About 120,000 immigrants lacking permanent legal status live in Oregon, according to a 2022 estimate from the Pew Research Center. The state has sanctuary laws in place, meaning that state and local resources are not used for federal immigration enforcement. Law enforcement officials in places including Marion, Polk and Jackson counties have told local media outlets they will continue to follow state laws on immigration enforcement.
Still, immigrant communities face uncertainty as policies change at the federal level. Kathy Keesee is a program coordinator for Unete, a nonprofit in Jackson County that advocates for agricultural workers and immigrants. She joins us with details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. As a candidate, Donald Trump vowed that he would carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As president, he seems to be ramping up the effort to carry through on that promise. The Guardian reported this morning that U.S. immigration enforcement officials arrested more people in the first 22 days of February than in any month over the last seven years.
About 120,000 immigrants without permanent legal status live in Oregon – that’s according to a 2022 estimate from the Pew Research Center. We want to get a sense for what life is like now for members of these communities. So we’ve called up Kathy Keesee. She is a program coordinator for Unete, a nonprofit in Jackson County that advocates for agricultural workers and immigrants, including people who are not here legally. Kathy Keesee, welcome back to the show.
Kathy Keesee: Hi, thank you. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for inviting me.
Miller: It’s been a little while since we’ve had you on. Can you just first remind us, broadly, what Unete does?
Keesee: So Unete is a community-based organization, nonprofit here in Southern Oregon and we have a lot of different programs. We can help people with the Oregon Health Plan, rental assistance, emergency shelter. We have a program where we work with workers in the illegal marijuana industry where we can offer them a large variety of supports. We also do classes. We do some legislative work to be able to pass bills that benefit immigrants or also oppose bills that would basically impact them negatively. So we have a lot of different services that we can offer. We do citizenship classes, driver’s license classes, things like that.
Miller: My understanding is one of the things you’ve been doing recently is a training for people who are not here legally. What does that training entail?
Keesee: I work with a team of attorneys that are immigration attorneys, and then we put together workshops for the community. A lot of it is related to basic know your rights. Don’t open the door. If someone knocks on your door and you don’t know who it is, don’t open the door. If you do have some type of interaction with ICE, to immediately start videoing. Also, there’s legal aspects to it, so if there’s a certain type of warrant, if it’s a judicial warrant, then you have to open the door, but we suggest only the person who’s on there, is physically on the warrant, goes outside to be arrested, unfortunately. But to not let the ICE officers into the home. Or if there’s also like a deportation order, you don’t have to open the door for that one. We try and give examples of those two different types of warrants so that people can kind of recognize [them].
We also have the number for the PIRC line, the Portland Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, the hotline. So if they do have an interaction with ICE, they can contact the PIRC hotline and they will automatically be connected with someone who can give them tips on what the next step should be or how to proceed along with the interaction with ICE.
Miller: Has the content of these trainings changed since the Trump administration took over in January, or just the sense of urgency in offering it?
Keesee: With the last Trump administration, we used pretty much the same information with a few minor changes. But this time, I think it was just the urgency because we were seeing a lot of fear in the community, a lot of fear. I mean, people weren’t going to the grocery store. They weren’t sending their kids to school. They were even canceling doctors appointments, things like that. And we were also hearing a lot of different comments. My husband would get calls, almost like four or five calls a day, that ICE was spotted at Fred Meyer, ICE was spotted at Winco, ICE was spotted at Walmart. So he would – poor guy – drive around all these different sites and check it out to see if there actually was any ICE action there, but none of them were ever confirmed.
Miller: What did you tell people? So, I mean, that list basically means almost a full shutdown of taking part in life – not going shopping to get groceries, canceling doctors appointments, not sending kids to school. If someone said to you, “I’m afraid to send my kids to school,” what would you say?
Keesee: So through the “Know Your Rights” trainings that we did, I think we kind of quelled a little bit of that fear because then families, after the trainings, did start sending their children back to school. At first, because it was considered that they would remove the sanctuary status of schools, so then the parents were afraid that ICE was just going to go in and take the children out. But the school districts down here in Southern Oregon came out saying that they would not honor ICE deportation orders unless the child was over 18 – and that was like a little different story. But for younger children, they would not be honoring the orders. So I think that was very helpful in families feeling more secure sending their kids to school.
