Comedian Arrested in Giraffe Suit Says ICE Laughed at His Trump-Epstein Jokes

Comedian Rob Potylo — a.k.a. Robby Roadsteamer — was dragged into detention while singing a Rod Stewart parody

The video is slightly absurdist. Three ICE agents, clad in full tactical camouflage with their faces covered by black masks, seize a man dressed in a fuzzy giraffe onesie singing an anti-ICE cover of Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” The backing track abruptly cuts out as two agents restrain his arms, while a third points a pepperball gun at other protesters, some wearing inflatable shark and frog suits. The man’s little giraffe tail sways as he’s dragged across a wide blue line on the pavement that reads “GOVERNMENT PROPERTY: DO NOT CROSS,” and into Portland, Oregon’s ICE field office.

The man is Rob Potylo — a.k.a. Robby Roadsteamer — a progressive comedian and musician who has gained a cult following for his raunchy anti-Trump, anti-ICE parodies, which he performs at protests across the country, including in Los Angeles after Trump sent the National Guard into the city earlier this year..

In the minutes and hours before his arrest in Portland, Potylo had been serenading the ICE agents and police officers around the facility with lyrics like: “Fuck I.C.E.” (to the tune of Y.M.C.A.), “What was the name of the plane / The one Trump flew with Epstein” (to the the tune of The Door’s “Touch Me”), and “If you hate brown people / And you are a Nazi / Come one ICE” (to the tune of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”).

“I get a little Voodoo Donuts. I go over there, and I’m ready,” Potylo tells Rolling Stone. “I have like, eight songs. I treat it like Nirvana: Unplugged man.”

On Wednesday, as he taunted what he referred to as “ICE snipers” who were watching the protesters from the roof of the building, Potylo was repeatedly shot with pepper balls. “They start trying to tee off on me with pepper shots, the snipers, and it’s like Apocalypse Now,” he recalls of the interactions that were captured on video by other protesters. “Couple minutes later, the snipers retreat, and I just do my thing again, and now all of a sudden, three ICE agents and army fatigues and rifles come right up […] they grab me and they pull me into the detainment tank like a Maximus from Gladiator.”

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“I’m not even past a blue line, the line they claim you’re not supposed to cross because you’ll be on federal property,” he adds. “I’m clearly not even nearer than shit.”

Potylo was taken to a holding area — “this little detainment thing, like a cell in Guantanamo but for these guys” — where he says DHS and ICE agents started “removing everything, my amp, my microphones, they wanted the [giraffe] onesie.”

“They start asking me questions and stuff: What’s your name? You do this for a living? Some of them knew my career, which was weird,” Potylo recalled. “One of them starts to play bad cop, and he says, ‘We’re going to bring you up on trespassing charges.’ And while they were searching me, unfortunately, they found two joints.”

Recreational weed is legal in Oregon, with the exception of possession and use on federal property. But in Potylo’s view, he didn’t bring the drugs into the office, they were dragged in along with him.

“I felt like The Big Lebowski, ‘We’re going to get you on the joints.’ I’m like, get me on the joints? You’re the guys who pulled me over the line. You brought the joints in here,” he laughs.

At a certain point, Potylo says he fell back into character, joking with the officers about what methods of torture they would use against him. “I’m just like, ‘So what are you guys gonna do first? You gonna use the hose? You gonna use the line? You gonna get up to the second knuckle? I’m ready.’ And they start cracking up.”

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“I start getting more comfortable. [Asking] what are you guys going to detain me for? Like, really, let’s be honest. I’m singing — ‘Trump was on the plane. He was chasing around young girls,’ and they start cracking up more,” Potylo adds.

The Department of Homeland Security — which under Trump has made a habit of overcharging and overstating the actions of protesters it attempts to make an example of — said in a statement to The Boston Globe that video of the arrest was “deceptively clipped,” desribing Potylo as an “attention starved influencer who flew all the way from Massachusetts to trespass on federal property. Three times law enforcement officers told him to back up and step off federal property. He continued to disobey law enforcement and moved further on to federal property. Officers continued to warn him to back up. Following his repeated refusal to listen to law enforcement, he was placed under arrest.”

Potylo left the ICE facility with nothing more than a citation for failure to obey an officer of the law, which will require him to return to Portland at some future date. He says he plans to sue “the living, holy hell out of that whole establishment,” but has also, in the course of his travels around the country, found that what’s happening in Portland may be the key to successful protest against Trump’s authoritarian power grabs.

“We don’t need to fight MAGA by out-debating them and being out-angry with them on the facts. We win by making them absurd, because that’s what they are,” he says. “You have to remember Donald Trump’s fame, he’s the original Vince McMahon from the early ‘90s. … Winning in debates really isn’t as much fun as having a night of dressing up in inflatable costumes, and supporting your friends, and maybe a little bit of a rave. A lot of food, and now maybe Gen Z is excited again, and now maybe we get a bunch of folks on board, because it turns into the Grateful Dead parking lot, and we bring that carnival everywhere.”

And Portland has been a bizarre political carnival in the face of the Trump administration’s incursion into the famously progressive city. Hundreds of naked — or close to naked — cyclists joined the ongoing protests on Sunday, in a peaceful display of flesh and outrage that made national headlines. The coalition of demonstrators who have maintained an active presence outside the Portland ICE building have become recognizable for their colorful costumes and party atmosphere. “I’ve definitely had spicier tamales,” Seth Todd — who dons a cartoonish inflatable frog at protests — told The Oregonian of his experience being pepper balled by federal agents.