‘South Park’ Characters Showed Up to Protest ICE in Portland

U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize loser Donald Trump recently attempted to send the National Guard into Portland, Oregon — presumably in an effort to protect Americans from the dangers of craft breweries and drum circles.

Well, Portland just responded to this authoritarian overreach in the most Portland fashion imaginable. Nude protesters descended on an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland over the weekend, all riding bicycles, as part of an “Emergency World Naked Bike Ride.”

But protesters who didn’t want to expose their junk for everyone to see opted to dress up as pop-culture characters instead. According to The Oregonian, around seven o’clock in the evening two protesters actually got married: one was dressed as a unicorn, the other, Kenny from South Park.

“We’ve been together for two years, and my partner is very passionate about the protesting,” the groom/“Kenny” told a reporter. “People can be fun-loving people and still protest. We wanted to show that this is about love and caring. We’re caring for other human beings.” 

Thankfully he survived the wedding without being, say, self-immolating while trying to set a fart on fire. 

But Kenny wasn’t the only South Park character to make an appearance that night. Despite the fact that he famously sang a sad ballad about minorities ruining his water park experience, Eric Cartman also participated in the anti-ICE protest.

Of course, Cartman has been known to attend other rallies in the past, sometimes with horrifying results. 

It’s possible that the South Park characters were selected entirely at random, seeing as how some protesters dressed up as pickles and the generally apolitical Care Bears. But then again, South Park iconography certainly has a more loaded context now that the show has been brutally roasting the Trump administration on a semi-weekly basis.

And Season 37’s second episode really stuck it to ICE specifically, depicting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as a puppy-slaughtering maniac with a perpetually melting face. She literally sends ICE agents into the afterlife to arrest any non-white eternal souls. 

While Cartman may not be part of the “resistance,” as The New York Times was roundly mocked for suggesting, randos dressed in giant inflatable Cartman costumes just may still fall into that category.