A peaceful Portland protest led by Jewish leaders and immigration rights activists Friday afternoon resulted in the arrests of at least a dozen people.

Protestors blocked the driveway of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office at 4310 SW Macadam Avenue. Law enforcement officers warned protestors several times that they could be arrested for blocking federal property and about 11 were. Most of them were women, and some said they were college students from Portland State University.

At least two people were a part of the PSU group, Jewish Voice for Peace Portland, said Brad Pector, a community member media coordinator.

Several shots were fired from what sounded like a paintball gun which dispersed the crowd of about 60 protestors into the streets. The Oregonian/OregonLive couldn’t confirm what was used or who shot it.

About a dozen law enforcement officers, including Portland police officers and federal officers, were at the scene. One person was put on the ground and arrested across the street near the corner of Southwest Brancroft Street and Southwest Moody Avenue after the crowd dispersed.

Four Portland police cars are on scene at the ICE headquarters on Mowery. pic.twitter.com/1Un0SwZKql — Christina Morales (@Christina_M18) August 2, 2019

The protest started at Poet’s Beach Park, from which people marched down Southwest Moody Avenue, blocking traffic and a street car to get to the federal building. Zia Laboff, the protest leader, surprised protestors by telling them they would march to the building.

Pector said the group is looking to get in contact with people to get them bailed out. He said some could be released as early as tonight but had no additional information.

“We didn’t really know what would happen when they went onto the driveway,” he said.

Protestors sang chants and songs in English, Spanish and Hebrew at the march and at the federal building. Protestors demanded that elected officials close border detention centers, defund ICE and Customs and Border Protection and provide permanent protection for undocumented immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

Some demonstrators set up a line of bronze colored shoes, a pair of which was in a cage and carried in the march created by Portland artist Aimee Sitarz, according to a Medium post. The shoes represent the children’s shoes found outside German concentration camps during the Holocaust. They’re painted bronze because American families kept bronze baby shoes as a memory of their child’s first steps.

This rally was part of the Never Again movement, a nationwide political action in which Jewish people protest against ICE raids and the treatment of migrants at detention facilities. Never Again protestors say they advocate to prevent events like the Holocaust from happening again.

Laboff and others said that if people wanted to see things changed that they needed to bring these conversations to the dinner table with their families and participate in protests like these.

“This is not about immigration, it’s not about who is legal, illegal,” she said. “It’s about racism.”

Note: This story was updated at 5 p.m. Aug. 2 to reflect that about 12 people were arrested.

-- Christina Morales; cmorales@oregonian.com; 503-221-5771; @Christina_M18

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