Raul Rodriguez Hernandez with Piñeros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, the Oregon's Farmworker Union, listens to speakers during the Day Without an Immigrant demonstration in protest of U.S. immigration policy and advocating workers’ rights in front of Oregon State Capitol Salem, Ore., on May 1, 2026, International Workers’ Day.
Eli Imadali / OPB
Oregon lawmakers passed eight immigration bills in the last legislative session that ended in March, and Gov. Tina Kotek signed them into law in April. The package of bills came as a response to a host of federal actions in 2025 that put immigrants and their families in jeopardy. Oregon was the first in the nation to become a sanctuary state in 1987 and has strengthened its protections in the intervening years. It is already illegal for law enforcement or public agencies to cooperate with federal agents without a warrant.
The new laws strengthen existing protections and establish new ones. Among other provisions, they direct schools and hospitals to create alert systems, formalizing responses to federal actions. And they protect immigrant’s data and aim to prevent employer retaliation. Isa Peña is the director of strategy at Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant rights organization that lobbied for the bills. She joins us to share more about what the laws will do and the difference they’re expected to make for immigrant communities in Oregon.
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. Oregon lawmakers passed eight immigration bills in the 2026 legislative session, and Governor Tina Kotek signed them all into law a few weeks ago. The package of bills came as a response to the federal government’s masked, militarized approach to immigration enforcement. Among other things, these new laws direct schools and hospitals to create alert systems in response to ICE activity on their campuses. They protect immigrants’ data, and they say that law enforcement agents in Oregon, including federal ones, can only wear masks in certain circumstances. Isa Peña is the director of strategy at Innovation Law Lab. The Portland-based immigrant rights organization lobbied for these bills. She joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Isa Peña: Thank you so much for having me.
Miller: Two of the new laws focus on places where there had been federal prohibitions on immigration enforcement actions, prohibitions that the Trump administration lifted. One of these new laws requires school districts and colleges to come up with an alert system if federal agents show up. What’s the idea behind this new law?
Peña: The idea behind this law really is about addressing what we were seeing on the ground. Schools had been forced to go into lockdown procedures, sometimes several schools in a single day, due to federal enforcement activities near or on campus. And so this requires proactive and reactive communication. That is needed so that all students and parents, regardless of what school they attend, are able to feel safe and informed.
We saw last fall the Trump administration arbitrarily target Oregon with Operation Black Rose, and our communities were feeling the impact. People were being disappeared and we were left behind with shattered glass in our streets and kids coming home from school to no parents. And so this is really about making sure that we all have notice of when federal agents are on campus.
Miller: What would that notice be like? Can you just give us an example of how you think this might play out?
Peña: Yeah, a lot of the schools already have existing notification systems, and so it is actually just asking those schools to use their systems to notify families when federal agents are on campus or have been on campus to make sure that all families are informed about what is happening.
Miller: So something like a district-wide text message or a more localized text message saying, FYI: Parents, there is ICE activity or ICE agents at such and such elementary school?
Peña: Yeah, exactly. It would require the schools to put out that notification for families so that they can make the best choices for themselves about going to pick up their kids or maybe sending somebody else, and it’s really geared at making sure people have the information they need to make the decisions that they need to make as a family.
Miller: Another new school-based law adds immigration status to the list of protected classes for the purpose of anti-discrimination laws. What effect will this have?
Peña: So the other school-based law really is about enshrining that right, that every eligible kid has the right to go to school and has the right to enroll. It also means that no child can be denied enrollment and participation in public K-12 education.
Miller: Is that currently happening? I mean, I thought that every Oregon kid, regardless of immigration status, can go to their local public schools?
Peña: They can, they can. I think the issue that we were trying to address or that continued to come up from families and advocates was not whether the right existed, but whether schools had clear and consistent procedures to be able to respond to immigration enforcement if they intersected in those campus settings. So this is really just to enshrine that into law.
Miller: What’s gonna change for hospitals under a new law?
Peña: Senate Bill 1570, the Healthcare Without Fear Act, really says that hospitals have to designate non-public patient areas and protect staff who share “know your rights” materials. We saw hospitals really be used as places of possible immigration enforcement, and recent federal policy changes also eliminated long-standing protections in hospitals.
