Portland City Council member Angelita Morillo has taken her activism to the next level, releasing a video this week that sounds less like a civics lesson and more like a crash course in counter-surveillance.
In the nearly three-minute clip, Morillo urged Portland residents to arm themselves with burner phones, encrypted apps, and even Faraday cages to shield against federal monitoring, all in response to President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland to defend ICE facilities.
“Your phone? You should consider this a tracker and a listening device at all times,” Morillo warned, before laying out an instruction manual for digital evasion. Her advice included disabling biometric logins, lengthening PINs, using encrypted apps like Signal, and setting messages to disappear. For those “regularly protesting,” she added, the safest bet is buying a burner phone in cash at a local grocery store.
The council member didn’t stop at phones. She highlighted the FBI’s use of facial recognition technology in the arrest of Robert Jacob Hoopes, accused of injuring an ICE officer, and cautioned that simple masks weren’t enough to evade detection.
“If you just cover the lower half, guess what? You have left your eyes and eyebrows, which are the most identifiable parts of you,” she said.
Morillo concluded her video by urging protesters to be strategic, to bring only trusted allies, and to assign “jail support” outside in case of arrests. “I believe that we will win,” she said, “but we have to be smarter, and we have to be better organized than our opposition because they have every tool available to them, and we do not.”
Her comments come as Portland’s city council is reportedly working to expand sanctuary policies even further, limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. This aligns with Portland’s long-standing reputation as a sanctuary city and a hub for left-wing activism.
But the optics of a sitting city council member coaching residents on how to evade federal surveillance and skirt law enforcement will almost certainly spark national debate.
Critics are already pointing out that her advice sounds less like public safety guidance and more like encouragement for organized resistance against lawful federal operations. Supporters, meanwhile, see her as protecting immigrant communities and activists from what they view as overreach by federal authorities.
