This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 21st, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

The federal incursion into Portland, Oregon nominally to protect federal monuments looks an awful lot like an attempt at suppressing

protest according to Cato's Patrick Edington he argues many long-standing federal

powers combined with recently granted authorities should concern anyone who wants to protect the

rights of individuals to speak their minds in public.

You and I have spoken about this many times and before you I spoke about this with

Adam Bates when he was at Cato I spoke about this with David Ritgers when he was at the

Cato Institute and this is this mishmash of federal authorities,

some of which exist nationwide, some of which exist within a what is not in statute anywhere, but has been sort of presumed to be a 100 mile band into the continental United States.

That is just a, if you took a highlighter

around the edges of the map of the United States,

you could get it. And. the that we do not normally associate these authorities with, which is to engage in the kinds of

searches and seizures that we do not normally associate with a free country. So what is going on in Portland right now?

So what we know at this stage of the game comes in no small part from some of the work that Ken Klippenstein at the nation has been doing and he actually got his hands on an internal DHS memo that talks about what I would have to refer to essentially as

counter demonstration type operations being marketed under the guise of protecting American monuments.

And in this circumstance, the particular memo in question is talking about the deployment of DHS personnel with CBP being in the lead here.

Customs and Border Protection essentially is operating under a particular statute here, at least this is what they've been talking about publicly with the New York, that was as was quoted in the New York Times and this is from the US Code 40 US Code section 1315

law enforcement authority of the Secretary of Homeland Security for protection of public property.

So that goes all the way back at least to the 2002 time frame.

So this has been on the books for a long time. It has never actually been utilized in the way that we are seeing here in Portland. And normally what we see with respect to CBP, whether we're talking about at fixed

checkpoints, fixed entry points into the country,

or some of these roving checkpoints that they can set up.

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