U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers reportedly arrested four workers at a construction site on Main Street in Gresham Saturday, Oct. 11, according to Oregon state Rep. Ricki Ruiz, D-Gresham.
Courtesy of Ricki Ruiz
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested four workers from a construction site in downtown Gresham on Saturday morning, according to State Rep. Ricki Ruiz, D-Gresham.
Ruiz, who has been in contact with the families of some of the detained people, said the men were traveling from the Home Depot in Troutdale to a work site on Main Street in Gresham when they noticed they were being followed by two SUVs.
When they arrived at the construction site, Ruiz said, six officers got out of the cars and handcuffed five of the men. A sixth member of the construction crew fled the scene and was not apprehended by ICE, the lawmaker said.
The agents reportedly released one of the five men after he proved his citizenship, Ruiz said. But the other four were taken to the ICE facility in South Portland.
On Monday morning, at least one of the men was taken to ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Ruiz told OPB, based on his conversations with family members.
The state lawmaker also shared that family members told him ICE had a warrant for only one of the four construction workers arrested Saturday, which OPB was unable to independently verify. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return multiple requests for comment.
Alyssa Walker Keller of the Portland Immigration Rights Coalition said the organization received a report about the arrests Saturday and was contacted by one of the people detained. On Tuesday, she said she did not have further information to share about the incident.
Ruiz and U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter, the Oregon congressional Democrat whose district encompasses Gresham, said a recent Supreme Court opinion is at least partly to blame for the arrest of the three men without a warrant.
In a 6-3 opinion last month, the Supreme Court effectively cleared the way for immigration agents to make arrests based on racial profiling.
The court’s ruling removed previous restrictions on “roving” immigration patrols that targeted “those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English.”
Dexter said using someone’s race or type of employment to make an arrest was “insane.”
“It’s un-American. It’s antithetical to due process to use racial profiling – let’s just call it what it is – to detain people because they’re brown or they speak another language,” Dexter told OPB.
The congresswoman also argued arrests such as these are down to the Supreme Court “bending the knee” to the Trump administration.
Dexter reiterated that everyone in the United States, not only citizens or people with papers, deserves due process.
“It is not just for citizens and the fact that that is even a question amongst our population is just emblematic of the propaganda that our colleagues on the right have been really escalating and buying into,” she said.
