What’s going on in Portland, Ore., that might contribute to fewer ICE arrests? : NPR

Scott Simon, host:

The Trump administration has greatly increased immigration arrests in June – part of its promise of mass deportations – but it has trouble keeping the pace. The new statistics of American immigration and the application of customs, or ICE, again show arrests in July, about 13% from one month to another. The government has cited its need for more officers and places of detention, but the local resistance to arrests and deportations can also play a role. At least it is the hope of activists. Martin Kaste of NPR reports the situation in Oregon.

(Soundbit of traffic noise)

Martin Kaste, Byline: He is at midnight outside the ICE building in Portland, and the young demonstrators are on tiptoe on a line in the alley that marks the edge of the federal property. Sometimes they jump over it, going back and forth. We have a bubble machine.

Unidentified protest # 1: dangerous antifa with bubbles.

Kaste: This evening, this only causes a brief appearance at the main door of masked federal officers, and their warnings have made fun of the masked demonstrators.

Unidentified protest # 2: They said, go down from the aisle. It is a federal property.

Kaste: But the other nights, the demonstrations obtained a more important response. Michael Green (PH) often comes here to look at the action, and he remembers what federal officers have done a few nights ago.

Michael Green: They came out of each side door – all types of gas, sandbags, pepper balls. Throughout the block, it was just chaos.

Kaste: It has been going on for two months now. The air here carries a residual flavor of spray to pepper. The ice building itself is a plywood bunker, each lower on-board window and covered with curses painted by spray.

Chandler Patey: You see, without us here, people would forget, right? It would just make people stop thinking about it.

Kaste: Chandler Patey is one of the few demonstrators who is not masked. He says he was arrested twice, so the federals still have his name.

Patey: We must be here, and we must create a certain amount of noise and have a presence here. By having a presence here, we fork the ice to be also here. And when the ice is there, they are not removing people, right?

Kaste: But the reality is that this building always works. People with immigration cases come here for recordings and government cars come and go, although often escorted in the aisle by armed officers. Meanwhile, the demonstrations have annoyed certain neighbors, one of whom continues the city for not having applied its noise prescriptions.

The Tsar on the Blanche border, Tom Homan, said more than once this summer that he was heading for Portland to verify things – a prospect that demonstrators savor. But so far, he has not given them this satisfaction.

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Unidentified person # 1: Hotline.

Kaste: telephone calls like this can be more an obstacle to mass expulsion in Oregon.

Unidentified person # 2: I just said that there is an ice activity in Woodburn.

Kaste: this is a hotline led by the Immigrant Portland Rights Coalition. The idea is to obtain an early warning of the application of immigration, to pass the word and to quickly align legal aid.

Isa Pena: It’s a question of hours – often very few hours.

Kaste: Isa Pena is with one of the groups involved in the Hotline law laboratory – Innovation. She says that a strategy when they get a word of arrest is to deposit a Habeas Corpus petition before the ice can transport someone through the state line to Washington, where the detention center at the nearest night is located.

PENA: If we are able to deposit a Habeas petition in Oregon, we have received orders from the judge that the person cannot be withdrawn from the state. And because the ice has no detention facilities, they are often released.

Kaste: The fact that ice has no night detention center in Oregon is a practical obstacle to immigration arrests here, which are lagging behind the neighboring states. Another factor is the law on the sanctuary on a state scale, which limits cooperation by the local police and prisons with ice. State also helps to finance part of the legal aid for detained persons.

Ice would not meet the requests for NPR comments on this story. But earlier this week, internal security secretary Kristi Noem was on Fox News, criticizing the actions of the sanctuary jurisdictions.

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Kristi Noem: These people who are in our undocumented country – they break our laws. And that what I find – do I find so surprising by so many of these leaders in these sanctuary cities and in these sanctuar states, is that they read and readily protect people who break our laws.

Kaste: In response to this kind of criticism, Isa Pena says that she does not think that the hotline system makes more difficult for ice to do her job. Instead, she said, they just ask for ice to quote: “Do their job properly”.

Martin Kaste, NPR News, Portland, Oregon.

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