Independent journalist Nick Sortor, 27, was arrested for disorderly conduct Thursday night by the Portland Police Bureau outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
Following his arrest, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a full investigation into the Portland Police Bureau.
Sortor was filming protesters “getting maced by federal agents,” when they “swarmed/surrounded him, pushed him down into a flower bed, and someone threw a punch,” Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin said after speaking with Sortor.
Sortor “swung back and missed, then disengaged” and walked over to a group of Portland police officers, Melugin added. He was “shocked to be arrested by them, and he sat in the back of a police cruiser while officers figured out what to charge him with.”
Officers arrested two others as well, including 49-year-old Angela Davis and 43-year-old Son Mi Yi, according to reports.
Sortor was released from custody Friday morning.
More than 100 consecutive nights of attacks on the ICE facility
The Portland ICE facility has seen protests at their gates every night since June 1, and many of them have been violent, the director of Portland’s ICE facility Cammila Wamsley told Fox News.
She added that protesters have set bottle rockets off at the building, thrown rocks through windows, used lasers to target officers’ eyes and set up barricades to block ICE vehicles.
Even when things get violent, “it takes Portland police a while to respond, or sometimes they don’t respond at all,” Wamsley said.
She added, “It’s frustrating for us to watch people be attacked on the street and know that we don’t have the authority to be able to really step in unless there’s some nexus to federal law.”