still, as bizarre as Trump’s whoppers are, he is simply not going to win a war of weirdness in a city where more than a thousand residents braved Sunday’s harsh weather to participate in an Emergency Naked Bike Ride. Portland is by no metric a perfect city, but it’s one whose combination of staunch anti-authoritarianism and literal balls-out commitment to absurdism meets this uniquely chaotic moment.

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Because protesters have the tenacity to keep going, even in rainy season (those frogs and sharks are roomy enough to accommodate layers of foul-weather clothing), but equally important, they are willing to put in the time. Oregon’s overall unemployment rate has dropped from recent highs, but the Portland metro area is still struggling to recover from COVID-era job losses; in addition, federal funding cuts made by DOGE in the first two months of 2025 have impacted government agencies across the state. Which is not to suggest that every underemployed Portlander wakes up each morning to grab a dinosaur costume and a box of donuts — but if and when they do, they’ll have backup, support, and mutual aid on their side.

The backlash against the current actions in Portland from obvious antagonists was expected. Grumbles about “superficial activism” from nonresident activists, meanwhile, were probably inevitable, but reflect a misconception that the most mediagenic protests are both the only actions being taken in Portland and the ones that other cities should be adopting. Nationwide anti-ICE actions from Los Angeles to New York were drawing notice and support well before an inflatable frog made the scene in Portland, and have also brought out thousands of demonstrators who never considered themselves protest people until recently. Yes, there will probably be a lot of frogs at this weekend’s No Kings protests. No, they are not in themselves evidence of insufficient “real” activism. It takes all of us, but that doesn’t mean it requires all the same tactics.

Aubin notes that Portland’s ethos isn’t the liberal caricature that’s often represented — it’s often more about anti-authoritarianism than about any specific political alignment. “During the protests in 2020, people were posting photos of businesses [that had] signs saying ‘Police not welcome here,’ and being like, ‘I can’t believe businesses are doing this!’ Well, you don’t know Portland then.” Portland’s protest style has everything to do with an approach to life that pushes back on being told what to do and how to do it. “There’s more permissibility around the idea of leaving work early because [you] need to go to a protest. It might not fly somewhere else, but here, if you’re not part of protests, you’re not participating in the city’s culture.”