Miller: Can you remind us, broadly, how Oregon’s sanctuary law works?
Keesee: So the Oregon Sanctuary law, as it stands right now, only applies to agencies that receive state funds. Like with ICE, if they receive federal funds, it doesn’t apply to them at all. But for law enforcement, schools, medical facilities, things like that, they’re the ones that have to comply with the sanctuary promise.
Miller: And basically, they cannot collaborate, partner with federal immigration enforcement. That would go against state law.
Keesee: Yes, that’s correct. They cannot offer up information about immigration status. And honestly, a lot of the law enforcement agencies down here in Southern Oregon don’t ask that question. Also, I don’t believe that that’s a question that’s asked at the schools. It’s certainly, I would think, not in medical settings, so I don’t think they even asked the questions about immigration status to be able to share that, if in case ICE or someone came in.
Miller: I mentioned the increase, the highest number of arrests by ICE officials in seven years, in just the first 22 days of February. Have you seen an increase in arrests or deportation proceedings in Jackson County over the last two months?
Keesee: There was a slight increase, but mostly it was just for targeted enforcement, which meant that the person already had a prior deportation order due to some type of felony convictions. So I think that, at the most, there’s been like 10 in Jackson County.
Miller: What does your organization do after, say, one member of a family is picked up?
Keesee: Unfortunately, most of those were before we started doing the “Know Your Rights” training, so like, very, very first part of February. So what we can do in that case is … we’re also part of an organization called Equity Corps of Oregon, who can offer legal immigration services for pro bono, essentially, immigration services for people who are unable to afford an attorney.
Unfortunately, there was one case that I can share with you. There was a family of four who had been checking in regularly at the local ICE office here. They were told to come in again and at which point they were detained this time. This was a family who had been victims of fraud. They had not only one but two attorneys who defrauded them from about $17,000. So they had deportation orders. They had been checking in regularly since like 2021. So they were detained. And the detentions right now are going really fast. I guess ICE has their own airplane now. They flew them up to Tacoma on Saturday morning. This was on a Friday evening, so Saturday morning they flew them to Tacoma. On Monday, they went before a judge and they were told, “don’t sign any documents.” So they didn’t sign any documents, but by Monday evening they were already in Mexico. They’re really going fast, so we didn’t even have time, really.
I was able to intervene with the family at a small level to get them signed up for the Equity Corps of Oregon, to get them into the system, but by then, there was no chance of them ever having any type of representation just because of how quickly it was moving. We were able to contact the Mexican consulate, who reached out to the family to be able to give them documents that said that yes, they were Mexican citizens, so that they could re-enter Mexico. But other than that, it was very fast. And they used to leave families or individuals in central hubs, like down in Guadalajara, Morelia, Mexico City, places like that. But now they’re literally just taking them over the border. So into Sonora, into the states that border the U.S., they’re just leaving them there.
Luckily, the Mexican government has stood up about 10 different sites where families, people who are deported can go to receive additional services. But other than that, I think it’s kind of inhumane that we’re just dumping people like literally right at the border. It makes them so much more vulnerable for crime, for human trafficking, things like that. Again, if they want to come back over to the U.S. So I think it’s really a shame that we are seeing those types of changes in how people are being processed.
Miller: Has the likelihood, maybe now we can just say the reality of a more militant federal crackdown on undocumented people, has it had an effect on the way you do your work at Unete?
Keesee: No, it hasn’t really. We’re a little more thoughtful about documenting things, but for the most part we’re here to help support the community in the best way that we can. And if it means that we lose funding for something, then so be it because we’re not going to … We’re here to fight for justice for the immigrant community and the farm worker community. So even if it means turning our back on them to be able to continue to receive funding, we’re not going there. We’re just here to be able to help protect them, give them the pieces that they need to be able to support themselves if they need to, or to be able to receive adequate services, legal services, immigration services, things like that.
Miller: I was also thinking, though, about the possibility of digital surveillance and wondering if the fear of that has changed the way you keep records or handle internal communications?
Keesee: Most of our … That is a good point and we’ve really been considering that too. But for the most part, we don’t have any big servers that anybody can hack into. So I think we’re OK. That may be naive, but I think we’re OK.
Miller: Kathy Keesee, thanks very much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Keesee: Thank you.
Miller: Kathy Keesee is program coordinator at Unete in Jackson County.
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