Immigration officers posted outside of schools in Woodburn and Wilsonville. A man dressed as a construction worker escorted by eight officers into a white van at a strip mall in Southeast Portland. A bedroom door busted in by federal agents, weapons drawn, as a baby cries in the background.

Throughout western Oregon, immigration arrests appear to have spiked this week. Social media likewise has flooded with videos of reported apprehensions and people confronting federal agents.

At the same time, attorneys representing farmworkers and a free legal clinic on Thursday asked a federal judge for a temporary restraining order, saying their clients are being transported out of state quicker than they can make contact with counsel.

The attorneys called it a “wave of coordinated arrests.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday on the apparent increase. Responding to a separate inquiry earlier this week, an agency spokesperson said that their “operational tempo and increased interest in our mission” made it difficult to respond to requests from news organizations about individual arrests.

It’s unclear exactly how many people have been arrested by officers with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so far, but attorneys, witnesses and immigrants’ rights groups are reporting a drastic uptick in arrests.

In interviews with OPB and in court documents, they described several episodes this week that demonstrate how federal agents appear to have aggressively stepped up their enforcement.

“Just in the past 24 hours at least three detentions happened in Woodburn: two young men were detained outside their apartment complex and a third, senior man, was detained in the street,” Reyna Lopez, president of the farm workers union Pineros y Campesinos del Noroeste, wrote in court filing dated Wednesday.

More than 170 US citizens have been held by immigration agents. They’ve been kicked, dragged and detained for days

A Portland-based rapid response hotline where people can report seeing ICE agents and request legal help has apparently been ringing off the hook. The hotline received roughly 550 calls between Monday and Thursday afternoon. Normally, it gets about 700 calls in an entire month.

“Calls started to ring early in the morning and continued to pile up throughout the day,” John Walsh, a volunteer with the hotline said in a court declaration, noting the calls peaked Wednesday. “There were so many reports of detentions and ICE actions that the operators were constantly busy.”

Many arrests are being reported outside the Portland city center, despite the fact that the ICE facility there has been a spotlight of nationwide attention. Many arrests this week were reported in Gresham, Hillsboro, Cornelius, Woodburn and Beaverton — suggesting the federal agents are targeting communities with larger immigrant populations.

One business owner interviewed by OPB, who asked not to be identified out of fear of repercussions, recalled watching an arrest on the Tualatin Valley Highway around noon on Wednesday. He said he watched four vehicles driven by ICE officers box-in a truck and force the driver to stop in traffic.

The witness said ICE agents then got out of their cars, approached the truck, and without knocking or appearing to present a warrant, smashed the driver’s window.

“They smashed the window, pointed guns at him, drug him out, cuffed him and threw him in the SUV,” the witness said. In a video of the latter half of the incident, which has circulated on social media, ICE agents can be seen putting the man in the back of one of their cars and quickly driving off.

Four other arrests occurred at a construction site in Gresham over the weekend. Federal immigration officers were targeting just one of the men from Mexico, who an ICE spokesperson said had been previously removed from the U.S. twice. The officers then “identified” three other men to arrest.

“When ICE encounters a targeted illegal alien, ICE will screen all individuals in a group to ensure that anyone violating U.S. immigration laws is held accountable,” the spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.

Portland’s ICE building closed for 22 days this summer, but immigration arrests and detentions hardly slowed

In at least two other videos posted to social media and shared with OPB, masked federal immigration officers are seen orchestrating arrests in broad daylight.

Attorneys say they’re unable to reach clients

In the lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Eugene, immigration attorneys report being unable to reach arrested people before they are transferred out of the state. That’s a constitutional violation, they argue.

The lawsuit seeks a restraining order that, if granted, would prevent ICE and their contractors from transferring anyone taken into civil immigration detention in Oregon outside the state for three business days, until they could “knowingly and affirmatively” waive in writing their right to counsel under the Fifth Amendment.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of CLEAR Clinic, which provides free legal services, and Pineros y Campesinos del Noroeste.

“Rapid transfers outside of Oregon, including deportations, have occurred before detained individuals have had any opportunities to obtain or communicate with counsel,” wrote attorneys with Innovation Law Lab, which is representing the union and clinic.

In some cases, the attorneys wrote, federal immigration officials “have purposely transferred detained people outside the state of Oregon as quickly as possible in order to thwart attorneys’ efforts to offer detained people legal representation and to undermine this Court’s jurisdiction.”

Federal data analyzed by OPB shows that immigration detainees in the Portland offices are often transferred within hours to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, or the Florence Service Processing Center in Florence, Arizona.

Oregon doesn’t have immigration detention facilities, in part, because the state’s sanctuary law prevents local jails from contracting to hold people arrested for civil immigration offenses.

After someone is detained by ICE, attorneys try to move quickly to make contact, they wrote in court filings. When people phone the “rapid response” hotlines, operators collect information and relay it to attorneys. Attorneys then try to make contact with potential clients as quickly as possible

“In my experience, when people have access to attorneys, it has resulted in many of them being released from ICE custody,” Eugene attorney Katrina Kilgren stated in court filings.

The University of Pennsylvania Law Review noted in a 2015 article that people who had an immigration attorney were approximately five times more likely to win their case compared to those who represented themselves.

Attorneys said in the filing they are either running into uncooperative ICE agents or detainees are quickly transferred out of Oregon. Once detainees leave the state it can be more difficult for attorneys to get legal protections for their clients, especially if lawyers don’t know where they’ve been sent.

Lawmakers condemn ICE arrest of four Gresham construction workers

Kilgren expressed concern that several detainees on Wednesday hadn’t yet met with a lawyer.

“Out of a group of people that were detained that day, only one was able to get representation and challenge his detention,” Kilgren stated in her sworn declaration with the court. “If the others would have had the opportunity to meet with an attorney, my colleagues or I could have been able to assist them and potentially challenge an unlawful detention.”

Another attorney, Josephine Moberg, noted as part of the lawsuit the resistance she says she faced while trying to reach her client who was detained and being held at the Portland ICE office.

Around 11:30 a.m. on Sept. 30, just hours after the arrest, Moberg asked to see her client, but an ICE agent at the entrance told her the man had refused to meet an attorney.

Moberg told the agent that her client might have “TPS” — short for temporary protected status, making him eligible to remain in the United States. Moberg wrote, “the agent responded that he did not know what TPS stood for, he guessed ‘Third Party Spaghetti’ and laughed. He closed the door without letting me inside.”

Moberg returned later, she wrote in court filings, and managed to get a meeting with her client. The client told Moberg that he hadn’t refused any visits. An ICE agent ended the meeting after a half-hour. Her client was then transported out of state, she stated.

“The stakes for Oregonians caught up in this unlawful dragnet are high,” according to the lawsuit.

“Individuals arrested in immigration enforcement actions may not only be rapidly transferred outside of Oregon and far from their communities of support, but they can also be sent quickly to third countries — like South Sudan, Eswatini, El Salvador, or Libya — where they have never been before and where the government takes the position that they are beyond the reach of this Court’s jurisdiction and ability to remedy any unlawful detention or transfer.”

The suit also refers to a meeting between immigration officials and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. At a May meeting, Miller reportedly told 50 officials from DHS to “target Home Depot and 7-Eleven stores.”

According to interviews OPB conducted with witnesses and a state lawmaker, at least five arrests this week — four in Gresham over the weekend and one in Hillsboro on Wednesday — occurred after ICE agents followed their targets from a Home Depot.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/16/ice-high-profile-arrests/