Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield and district attorneys of the state’s three largest counties say they will start investigating and prosecuting federal immigration enforcement agents if they don’t stop using excessive force on Oregonians.
Rayfield and Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez, Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton and Clackamas County District Attorney John Wentworth in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem alleged immigration officers have demonstrated a pattern of excessive force over the past six months on youth, peaceful protesters, Portland Police Bureau officers and Oregon State Police officers.
The Trump administration earlier this year vowed to target liberal states and cities that didn’t comply with federal immigration enforcement. Oregon, despite its sanctuary laws, has since seen an increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement sightings and arrests across the state.
Many of those instances have been shared on social media, ranging from ICE agents breaking open a man’s car window after dropping his child off at school, agents pepper-spraying the vent attached to a peaceful Portland protester’s inflatable frog costume and agents pushing into a Gresham apartment pointing rifles at a family in a bedroom, including a 24-year-old mother and her 3-month-old child.
Additionally, the attorney general and district attorneys said in their letter they witnessed federal agents use excessive force in October when a group of 10 masked agents and a law enforcement dog stopped and held a group of teenagers at gunpoint at Dutch Bros Coffee in Hillsboro. And last week, agents arrested a 17-year-old high school student and U.S. citizen in McMinnville during his school lunch break.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Under normal circumstances, the attorneys said they would defer the investigation to the federal agencies themselves, but these are not normal circumstances.
“Any such investigations revealing criminal conduct by individual federal officers will be referred to the district attorney to evaluate for prosecution,” they wrote in their letter.
In their letter, the attorney general and district attorneys requested that the federal government stop all its unlawful actions in Oregon, provide appropriate training to its staff coming to the state, maintain communication with local law enforcement, investigate accusations of excessive force for potential misconduct and cooperate with state investigations into potential violations of Oregon law.
“Each time law enforcement acts unlawfully, in violation of our Constitution, or with unwarranted force, it undermines public trust and confidence in our government and weakens the very principles our nation stands for,” the attorneys wrote.
By Mia Maldonado of news partner Oregon Capital Chronicle
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