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For the first<\/span> half of the summer, the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement field office in Medford, Oregon, remained relatively quiet. It was out of the way, tucked up against the regional airport and next to a preschool, a laundromat, and an undeveloped lot.\u00a0<\/p>\n A group of local volunteers monitoring ICE activity noticed something new on July 30. Vehicles from the Federal Protective Service, a law enforcement agency that secures federal facilities, were parked outside. Behind the barbed-wire fence, a long, white bus with tinted windows idled behind the gates with the words \u201cGEO Transport Inc.\u201d emblazoned on its side.<\/p>\n Grace Warner, a volunteer who just arrived that morning to spot at the ICE facility, was immediately concerned.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019d never seen a bus like that there before,\u201d she said. If GEO Group, a major private prison<\/a> and ICE contractor <\/a>was there, then immigration agents must be too.<\/p>\n Five miles away, she soon learned, federal, state, and local law enforcement, led by the Drug Enforcement Administration, were raiding cannabis farms. She drove to one of the farms, owned by a company called HempNova Lifetech Corp.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not an ICE raid. This is just a drug bust.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Outside, Warner was immediately approached by a spokesperson from the Jackson County Sheriff\u2019s Office, which is barred from participating in most federal immigration enforcement by Oregon sanctuary laws.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not an ICE raid,\u201d Warner recalled the officer saying. \u201cThis is just a drug bust.\u201d<\/p>\n That explanation would be echoed by spokespeople for other law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n By the end of the operation, however, activists monitoring the facility saw federal agents loading people onto the GEO bus. Seventeen workers from the raids were detained and, as night fell, hurtled north toward the Northwest ICE Processing Center, in Tacoma, Washington, an ICE detention center owned by GEO Group. (GEO Group referred a request for comment to ICE, which did not respond.)<\/p>\n According to emails obtained by local researchers at Information for Public Use and shared with The Intercept, local and state police were involved the raids at many levels: According to an internal sheriff\u2019s office email ahead of the operation, seven of the locations raided had Jackson County sheriff\u2019s deputies listed as the \u201cprimary\u201d officials; a local police official was the \u201cprimary\u201d at another site; a state trooper on a ninth site; and an official from the DEA on the 10th.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n When asked by The Intercept, however, the Jackson County Sheriff\u2019s Office denied knowing of any ICE activity that day.<\/p>\n \u201cThe DEA was the lead agency for this investigation,\u201d Sheriff Nathan Sickler said. \u201cThe focus of this case was not immigration violations. While there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe did not detain anybody for immigration purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n Oregon\u2019s sanctuary laws, which prevent local coordination on federal immigration enforcement without a signed judicial warrant, are a point of pride.<\/p>\n Though local agencies denied any direct cooperation with ICE\u00a0\u2014 and, in case of the sheriff\u2019s office, denied knowing about ICE\u2019s involvement \u2014 federal authorities appeared to have pre-planned immigration enforcement as part of the raids in the Medford area. Under Donald Trump\u2019s administration, situations like this are raising concerns about how Oregon\u2019s sanctuary laws are being upheld.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen collaborating with federal agencies, it is not good enough to trust things to be business as usual without verifying,\u201d said Kelly Simon, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. \u201cWe know the agenda, and it\u2019s on our local leaders to take no part in it.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked if local law enforcement detained workers during raids, Jackson County Sheriff\u2019s Office spokesperson Aaron Lewis said it was \u201cnot outside the realm of possibility.\u201d <\/p>\n The Jackson County Sheriff\u2019s Office was assisting with a large, ongoing federal drug investigation<\/a> through a regional \u201cIllegal Marijuana Enforcement Team,\u201d said Sickler, the sheriff.<\/p>\n \u201cWe follow the Oregon laws,\u201d Sickler said. \u201cWe don\u2019t communicate with ICE for those purposes.\u201c<\/p>\n Capt. Kyle Kennedy, a spokesperson for the Oregon State Police, didn\u2019t comment on whether the agency had any knowledge of ICE involvement or planning before the raid but said State Police had seized one of the raided properties and arrested people there, then handed over control to the DEA.<\/p>\n \u201cOSP did not have a role at the off-site location where the presumed transfer of DEA custodies to ICE may have occurred,\u201d Kennedy said. (The DEA declined to comment.)<\/p>\n In the Medford area raids, however, federal agents had anticipated ICE\u2019s involvement ahead of time. Not only was the GEO bus staged in Medford before the raid, the Federal Protective Service had also been called in beforehand to provide extra security.<\/p>\n A Federal Protective Service official wrote in an incident report obtained by The Intercept that the support was necessary because of the potential for \u201ccollateral<\/a>\u201d detainees \u2014 the term used for undocumented immigrants who are not the targets of criminal enforcement, but are swept up in raids. The federal security was there, according to the official writing the report, to ensure ICE could carry out its activities in the event of demonstrations. (The Federal Protective Service declined to comment.)<\/p>\n The DEA has been ramping up its role in immigration enforcement. In January, Benjamine Huffman, then-acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a memo<\/a> authorizing the DEA to carry out the \u201cfunctions\u201d of an immigration officer. Since then, collaboration has been close<\/a>. A raid at a rural Kentucky restaurant in May, led by the DEA, was also shrouded in the language of \u201cactive investigation\u201d and led to immigration detentions with no explanation<\/a> of how it happened.<\/p>\n For three months, no further information was released about the July 30 raids and the ICE detentions, including the role played by local police.<\/p>\n Regional media has yet to cover the raids and detentions, and communication from government officials has remained opaque, leaving community members without answers.<\/p>\n \u201cOregon has one of the longest standing and strongest sanctuary laws in the country,\u201d said Simon from the ACLU of Oregon. \u201cIt is imperative that our local law enforcement agencies are taking great care to protect local resources from being commandeered and used for this administration\u2019s cruel deportation machine.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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Who Knew What When?<\/h2>\n