How Trump’s immigration policies could impact Oregon

During the first Trump administration, immigration enforcement sowed chaos across the Pacific Northwest, spurring legal challenges and fear. Legal experts and immigrant communities expect that to happen once more when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House in January should he follow through on his campaign promise to crack down on immigration.

In the days since the election, Trump has appointed three immigration hard-liners to key cabinet and White House positions. He’s also pledged to hire thousands of border patrol agents, and even suggested using the National Guard to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, pushing policies that go much further than his first presidency.

Across the Pacific Northwest, the immigration and legal landscape has also changed.

Since 2016, when Trump was elected the first time, Oregon has strengthened laws that limit or prevent communication with federal immigration officials. Previous contracts between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local jails were severed and are now prevented by state laws. Since Trump’s first term, Oregon also expanded rights to noncitizens through programs that allow for drivers licenses, access to health care and paying for attorneys to help with their immigration cases.

Immigration crackdown during Trump 1.0

During Trump’s first term, the administration tried to revive a policy that relied on local law enforcement to also act as immigration officers. The crux of the plan relied on police and sheriffs to provide information to federal immigration officers and hold people in custody on immigration detainers. Those warrants had already been deemed unconstitutional, including by a federal judge in Oregon along with similar rulings throughout the country.

“That was a real tension between the Trump administration and Oregon,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland. “The Trump administration was calling out Oregon as not cooperating with Trump’s plans to create this mass deportation.”

Stumpf said those plans largely failed because of Oregon’s sanctuary law — the oldest of its kind in the country. The law prohibited the use of state and local resources to enforce federal immigration law if a person’s only crime is being in the country illegally.

At the time, the decades-old law wasn’t well known. In Multnomah County, that led to some violations where sheriff’s deputies worked with ICE by assisting with arrests and providing information. Some officers reported they had not received training and were unaware of the law or any policies limiting cooperation with ICE. Headline-grabbing incidents coupled with a 2018 failed effort to repeal Oregon’s sanctuary law all served to elevate the statute.

In the years since, Oregon lawmakers have updated the sanctuary law and added more rights and protections for immigrants.

Oregon law

State lawmakers passed the Sanctuary Promise Act in 2021, modernizing and strengthening the original 1987 sanctuary law. The new legislation also laid out what information cannot be shared between public entities and federal immigration officials, and prevents state law enforcement from jailing people for immigration agencies.

The updated sanctuary law also reinforced that state and local police in Oregon are prohibited from asking a person’s immigration status.

“It’s unlawful for us to do so,” said Portland Police Sgt. Aaron Schmautz who is also president of the Oregon Coalition of Police & Sheriffs, an organization that advocates on behalf of dozens of local law enforcement entities throughout the state.

Schmautz said the organization’s members are not focused on immigration policy and any potential changes. He said if the federal government wants a new policy enforced, they will likely need to use federal agents.

“We have no legal authority in that world,” he said.

Tim Svenson, of the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association, agreed.

“Federal immigration is a federal issue and up to the feds to enforce,” Svenson told OPB. “We still operate and will operate in conjunction with state law when it comes to immigration.”

If there are violations of the sanctuary law, Oregon lawmakers also added a requirement that local agencies must report it, as well as requests from ICE or other federal agencies for cooperation with immigration enforcement.

Between June 1, 2023 and May 31, 2024, there were 60 reported violations of the state’s sanctuary law, according to the Oregon Department of Justice and the Criminal Justice Commission, the two state agencies tasked with tracking violations. Of those, 26 were requests from immigration officials made to jails, prosecutors, police, and sheriffs across Oregon. That’s a decrease from the previous year, which saw 84 reported violations, which included 33 requests to law enforcement agencies.

Last year, the city of Cottage Grove and the city’s police were accused of violating the law, using public resources to aid in immigration enforcement. In February, a Lane Circuit County judge agreed and ordered, among other things, the city to provide training on the law.

Oregon lawmakers have gone even further towards extending rights to immigrants. Lawmakers passed a bill in 2019, almost entirely along party lines, that gave people who are not citizens the ability to get a driver’s license. And last year, the state expanded access to health care for low-income residents, regardless of immigration status.

According to 2022 estimates from the American Immigration Council, about 10% of Oregon’s residents are foreign-born, including 117,200 people who are undocumented.