It was already creating confusion about patient safety, about what role federal agents had in those spaces. So this law is really about providing clarity, and it requires hospitals to designate those areas as well as limit disclosures of sensitive information, and it prohibits retaliation or discipline against any hospital worker that shares lawful and accurate educational information.
Miller: Let’s turn to another set of laws. These are more attempts to rein in federal immigration actions, even if they don’t explicitly mention federal immigration agencies by name in the text of the bills. Can you describe what House Bill 4114 does?
Peña: Yeah, 4114, or Protect Your Door Act, really enshrined that if anyone tries to come in through your door without a warrant or your consent, that you have the right to sue. This is already a right that existed in the Fourth Amendment, but it really targets unlawful conduct and non-legitimate policing.
Miller: So, as you say, this does not establish a new right. In other words, could somebody have brought a civil suit in the past because an ICE agent entered their home without a warrant, before this new bill became law?
Peña: Yeah, so somebody could bring a civil suit, and while I’m not an attorney, I can share that, because people could bring in a suit, they would be suing the government. This bill really targets the unlawful conduct of individuals and really aims to protect families from those unconstitutional home intrusions.
Miller: There is also House Bill 4138. This says that law enforcement officers operating in Oregon, whether state, local, federal, they have to wear uniforms that clearly identify who they are and what agency they work for, and they cannot use masks unless they need to for specific reasons – for medical reasons or for certain kinds of work like undercover work or SWAT Team activity. What’s the idea behind this new law?
Peña: The idea is pretty simple. We saw that masked agents were operating anonymously, and we want to make sure that they are accountable. This bill generally bans masks on law enforcement during operations, and it ensures that Oregonians know who is detaining them.
Miller: Just a few weeks ago, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals prohibited California from enforcing its own new identification law, and a few months before that a judge in California issued an injunction over that state’s mask law. What do both of these cases say about the likelihood that Oregon’s law, which is not identical but very similar, that it will survive judicial scrutiny?
Peña: We think that the Law Enforcement Accountability and Visibility Act actually responds to that. Legislators learned from what happened in California, and we worked together with all of the advocacy organizations to make sure it was legally enforceable. And so we actually feel strongly that our law can be enforceable in our state.
Miller: One difference between California’s law and Oregon’s, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that one of the problems that a judge found in California is that the mask mandate – it’s funny to call it that – the prohibition on masks, in most cases, it only applied to federal agents, not to state and local agents. And am I right that that’s one of the changes that Oregon’s law made? That it would apply to all law enforcement, so you wouldn’t be singling out the feds unlawfully?
Peña: That’s correct, yeah. We aimed to make sure that our law is followed by all law enforcement, our local law enforcement agencies, our state law enforcement agencies, as well as the federal government.
Miller: The final set of new laws focus on data protection. What do you think Oregonians need to know about these other new laws?
Peña: So through Operation Black Rose and through a lot of the litigation that Innovation Law Lab actually sued about, we uncovered a lot of really devastating things. We uncovered that agents were using high tech surveillance, drones, and manufactured paperwork, and they were going after our information and our data. So the data protections were really about ensuring that our public agencies cannot sell Oregonians’ personal data to data brokers unless we have assurances that it will not be used for immigration actions.
Miller: As the daughter of immigrants yourself, what do all these new laws taken together mean to you personally?
Peña: These laws taken together really show how Oregonians can stand with Oregonians. I think when we saw all of these attacks happen to our community, we stood up. We saw Oregonians band together, we saw people take action, and we asked our legislators to stand up with our immigrant community, and they listened. They passed this large set of bills that really tell immigrant Oregonians that Oregon is our home and that Oregon aims to protect us, and that we can stand together as a community.
Immigrants are the backbone of our economy and the backbone of our nation, and I think as the daughter of immigrants, it makes me really proud to know that as a state, we can stand together for one another to protect the place we call home.
Miller: Isa, thanks very much.
Peña:Thank you.
Miller: Isa Peña is the director of strategy at Innovation Law Lab.
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