Oregon Taxpayers Are Funding a Legal Army to Fight Federal Immigration Enforcement

Oregon is the only state in America that uses taxpayer money to provide free lawyers to illegal immigrants fighting deportation.

The program has represented nearly 6,500 people since 2022 and is actively being used as a strategic tool to obstruct federal immigration enforcement. The organizations running it openly compare ICE to slave patrols and call detention centers concentration camps. And a sitting Portland city councilor is coordinating strategy with them, at a wine and pizza activist night, on how to make sure as few people as possible are ever deported from Oregon.

This is not speculation. It is documented, funded, legally codified, and expanding.

And they told us all about it at the meeting of 350PDX for a screening of the documentary, Gas Me, Teddy on February 11—in the same space where the Oregon Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) hold their meetings.

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Oregon Is Paying to Defeat Federal Deportation Orders With Tax Dollars

The program is called Equity Corps of Oregon (ECO), and according to their website, it was built from the ground up to do one thing: prevent deportations through "universal representation". It launched in 2018 with funding from the City of Portland and Multnomah County. In 2019, the state stepped in with $2 million to go statewide. Then in March 2022, the Oregon Legislature made it permanent law, Senate Bill 1543, and appropriated $15 million from the state General Fund in the first two-year budget cycle alone.

Oregon Democrats have introduced a bill to inject another $10 million into the fund this year.

ECO has an unambiguous mission: to provide universal legal representation to all eligible immigrants in Oregon facing deportation. Not most. Not the sympathetic cases. All of them. ECO's own materials boast that people represented through the program are 5.5 times more likely to avoid deportation than those without a lawyer. That is precisely the point. ECO aims to maximize the number of people who successfully resist deportation, including those in the country illegally—regardless of their criminal history.

The program is jointly administered by Oregon Worker Relief and the Oregon State Bar. Oregon Worker Relief is a "community-governed initiative" that works with immigrant and refugees. It was initially founded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Another non-profit, Innovation Law Lab, won the state contract in 2022 to run day-to-day operations, the intake clearinghouse, case management, and attorney assignments. Innovation Law Lab is the same activist organization that Oregon's own Department of Justice credits with being behind some of Oregon's most inclusive immigrant justice policies, including strengthening the state sanctuary law and passing the law creating Oregon's Universal Legal Representation program.

In other words, the organization that lobbied for this law now gets paid by the state to run it.

The Portland ICE Office Is Being Used as a Coordination Hub—and They're Admitting It

The activists running this program will tell you openly, if you pay attention: despite massive protests to the contrary, they don't want to shut down the Portland ICE office right now. They want it open. Even the city administrator has come on board with this idea. Not because they support immigration enforcement, but because they use it as a physical anchor point to route their state-funded legal defense network to detained immigrants before federal officials can move them somewhere out of state where they can't help them.

Sandy Chung, Executive Director of ACLU Oregon, made this clear in response to an audience question at a 350PDX meeting and documentary screening on Feb. 11, promoted and attended by Portland City Councilor Sameer Kanal. When an audience member asked whether Portland could work to shut the ICE facility down entirely, Chung explained the strategic calculus:

The ICE office and facility in Portland, that's really a complicated situation. They're not a detention center. They are simply a processing facility. We first need to get rid of the harmful detention centers, especially the ones in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The Washington state one. Oregon right now does not have a detention center. We also need to make sure that their efforts to build any other centers in Oregon, we stop it . . . What does this mean? We need at least for some period of time people to be in Oregon . . . what happened when that ICE facility was closed down by the feds was we couldn't connect our attorneys in Oregon. We just couldn't locate people. We didn't know where [ICE] had them. And so we couldn't actually get our attorney to represent them . . . If they've already reached the detention centers . . . in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas, they have a lot less rights, because the courts there are much more hard.

Read that again, carefully. The ACLU Oregon's executive director describes the Portland ICE facility as necessary to their work—a logistical asset in their legal defense operation. When detainees pass through Portland before getting transferred to facilities in Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi, ECO's attorneys can intercept them, file paperwork, and get them into Oregon's state-funded free legal network.

Once they get moved out of state to jurisdictions with tougher federal courts, that leverage is gone.

Chung was explicit: the order of operations matters. First, shut down the out-of-state detention centers in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the ones where the activists can't reach them with taxpayer-funded lawyers for deportation relief. Only then, once those are gone and there is nowhere else to send detainees, they can shut down Portland. In the meantime, they want the facility open and to use it to inject state-funded lawyers into as many cases as possible before federal authorities can move people beyond ECO's reach.

This is not a humanitarian program responding to individual hardship. It is a coordinated, taxpayer-funded legal insurgency designed to frustrate federal immigration enforcement at every turn, by using the physical location of the very facility its supporters publicly protested, attacked, and demanded the city remove, as a strategic tool.

The Organizations Running This Program Compare ICE to Slave Patrols and Call Detention Centers 'Concentration Camps'

Oregon is not contracting with neutral legal aid organizations. The state contracts with, and channels taxpayer money through, ideological activist groups whose leadership publicly characterizes federal immigration enforcement as equivalent to slave traders, slave patrols, and Nazi Germany.

