Oregon State Police hold a line behind Portland Police officers during a May Day demonstration outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., on May 1, 2026.
Mathieu Lewis-Rolland for OPB
The Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement has been multi-pronged: detentions and rapid deportation, warrantless arrests, the deployment and attempted deployment of the National Guard, and in some cases lethal force. All of these tactics have been challenged in courts.
In Oregon, civil rights groups and immigrant advocates won a significant victory in February, when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing ICE agents from making arrests without a warrant, except in certain circumstances. But the Innovation Law Lab says that the Administration is still carrying out warrantless arrests, and the non-profit was in court this week asking the judge to enforce his order. We get the details from Joni Auden Land, legal affairs reporter for OPB.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Federal immigration enforcement may have receded from daily headlines in the last six months or so after dominating them in the first year of President Trump’s second term. But aggressive immigration enforcement never really stopped. Now, a legal nonprofit says that the administration is violating a federal judge’s order in Oregon. The Innovation Law Lab says that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are arresting people without warrants and failing to document it. That was the subject of a recent two-day hearing.
Reporter Joni Auden Land covers legal affairs for OPB and joins us now. It’s great to have you back on the show.
Joni Auden Land: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: To understand what’s happening now and that the hearing you just covered, I think we should go back to last year. Can you remind us about the class action suit that the Innovation Law Lab filed last year?
Auden Land: Sure. Innovation Law Lab originally filed on behalf of a Woodburn farm worker in October 2025. This person, who was known by the initials MJMA, was arrested on their way to work by ICE during Operation Black Rose, which if some listeners remember, was the enforcement campaign that happened last fall. Attorneys for MJMA said the arrest was unlawful because ICE didn’t have a warrant for her. In January, it was expanded into a class action lawsuit, on behalf of everyone who’s been arrested or could be arrested without a warrant for an immigration violation in the state of Oregon.
Miller: So that was a suit that was brought. What did US District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai say in a preliminary order in February?
Auden Land: In that preliminary order, he said that ICE had to stop conducting arrests without warrants, except in certain cases. He said they could only do so if they previously deemed that that person was a flight risk, at risk of escape at all. And each time [they] had to be documented, and that documentation had to be sent to Innovation Law Lab’s attorneys, essentially.
Miller: That is the order that the legal nonprofit says the federal government is not complying with. What are their allegations?
Auden Land: They allege that ICE has continued making hundreds of warrantless arrests since the order went into effect. In fact, they say the efforts to make these kinds of arrests have only increased since the order went into effect. And attorneys cited arrest numbers provided by the Deportation Data Project to support that. I should say ICE has publicly disputed that data in the past, but the numbers do come from public records requests directly from the Department of Homeland Security. And in that time, the Innovation Law Lab says they’ve only received documentation for 24 of the estimated hundreds of arrests that they say ICE has made without a warrant.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for what this two-day hearing Friday and this past Monday entailed? Who was testifying?
Auden Land: It was all day on Friday and half of Monday, and it was pretty dramatic at times. It was four different men who were arrested by ICE during this calendar year, and two lived in Medford, one in Eugene and one in The Dalles. And essentially, they all shared their stories about ICE arresting them. Typically, it occurred while they were driving, when officers would suddenly surround them. And most of them described it as a terrifying experience. One other person [who] testified was a deportation officer for ICE who was known by the initials JG, and he was involved in two of the arrests that happened in the Medford area.
Miller: I want to turn to one story in particular. Can you tell us what the federal government had originally said before this trial about the arrest of those two people you’re just mentioning in Southern Oregon in July?
Auden Land: Just to give you some context about that arrest, basically, the officer JG described the process for identifying these people that he arrested. He and his partner were sitting in a parking lot at a Walmart in the Medford area, scanning license plates, looking for someone with an immigration violation that they could make an arrest on. And eventually, they got a hit and quickly obtained a warrant for the driver. This has increasingly been part of the process. In some cases, ICE officers even have printers in their cars and folders with blank arrest documents to fill out so they can respond in the moment. And then he and his partner, he testified, followed the driver to a nearby lake where these two were planning on fishing, and arrested both the driver and the passenger.
Miller: What came out at the trial?
Auden Land: So the original warrant was for the driver specifically. But after the arrest took place, officer JG and his partner realized that the passenger, who was known by his initials HDGH, was also in the country illegally and also placed him under arrest. Now, this is a little complicated, but Officer JG had originally written in his arrest reports that he had known before they pulled him over HDGH’s name and status all before making the arrest. But when he was on the witness stand in court, he admitted that that was false. He didn’t know his name. He didn’t know his immigration status. It was in direct contradiction to what he had written in this report.
