PITTSBURGH — Pittsburghers expected to have to dodge ice-covered sidewalks and piles of snow along Commonwealth Place. Two weeks after a winter storm dropped several inches in the region, the city was still struggling to clean up its remnants.
But it was the poop, piles and piles of it, littering the sidewalks in front of the luxury “Apartments at River View” building that was the bigger challenge. It wasn’t your average animal, or perhaps human, excrement coming from one mere defiler.
There were hundreds of piles circling the entire city block of the building. Some were decorated with orange candy sprinkles. Most had tiny “Dump Trump” flags planted in them. It was all a vile way to protest ICE and President Donald Trump.
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Along with myself, scores of downtown workers were faced with a choice: Risk sliding on the ice-covered sidewalks or find themselves shoe-deep in poop. If someone tried to navigate the mess in a wheelchair, they would have found themselves forced out into busy Liberty Avenue, where thousands of cars exit off of Parkway West.
One woman told me, “I’m just trying to get to work.” She added: “You do not win people over to your cause — I don’t care what your cause is — with this kind of protest. You hurt working people.”
Since Trump’s 2024 win, the manufactured protest industry has become more robust. Both the numbers and the tactics have escalated since he was sworn in a little more than a year ago. The protest industry is well-funded, with recruited professionals to man its infrastructure. And it depends on non-professional protesters, everyday people who agree with whatever the affront of the day is, to show up angry.
It is a tactic as old as time. It’s been mostly used by the far left, but also by conservatives on occasion, notably the circus barker days of the Tea Party, when it went from organic to organized.
Right now, the focus is ICE enforcement. On Sunday, I attended a poop free protest held at the foot of the Hot Metal Bridge. Several hundred gathered to hear Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) say, “You can’t reform oppression, you can’t reform hatred.” Lee added: “We won’t stop at abolishing ICE.” Pittsburgh’s branch of Indivisible, a well-funded leftist resistance organization, along with activist groups like 1Hood and Casa San Jose, were the main organizers.
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They circled around the block, with signs saying everything from “ICE OUT” to colorful references to the male anatomy. Others referred to ICE officers as “Fascist” or “Nazi.” As the rally ended, they chanted: “No ICE! No KKK! No fascist USA.”
On Wednesday evening, based solely on a rumor that ICE officers may or may not be staying there, several dozen protesters showed up outside a Marriott Hotel across the street from PNC Park to cause disruption. They screamed anti-ICE chants through megaphones and endlessly banged pots and pans and blew whistles.
The objective? To disturb the sleep of ICE officers. But they failed. In fact, ICE’s presence at the hotel was purely a rumor. They did, however, disturb the sleep of those visiting the city for business or to see family.
The scene was straight out of the playbook used in Minneapolis and other cities, where organizers, based purely on an unverified tip, chase down individuals, stalk businesses, or even harass someone who just owns an SUV. And all because they assume that they’re part of ICE.
The Sunrise Movement has been at the forefront, demanding that Marriott and other hotels not rent rooms to ICE. Sunrise began as a leftist climate change youth movement. They’re so far left they even protested then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in 2018, demanding a “New Green Deal.” Since Trump won, Sunrise has taken its mobilizing skills to go after ICE, often targeting hospitality companies and others who provide accommodations to federal immigration agents.
Tracking their funding is difficult. A profile in Inside Philanthropy has the group receiving much of its initial support from the Rockefeller Family Fund and Wallace Global Fund. But since they’re not legally required to disclose donors, not much else is known.
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Pittsburgh’s mayor, Corey O’Connor, a Squirrel Hill Democrat and self-described “progressive,” has repeatedly said that if ICE officers called for any assistance, he wouldn’t provide any. “If an organization like that calls us, we are not going, we are not supporting, we’ve said it a number of times,” he said on Thursday.
The next day, a peaceful anti-ICE protest was held in front of the Federal Building, directed at U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). On Saturday, one is planned for Springdale, a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh, where a local was recently detained. On Thursday, Pittsburgh Police Chief Jason Lando told a local NBC news affiliate that rumors were circulating on social media that people were being kidnapped off the street. Lando said that Homeland Security officials had agreed to notify the city after an operation was completed. “We’ve been getting calls that someone was kidnapped off a street corner,” Lando told WPXI. “We can say we heard from them that it was an ICE operation, it was not a kidnapping.”
One thing that is certain. The country would not be in this volatile position if former President Joe Biden had not failed at keeping the border closed for four years. But he failed, and in an astronomical way. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of illegal immigrants living in this country reached a record 14 million in 2023.
What is happening now with detentions isn’t different from what happened under President Barack Obama. Between 2009 and 2017, he deported more people than any other president in U.S. history, with more than 3 million removed.
Yet a deep dive in national news archives found no references to Obama or ICE being called a “fascist, “Nazi,” or “dictator.” Nor was there screaming outside of hotels. Nor could I find any poop demonstrations.
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Instead, the stories were reported as straight news, presented with barely a shrug. The question is why. The answer, of course, is because of the obsessive fixation for, and hatred of, Donald Trump.
I couldn’t find any local coverage of an entire city block covered in poop, nor were people asked by the press how they feel about the anti-ICE movement — whether their tactics are winning people over. These are important questions, because it seems to me that there are lots of political junkies who are surprised at election results every four years. But it’s entirely possible that elections are decided by women like the one I met, dodging poop and who had had just about enough.
