Are inflatable costumes and naked bike rides helping or hurting ICE protests?

A specter is haunting Portland — the specter of amphibians, or at least people dressed as such, in what’s become a regular feature at protests against the Trump administration’s deportation operations. As the White House continues to frame cities like Portland and Chicago as chaotic war zones, demonstrators in inflatable costumes (or sometimes wearing nothing at all) have brought a touch of the surreal and ridiculous to the otherwise grim confrontations with federal immigration forces. But as protests grow in both size and intensity around the country, these freedom frogs and their costumed ilk are increasingly becoming symbols for the demonstrators’ cause, for better or worse.

‘This moment is dangerous. It’s violent. It’s also absurd.’

For protesters, the incongruity of an inflatable costume amid frequently tense demonstrations is part of the appeal. The “juxtaposition” of a costumed animal “standing up to ICE covered in weapons and armor is absurd,” said 404 Media. That is part of why the Portland frogs are “hitting so hard” in the zeitgeist. Although critics may argue that the costumed protesters are taking the threat posed by armed administration forces “too lightly,” that is “kind of the point,” said Fast Company. As the White House works to frame anti-ICE protesters as “antifa supersoldiers” in an attempt to create fear around joining them at demonstrations, “viral clips showing gaggles of gyrating animals in Portland deny the administration” both points.

Protesters say the “absurdity” of costumed adults reveling in the face of ICE aggression is “meant to display community joy” and “helps to dispel” the White House’s claims of blue cities as urban war zones, said NBC News. “If you’re going to make it silly and say that we’re evil, we’re going to make it silly by showing how evil you are,” said Brooks Brown, a protester who helped provide dozens of costumes to demonstrators as part of a grassroots “Operation Inflation” project.

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The “juxtaposition of this moment is what’s resonating” with the broader public, said Whitney Phillips, an expert on political semiotics and narratives, to The New York Times. “This moment is dangerous. It’s violent. It’s also absurd.” And although the “animal army” of costumed protesters hasn’t “precluded shoving matches” or ICE arrests of demonstrators, it has “altered the national conversation about the protests” themselves through “internet memes and segments on late-night shows.”

Politics in the second Trump administration is predominantly split between “two internet-poisoned types of behavior, said Sarah Jeong at The Verge: “Auraposting” or an “earnest attempt to look cool” and “shitposting,” a form of “nihilism” that “refuses to engage with meaning, words, or reality” in a “mockery of seriousness.” In this context the frog costumes have “no meaning” by themselves. Rather, It is the “juxtaposition against an increasingly militarized ICE” that makes its “big googly eyes so powerful.”

‘If you think this is crazy, congratulations, you’re a Republican!’

For supporters of the president’s deportation platform, the confrontational silliness of costumed protesters is often taken as proof positive that the Department of Homeland Security is largely in the right. Republicans are “optimistic” that the protests outside ICE facilities in Portland and Chicago will do more to “drum up support for the Trump administration,” said The Washington Examiner.

“If you think this is crazy,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X, in response to a protest of naked bike riders outside Portland’s ICE facility, “congratulations, you’re a Republican!”

“I have a feeling a bunch of illegals saw this and just threw up their hands and self-deported rather than be subjected to whatever this is,” said Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet on X.

With the president drawing attention to the “small but persistent” demonstrations outside the Portland ICE facility, a “growing number of his supporters, including MAGA influencers, have turned up to confront the protesters,” The Guardian said. Despite “clear visual evidence of a small number of demonstrators in non-threatening attire,” conservative influencers who accompanied Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for a visit to the site last week “continued to refer to the protesters as dangerous radicals.”