And the officer tried to explain to the judge, saying that maybe he had gotten confused and that he was filling out multiple reports, and essentially characterized the incident as an honest mistake. Attorneys for the federal government reinforced that, telling the judge that this was not a lie and it was not malicious.
Miller: Can you help us understand how what you’ve just described, with the clarity that came out at trial that was not in the original arresting documents, would go against the judge’s order?
Auden Land: Firstly, the judge was explicit that arrests without a warrant could only take place if the person was a flight risk, at risk of escaping. And based on the testimony we heard, that wasn’t clearly established, that this person whom they previously had not known was at risk of escaping. And again, the officers are supposed to document each of these cases and send them to Innovation Law Lab’s attorneys. If these reports are false, it sort of goes against the spirit of that order.
And it also kind of puts into question the truthfulness of all the other documentation that ICE has been submitting about these arrests. Because again, if you’re submitting all these reports, the assumption is they’re true. And if they’re not, is the order actually being followed?
Miller: So how did the judge respond when he found out that an arresting officer had written false statements in a report?
Auden Land: That’s essentially what he said in court. Judge Kasubhai was especially concerned that this document was used to justify the issuing of a warrant for someone’s arrest, and that the narrative had a lot of discrepancies, as he put it. In general, Kasubhai did not seem happy about the situation. He even said that had the officer not been forced to testify, this never would have come out, and that that false information would have stayed on the record. He used words like “sloppy” to describe the process done by ICE.
Miller: As you noted, this was just one of the four arrests that immigrants testified about at the two-day hearing. What other stories stood out to you?
Auden Land: As I said earlier, there’s four people who testified and they were in different parts of the state. But a lot of these arrests appear to stem from ICE using license plate readers to get their initial warrants, officers sitting in parking lots, entering license plate numbers until they get a hit. Like I said, it could take us between as quickly as five minutes for these officers to get a warrant after identifying somebody.
And a couple of these stories show that the system does have its pitfalls. One man who was living in Medford was arrested outside the McDonald’s he worked at. Police surrounded him, smashed his window because they were afraid he had a weapon in his car, and arrested him. But it turns out he was driving a relative’s car, and they thought he was a different person. When ICE officers realized they had arrested the wrong person, they let him go.
Another man was arrested in a Walmart parking lot in Hood River. And when he finally saw the paperwork of his arrest, he said agents had written his brother’s car, which was a similar make and model. It’s like a Toyota Camry versus a Toyota Corolla. And he says it was a case of mistaken identity, but he still spent three months at the Tacoma ICE Detention Center and was only released a couple of weeks ago.
Experts I talked to say this method of ICE, going in public areas, running license plates, is becoming more common. I spoke with Angelina Godoy, she’s a professor and director of the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights. And she said the number of these types of arrests in Washington State at least has surged in the past few months. Now, they don’t have figures for Oregon, but she says they’re seeing this happen in multiple states, and she says it has risks.
Angelina Godoy [recording]: What it allows them to do is identify somebody driving a car, say, “That car looks suspicious,” and then just query that person’s information. That enables a kind of racial and also occupational profiling of the arrests that we have seen that we’re documenting here in Washington. The number that are on clearly work vehicles or vehicles associated with either construction or landscaping business is off the charts.
Auden Land: She also says these arrests can be more violent, because imagine you are suddenly surrounded by five [or] six vehicles with masked men jumping out with weapons. It can be very confrontational and very scary for some people.
Miller: My understanding is that the judge gave both sides something like a week to provide more information. Let’s say that Judge Kasubhai agrees with the plaintiffs, that the Trump administration has been ignoring his order, has been arresting people who are not likely to flee without a warrant, and not providing that information to the other side. Practically speaking, what options does he actually have to change that behavior?
Auden Land: Difficult to say. Judges have a lot of discretion when enforcing these kinds of orders, and it’ll really be up to him in the end.
I will say, as far as what the plaintiffs [and] Innovation Law Lab are asking for, they’re not seeking any monetary damages or any attorney fees, anything like that. Really, they’re seeking compliance with the original order. But in addition, now they’re also seeking body camera footage from all those arrests, which ICE officers now have to use for these encounters. So that could add some additional accountability measures. Ultimately though, it’s up to Judge Kasubhai. He could grant those requests that they’re making, or he could go even further than that if he sees fit. We won’t really know until the order comes out next week, maybe.
Miller: Joni, thanks very much.
Auden Land: Thank you.
Miller: Joni Auden Land, an OPB reporter covering legal affairs.
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