Related: Updated findings show nearly 1,260 possible noncitizens were registered to vote in Oregon since 2021

In 2022, Oregon lawmakers also funded a program to support legal services for immigrants in Oregon. Since then, the state has provided $22.5 million to assist people with their immigration cases.

“Oregon is actually well-suited because our coalition and our network of immigrant rights advocates have really developed some concrete solutions to help protect our community from these attacks,” said Isa Peña with the Portland-based immigration firm, Innovation Law Lab. “Of course, we don’t know what is coming per se, but I think we have built systems that will be able to respond, I think better than we did several years ago for sure.”

A 2nd Trump administration

During the presidential campaign, Trump spoke about using a 1798 law known as the Alien Enemies Act. The law allows the president to detain and deport noncitizens from a country the U.S. has declared war against.

“What Trump wants to do with that act is to try to deport not on the basis of a declaration of war against a nation, but focus in on gang members or cartel members of particular nations,” Stumpf said.

Legally, she said, it’s an open question whether a president can focus on deporting people of a specific nationality without declaring war against their country.

“Even with the Supreme Court and some of the judicial appointments that Trump has made around the nation, the courts may not cooperate with him in that project,” Stumpf said.

Despite the outstanding legal questions, lawyers are gearing up for immigration enforcement.

“Mass deportation is not that hard to accomplish very unfortunately,” said Stephen Manning, who runs the Innovation Law Lab.

He said the process begins by stigmatizing groups of people, then having the ability to incarcerate them and, finally, sidelining courts and lawyers from intervening in the process.

“You can depopulate the city of Portland. You can depopulate Miami. It is totally possible, but you got to have all three things,” Manning said.

Despite Oregon’s laws, the incoming Trump administration could try to force state and local officials to comply with federal immigration laws by withholding grants or other federal money, a policy suggestion floated in the conservative policy document known as Project 2025.

While many view Trump’s actions as an acceleration from his last term, experts note that President Biden’s administration has also taken a hard line approach to immigration.

When Biden took office, immigration enforcement started out with a different tone, one that provided migrants with temporary legal status if they came from other countries facing upheaval and supporting people brought to the United States as children by allowing them to stay in the country under a program known as DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

“Then it also became pretty quickly clear after the first year or so that the Biden administration felt that immigration and their supposed sympathy towards immigration or immigrant communities was a political weakness,” said Matt Adams, legal director of the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. “The Biden administration in many aspects became just as harsh as Trump.”

Adams cites efforts to limit the numbers of people applying for asylum. At the same time, he said the Biden administration didn’t try to eliminate DACA.

“You didn’t have the Biden administration out there separating children from their parents,” he said.

As for what may be coming under a second Trump presidency, Adams said it’s not so much aggressive enforcement. He expects that.

“They get to set, for example, their own enforcement guidelines. Every administration does that,” Adams said. “The question is, are they going to do it in a way that violates the Constitution or are they going to do it in a lawful manner?”

And if they move “roughshod over constitutional norms” that break the law, Adams said, that’s when organizations like his will step in, filing lawsuits, just like they did during the first Trump administration.

Community fear

Reyna Lopez, the executive director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, or PCUN, — an advocacy group for Oregon farmworkers — said Republicans' rhetoric on immigration still has a profound impact on communities in Oregon following Trump’s first presidential term. Cities like Woodburn, and other communities with a high population of immigrants, were targeted by ICE.

“It was really scary after the 2016 election,” Lopez said. “Woodburn was targeted that very first week that Trump was in office and there were multiple workplace raids that happened in the community, and that sent a chilling effect.”

While Lopez said immigrant communities do have stronger protections in Oregon from federal mass deportations programs, the coming months will be about preparing communities for what could happen.

“So some of this is going back to the old playbooks and tapping the elders around what they saw in those times and what was needed,” Lopez said, reflecting on the past several decades as immigration enforcement and protections have evolved. “And in some of these really scary moments where we had similar playbooks being introduced from the right.”

Lopez said that means training groups of people on what to do if there is a workplace raid and educating communities about their rights.

Ultimately, immigration experts say that no matter what policies the Trump administration advances, it won’t stop people from coming.

“Draconian immigration policies don’t stop migration to the United States,” Stumpf said. “No matter what happens on a policy level in the United States, that’s not going to stop migration. We just need to figure out how to handle that and handle it well.”

OPB’s Alejandro Figueroa, Joni Auden Land and Troy Brynelson contributed reporting.