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The Oregon Republican Party drew national attention this week after it announced the potential deployment of California National Guard troops to Portland in social media posts that featured stock protest photos from South America instead of real images from the city.
The Guardian and The Daily Beast reported on the social media posts early Tuesday.
The posts have since been removed from the party’s Instagram and X accounts. A post on the GOP’s Facebook account still discusses the potential deployment of troops to Portland – which a judge temporarily blocked Sunday – but has no image attached.
In an email Tuesday, party chairwoman Connie Whelchel said the graphic was created by a volunteer who was “working quickly to post breaking news” about President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Oregon.
The volunteer used images from the website Canva, which “unbeknownst to us included foreign imagery,” Whelchel said.
“No assertion that the images were taken in Portland was made nor intended,” Whelchel said. “The post was promptly removed once the misperception was identified.”
The post contained a photo of law enforcement leaning on police shields, which appears in the Getty Images archives as a stock photo of “South American riot police.”
The photo was pasted atop another photo of protesters surrounded in red smoke. The origin of the second picture is less clear, but a reverse Google Image search shows it’s been used widely on the internet, starting at least nine years ago. It was posted by Brazilian photographer Maurício Mascaro on stock image site Pexels.
The composite photo painted a very different picture than the one on the ground in Portland.
In Oregon, protests outside the Portland ICE facility picked up steam in early June, following the arrest of an asylum-seeker in U.S. Immigration Court. They were sometimes sleepy, but saw periodic flare-ups. Most protests had involved no more than several dozen people in the weeks before Trump announced in late September that he was sending “all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland.”
In a response to criticism about its choice of photos by one social media commenter, the GOP’s X account responded Monday: “It’s just a meme. Not Portland. But we could easily create a new one with screen shots from Portland.”
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