Portland’s ICE office has become a character in real-life drama

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Portland has been thrust into the national spotlight by President Trump who has spun a dark and often misleading narrative about the city’s robust and sometimes violent history of protesting.

His focus lately has been on the rather humble three-story building south of downtown on a street not far from apartment buildings, coffee shops and a spaghetti restaurant where families dine under ornate chandeliers as the Willamette River rolls by.

The building itself has become a character in the real-life drama that has roiled the city and state as Trump has activated 200 Oregon National Guard troops to protect it. They haven’t arrived yet.

Here’s a look at the history of the building, what’s happening outside and what happens inside.

Fiction vs. reality

Much has been made of the disconnect between the Trump administration’s wild descriptions of war-torn destruction — and what’s really happening.

Take Wednesday night. About one dozen people stood on the sidewalk next to the ICE building, including a man dressed in a yellow bird onesie with an American flag as a cape.

About another dozen people, including a woman with a small fluffy white dog, stood on the sidewalk across the street. On another corner, a woman sat on a camp chair narrating a live-stream.

The scene became a bit tense when a group of federal officers suddenly ran onto the driveway to let a car go out of the building and another one in. They retreated soon after and calm returned.

That’s not unlike what has happened many nights since June, when demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration policies appeared to peak.

Federal officers and Portland police have arrested about 60 people at the building on misdemeanor and felony allegations including assaulting officers, destroying government property and failing to follow lawful orders, many of them at the outset of the protests.

In addition to those people, federal officers have briefly detained others at the building and have cited them on low-level violations like trespassing and disorderly conduct. They’re typically ordered to appear in court at a future date. Violation hearings are held once a month in U.S. District Court and punishments generally involve a fine.

Trump’s attention and rhetoric has led to a recent bump in demonstrations, including about 200 people who converged on the site Sunday night after Trump ordered the troops to Portland. Police arrested two people that night after they said they saw participants with opposing views fighting.

Why is the building here?

The city granted land-use approval for the building in 2011.

The approval came after the owner of the building entered into a long-term lease with the General Services Administration to operate a processing center, according to the city. Before the agreement, federal immigration authorities operated two offices in the Pearl District and downtown.

The ICE office in South Portland handles the cases of immigrants from a handful of counties in Oregon and four in Washington, according to ICE’s website, which doesn’t offer much other information about its operations.

The Portland facility is one of three similar immigration offices in Oregon. The others are in Eugene, which also has seen small and largely peaceful protests outside, and in Medford.

The ICE office in Portland also was a focal point of media attention in 2018 under Trump’s first administration when hundreds of occupiers set up camp outside the building, with a plan to stay there until the facility was shut down as part of a movement that became known as Occupy ICE PDX.

What happens inside?

“ICE, like all law enforcement agencies, has facilities to process arrests, check-ins, and other activities in support of law enforcement efforts,” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in an email. “For some reason rioters have an obsession with this facility.”

The office is where ICE agents take people after they’re arrested and before they’re sent to a long-term detention facility. It also serves as a place for immigrants to do required check-ins with immigration authorities and for other immigration-related appointments.

“People go in there for various kinds of interviews,” said Robert Brown, a volunteer with the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition.

U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a Democrat who represents portions of Portland and the rest of Oregon’s 1st Congressional District, recently toured the building with other members of Congress. They were told about 70 people go through the field office each month for processing, she said.

The building also has temporary cells where people are held while they’re being processed.

Under the building’s conditional land-use approval with the city, immigration authorities cannot hold people for more than 12 hours. That’s a rule that Portland city officials last month said ICE had broken 25 times. The city gave ICE 30 days to address the violations.

City officials have said ICE’s violation of the land-use approval could put the facility at risk of being closed.

It’s unknown how many staff and agents work at the building, but Mayor Keith Wilson said last Friday said there was a “sudden influx” of federal officers at the building.

The agents who typically work at the building include ICE officers, Enforcement and Removal Operations agents and officers with the Federal Protective Service, whose job is to secure federal government buildings.

McLaughlin, with Homeland Security, didn’t answer questions about how many people work out of the ICE office in Portland and how many are there now.

Oregon doesn’t have a place for long-term detention of immigrants

Oregon became the nation’s first sanctuary state in 1987. Under the sanctuary laws, which were strengthened in 2021, “a person may not operate a private immigration detention facility within” the state.

People detained by immigration officials in Oregon can be released and asked to later check-in with immigration authorities or they can be transported to the immigration detention center in Tacoma, which can hold close to 1,600 people.

The detention center is operated by The GEO Group, a private company, for the federal government.

The company also runs several other detention centers across the country, including several in California, and has been sued for underpaying detainees who work at the facilities and has faced complaints of use of force and unsanitary conditions of the centers. The company has also faced lawsuits over the treatment of immigrant detainees.

What’s happening with immigration enforcement in Oregon?

Oregon’s largest immigration raid took place in June 2007 at the Fresh Del Monte Produce processing plant in Portland. At the time, it was also one of the most aggressive immigration crackdowns in the country, with 168 workers arrested.

The George W. Bush administration had increased worksite immigration enforcement in an attempt to penalize employers who knowingly hired workers without legal status.

There have been no raids of that scale in the state since.

Today, Oregon is home to an estimated 120,000 undocumented immigrants, or 2.9% of the state’s population, according to data from the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Since Trump took office a second time in January, federal officers have arrested at least 306 people in the state, according to the Immigration Enforcement Dashboard, an independent project developed by Relevant Research with data from the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Berkeley, to help provide information on the immigration crackdown.

But the data goes through only the end of July after peaking in June, and the number is likely an undercount because the federal government hasn’t made the arrest information readily accessible to the public.

Even though the number of immigration arrests had quadrupled in Oregon through early June this year compared to last year, the state remains among the bottom tier of states for the number of detainments. California, for example, saw more than 10,000 immigration arrests from January through late July, and that could also be an undercount.

Here are some of the recent high-profile immigration arrests in Oregon or involving Oregon residentsIn late August, an Oregon wildland firefighter was arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents while working at a fire in Washington state. He was released last month. In August, a group of Guatemalan farmworkers were detained near the Woodburn area while they were on their way to harvest blueberries. In July, immigration authorities arrested a man as he was dropping off his child at a Beaverton day care. In June, ICE agents arrested workers from a Yamhill County vineyard services company. In June, a Portland family, including four U.S.-born children, their mother and grandmother, were arrested while gathering with other family from Canada at the Peace Arch Historical State Park in Blaine, Washington. The children’s father was arrested a few days later outside the family’s home in Portland. Also in June, a handful of asylum seekers were arrested after their Portland Immigration Court hearings in the hallway or nearby.

“What’s happening in Oregon now is much more horrific” than in the past in the state, said Brown of the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, citing “indiscriminate” arrests, officers being “very physical” and breaking windows of cars they stop.

“They wear masks and they don’t identify themselves and people don’t understand what’s going on,” he said.

In previous years, he said, ICE agents would identify themselves and would wear badges and uniforms.

Another difference is that immigration authorities are asking immigrants to go into the ICE offices for check-in appointments with short notice. Before, if immigrants were following the rules, they didn’t have to go into the office to check-in as frequently and were given ample notice, he said.

“It’s also very scary for people,” Brown said. “They don’t know why they’re being called in on such short notice.”

People have been detained during those check-in appointments at the ICE office in Portland and also in Eugene, said Brown and other immigration advocates.

The Trump administration early on said it would arrest only people who had been charged with crimes, he said, but the arrests have swept up those who have done nothing wrong.

“They are definitely working with impunity,” he said.

— Maxine Bernstein of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed to this story.