A MAGA reporter who was arrested in Portland, Oregon, has claimed he was detained by police for “being a conservative.”
Nick Sortor claimed that he had done nothing to provoke his arrest and had been harassed himself by a group of people described by his supporters as “Antifa thugs.”
The 27-year-old, who is a regular guest on Fox News and whose X profile has more than 1 million followers, was arrested Thursday night with two other people outside the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.
It is not precisely clear why Sortor or the others were arrested. Portland police said they moved into the crowd to make arrests as fights broke out. They arrested Sortor and two others.
“They say when they make arrests based on observed behavior,” Sortor said, recalling the incident to Fox News Saturday. “I believe, in these circumstances, that ‘observed behavior’ was being a conservative, if I’m being totally honest with you.”
“You saw the video, there was another video that came out yesterday showing a close up of what happened.”
Video from Thursday showed Sortor grabbing an American flag that had been set on fire and stamping out the flames. In another, he was seen being verbally abused by protesters as he walked down the street.
“Nobody, even my biggest detractors, cannot take that video and say I was the aggressor in that situation, simply trying to walk down the sidewalk with my camera,” Sortor continued.
“I get up and I walk over to the Portland police, not to report anybody because, honestly, I didn’t expect anything to be done anyway. I just walk over there for a little safety, you know, calm down for a few minutes.
“But instead I sit there, 7 or 8 minutes, and a sergeant walks up and points to me and says to the officers, ‘Cuff him.’ No reason given, the officers didn’t know what they were doing.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later blasted the arrest, calling it “extremely troubling.” Speaking to reporters, she said that Sortor had been “ambushed by Antifa and was defending himself from these assaults.”
“But instead of arresting these violent mob members night after night after night who are ravaging this community, the police arrested a journalist who was there trying to document the chaos, and everyone in this room should be extremely concerned about that,” she said.
The Independent has contacted Portland police for comment about Sortor’s arrest.
Before his arrest, Sortor had been posting consistently on social media about Portland, which he described as a “third world hellhole.” “Antifa is in full control out here. President Trump NEEDS to step in,” he wrote.
It was previously reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth considered deploying an elite Army unit to Portland to address what the president had called “lawless mayhem.”
High-ranking Trump administration officials exchanged messages about potentially deploying the Army’s 82nd Airborne, a division historically sent into combat in both World Wars, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Any move to send the unit domestically would likely face legal challenges under federal restrictions on the use of military forces within the United States.
