This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 29th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown. Federal police activity continued in Portland over the weekend and the White House pledges to deploy federal police in other cities.

It's worth drawing distinctions about what these police forces are being asked to do and what

agencies they represent.

Cato's Patrick Eddington and Walter Olson comment on the planned surges of federal cops in American cities.

Pat, I want to start with you.

The federal presence in Portland and elsewhere has continued

characterize for us the nature or and the nominal purpose of these federal agents operating within these cities?

I think it's important to recognize that in the wake of Mr Floyd's murder in Minneapolis on May the 25th we saw

demonstrations break out not just in that city but over the course of the next

ten days we saw demonstrations

break out in multiple cities across this country and one of those of course is

Portland which has in many respects gotten a lot of the a lot of the ink and a lot of the electrons if you will in terms of coverage.

But we now have some evidence courtesy of Ken Klippenstein at the nation that I think gives us a real window into just exactly how

far in advance they were probably planning these deployments.

This comes in the form of a 19-page document questions that Kamala Harris, Senator Kamala Harris, of California

asked of Customs and Border Protection and the responses of which were obtained by the nation and published just this past Friday.

And what we learned here, and this is from Appendix 1 of the document which is entitled

Comprehensive Nationwide Civil Unrest Report May 31st, 2020 again that's only

six days after Mr Floyd's murder through June the 11th of 2020.

And what they say here at the top of this document, the top four bullets, the very first

one is CBP personnel deployed 2,174 personnel deployed

...