At the 350PDX event, Sandy Chung of ACLU Oregon had some more choice words for the crowd.

On ICE and Federal Law Enforcement, Chung said, "I think it's really important to listen to a lot of scholars of black history, who said, actually, they're much more similar to the slave patrols that are part of American history."

Chung said this about detention centers: "And honestly, right now, the detention centers… they are concentration [camps]. Right? And they're trying to increase them by basically buying up warehouses across the country. And a lot of the plans . . . look like historical documents, how slave ships were laid out."

This is the executive director of ACLU Oregon—a major legal organization that co-litigated the Portland tear gas lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, that championed SB 1543 through the Oregon legislature, and whose legal director is actively working on a new federal lawsuit seeking a permanent injunction against federal agents tasked with protecting the Portland ICE facility. She compares ICE officers to slave patrols and calls federal detention centers concentration camps and reminiscent of slave ships.

Chung also framed the entire effort in explicitly racial and ideological terms, describing the Trump administration as reinforcing and expanding the systems and bureaucracies of racial injustice, and characterizing the current legal campaign as resistance to "state-sanctioned violence and fascism." She told the crowd: "This is honestly very messed up and we have to fight back."

A Sitting City Councilor Is Coordinating With These Groups to Build the Legal and Legislative Infrastructure That Makes It All Work

Portland City Councilor Sameer Kanal may not carry a DSA membership card—his political ambitions won't allow it—but he votes in lockstep with Portland's DSA-affiliated 'Peacock Bloc' on city council and had no trouble spending his evening at a 350PDX strategy session alongside the ACLU Oregon, radical activist attorneys, and protest organizers. He was not there to observe. He was there to report on progress, rally the crowd, and coordinate the next phase of a multi-year legislative strategy he described as building a defense against the federal government "brick by brick."

Kanal outlined what has already been accomplished at the city level: sanctuary city codification, a detention facility impact fee, restrictions on ICE access to public spaces without a warrant, and what is coming next. The immediate priority is a de-masking bill, coming to the Public Safety Committee on March 17th, designed to require that law enforcement officers whose identities cannot be confirmed, including federal agents operating near the ICE facility, be subject to local police engagement. After that: a legally binding ban on tear gas.

He claimed that Portland spent $800,000 on overtime alone in a single month policing the area around the ICE facility and that he authored a budget note directing the Portland Police Bureau to deprioritize that overtime in favor of other law enforcement activity. He said police had not fully complied and issued a press release documenting the non-compliance. In Kanal's view, spending city police resources to maintain order around a federal immigration facility is the wrong priority. The federal government enforcing immigration law is the problem, not the violent protests and attacks against the building and the people tasked with protecting it.

Kanal then told the crowd he had six of the twelve city councilors on board; he could not tell them which six votes he believed he had. He strongly encouraged attendees to figure out the holdouts and apply pressure to them. A 350PDX staff member promptly named the councilors to target and identified which districts they represent.

What Oregon Has Built and What It Means

Oregon has constructed, layer by layer, a state-level infrastructure specifically designed to obstruct federal immigration enforcement. It starts with sanctuary laws that bar local police and sheriffs from cooperating with ICE. It continues with a taxpayer-funded legal defense program, the only state-level program of its kind in the country, that places taxpayer-funded attorneys in federal immigration court to fight detention and deportation. It is reinforced by city-level ordinances limiting ICE access to public spaces and imposing extra fees on federal facilities. And it is sustained by a network of activist legal organizations like the ACLU, Innovation Law Lab, and Crag Law Center, and others that helped write the laws, administer programs, and are simultaneously litigating in federal court to strip federal agents of the tools they use for crowd control in dangerous situations around their facilities.

Kanal, the DSA, and the ACLU say ICE is not a "legitimate" law enforcement agency. They have said so, in those terms, on the record, in public. They pronounce detention centers "concentration camps." They believe the federal government's effort to enforce its own immigration laws constitutes race-based violence. And they have used Oregon's Democratic legislative supermajority to turn those beliefs into law and to make Oregon taxpayers fund the legal army fighting to make those beliefs operational.

Oregon is not the first state to resist federal immigration enforcement. But it is the only state that has built a permanent, publicly funded legal apparatus to fight it systematically and is currently asking for another $10 million to keep it going. Oregonians have never voted on this. Their legislature passed it, their governor signed it—and lobbyists and far-left activist groups are pressuring legislators to expand it.

What Other States Need to Watch For

Oregon did not build this overnight. The organizations that designed and now operate ECO, including Innovation Law Lab and ACLU affiliates, are national in scope. The same advocacy network that lobbied the Oregon legislature for universal legal representation is already active in other states, and the playbook is not a secret. It begins with city-level sanctuary policies and immigrant legal defense funds, moves to county funding and pilot programs, and eventually arrives at a permanent legislative mandate backed by state general fund dollars. If your state legislature is entertaining bills to create universal legal representation programs for non-citizens, or if advocacy organizations are pushing to prohibit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, you are watching the early stages of what Oregon built over decades. The infrastructure Oregon has created is a model being studied and replicated.

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