The Oregon Republican Party has removed an image that misleadingly depicted South American riot police from its social media posts about President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Portland. The Guardian first identified the party’s use of stock images unrelated to current political events, and the Oregon Republican Party confirmed to Hyperallergic that it had posted and subsequently taken down the posts.
The removed image, reportedly posted to X, Facebook, and Instagram, was a collage of two photographs — one depicting a small group of riot police, and another of a crowd of people holding up their phones at a scene engulfed in smoke. “Today POTUS deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Portland after a judge ruled that the Oregon National Guard troops could not be deployed to keep federal facilities and personnel safe,” the posts read.
The Oregon Republican Party removed the postings after the Guardian identified the police image as a 2008 photograph of “South American riot police” on Getty Images, a platform used by journalists to access a wide selection of news photographs. The photo, which some outlets speculate depicts Ecuadorian police, features the Spanish word polícia written on a shield.
The image was transposed onto another stock photo from the website Pexels, titled “anonymous people standing on a street among smoke during protests at night.” An emblem of the Oregon Republican Party was included in the upper right-hand corner.
In a statement to Hyperallergic, a spokesperson for the Oregon Republican Party said that a volunteer had created the image collage in order to “post breaking news about President Trump’s deployment of California National Guard troops to Portland.”
“The background to the announcement was created using stock photos from Canva, which — unbeknownst to us — included foreign imagery. No assertion that the images were taken in Portland was made nor intended,” the spokesperson said. “The post was promptly removed once the misperception was identified.”
The Trump administration has already deployed 2,400 National Guard troops to Washington, DC, and 300 to Los Angeles. Another 200 are en route to Chicago.
After a first court order temporarily prohibiting the deployment of troops to Oregon on Sunday, October 5, the Trump administration reportedly announced that it was sending the National Guard anyway. The president is reportedly considering utilizing the Insurrection Act to deploy troops, equating anti-ICE protests to “criminal insurrection.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the text portion of the Oregon Republican Party’s Facebook post was still accessible. It includes a lengthy unattributed quote matching statements made on Fox News this week by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, claiming that individuals are placing bounties on the heads of ICE officers. A series of hashtags in the post referenced Portland, ICE, and the phrases “Stop the riots” and “Lock them up.”
The altered image seems to reflect a scene promoted by Trump of the West Coast city as “war-ravaged.” Meanwhile, one of the most prevailing images of protests in Portland is of an individual wearing a massive inflatable frog costume, standing before police in riot gear. Videos on TikTok show police spraying what appears to be pepper spray at the costume’s ventilation hole.
