Federal agents on Wednesday stopped a van in Woodburn and detained 14 farmworkers on board, an immigrant rights organization said. It’s the latest in a string of large immigration arrests in Woodburn, where more than half of the population is Latino.
In late October, at least 35 people were arrested in one day, immigrants rights groups reported, and in August, a group of farm workers from Guatemala were also detained by immigration authorities when they were on their way to pick berries.
Natalie Lerner, a board member with the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, which verifies and tracks immigration arrests in Oregon, said the latest arrests took place Wednesday morning.
Lerner believes 15 workers were in the van stopped by immigration agents, but one worker was released. She said she didn’t know what kind of field work they did.
The Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition is concerned that federal agents are routinely stopping vans and arresting most of the people inside, Lerner said. This is the third or fourth time it has happened in Oregon, she said.
“I would be extremely surprised if there was a warrant for anyone more than the owner of the van, if that,” Lerner said. “Based on these patterns of arrests I would not be surprised if tactics of questionable legality were used.”
Immigration enforcement started to intensify in Oregon in October and has continued to ramp up. Masked agents have used aggressive tactics to drag people from cars and pull people from their homes, sometimes at gunpoint. U.S. citizens have also been detained by federal agents in Oregon.
The exact number of people caught up in Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Oregon isn’t public because federal authorities don’t make arrest figures regularly accessible.
A total of 373 immigration arrests were reported to the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition in November. A federal immigration official touted on social media that 560 arrests had been carried out in the Portland area in October.