Portland isn't 'burning down,' the president is lying.

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3. Fact check: The only fires in Portland were from ICE tear gas canisters that sparked small brush fires.

President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday: “I looked at Portland over the weekend. The place is burning down, just burning down.” Trump noted that an appeals court on Monday overturned one of the two rulings that have temporarily blocked his attempt to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, then added: “You look at a place like Portland, it’s just — it’s ridiculous, when they say that there’s no problem. The place is — it was on fire over the weekend.”

But Portland was nothing remotely resembling “burning down” over the weekend. It still wasn’t when Trump made these comments on Tuesday. And it wasn’t when Trump made such claims on previous occasions over the last month.

Photos of Portland over the weekend — including shots of an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest that was peacefully attended Saturday by tens of thousands of people — show a city very much intact and not ablaze. Portland city spokesperson Cody Bowman said the fire department was never even dispatched over the weekend to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building that has been the center of protest activity in recent months.

It’s possible that Trump saw images of small fires that started near the ICE building on Saturday after federal agents deployed tear gas and smoke devices to disperse protesters there. The Oregonian newspaper reported Tuesday in a debunking of Trump’s latest “burning down” claims: “Federal agents used tear gas against the crowd and sparks from canisters set several small fires, but rain and a lack of fuel quickly extinguished them.”

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/politics/fact-check-trump-portland-burning-fire