The Legal Machine Behind Oregon’s Open Borders Rebellion—And Why Your State Should Pay Attention
The state works directly with these non-profit organizations to coordinate resistance to federal law.
Oregon did not build its immigration enforcement resistance network by accident. Behind the legislation, activism and protests, and sympathetic press coverage, is a coordinated network of legal non-profit organizations—some Oregon-grown, some parachuted in from out of state—working systematically to dismantle federal immigration enforcement using tax dollars, foundation money, and their own brazen confidence that nobody is watching. They are not satisfied with just the deep-blue sanctuary state of Oregon— they are just getting started on the rest of the country.
What follows is not speculation, but what they have broadcast themselves.
Innovation Law Lab: The Architect
Start with Innovation Law Lab. Founded in Portland in 2014 by attorney Stephen Manning, Innovation Law Lab describes itself as “equal parts lawyer, coder, and organizer.” That framing is surprisingly more honest than most activist organizations manage. They are not primarily a legal services provider. They are an infrastructure builder — and Oregon is their flagship project.
Manning and his organization were present at every turning point in the construction of Oregon’s deportation defense system. Innovation Law Lab helped launch Oregon Worker Relief in 2020, the COVID cash distribution network that became the financial foundation for everything that followed.
In the spring of 2020, Oregon legislators were in an emergency session. It was an emergency that they themselves created.
— Restoration News (@NewsRestoration) April 16, 2026
They shuttered businesses, killed livelihoods and drove hundreds of thousands of workers into the unemployment lines—and now, while ordinary Oregonians… pic.twitter.com/V7iAVT2iGF
They designed what they call “Massive Collaborative Representation”—a technology-driven model that allows groups of lawyers to represent hundreds of people at once, specifically built to overwhelm immigration courts with volume—and that model now powers the Equity Corps of Oregon. They lobbied Senate Bill 1543 into existence, and in August 2022 they won the state contract to run the ECO clearinghouse, the central nervous system of the program they designed and advocated for.
Oregon’s Department of Justice, led by radical Attorney General Dan Rayfield (D), makes their role plain on the state’s official immigration resources page. The DOJ credits Innovation Law Lab by name with authoring both Oregon’s sanctuary law and the universal representation program. The same organization that wrote the law got paid by the state to run it. In Oregon, that is not a scandal. This is standard operating procedure.
On top of being awarded that state contract, Innovation Law Lab is simultaneously running a cascade of federal lawsuits against ICE. In February 2026, a federal judge granted their motion in a warrantless arrests case, ordering DHS to stop making warrantless arrests in Oregon without completing required flight risk analyses. They have additional active cases challenging ICE’s use of facial recognition surveillance, its denial of access to counsel at the Portland detention facility, and its policy of enforcing immigration law near schools and churches, and they have won two separate FOIA lawsuits forcing the federal government to release internal enforcement procedure manuals that now give the entire network a roadmap for challenging deportation decisions.
Innovation Law Lab calls itself “radical” and describes federal immigration enforcement as an “industry of misery.” Manning sits on the board of the ACLU of Oregon and previously served on the City of Portland’s Human Rights Commission. Oregon taxpayers are funding his clearinghouse contract while he litigates against the federal government in Oregon courts, and nobody in Salem seems to find that arrangement worthy of questioning.
Innovation Law Lab is not the only arm of this network filing cases in Oregon’s federal courts. CLEAR Clinic, a Portland-based nonprofit providing free immigration legal counsel, and PCUN — Oregon’s farmworker union and one of the founding organizations of Oregon Worker Relief — jointly sued DHS and ICE in October 2025, alleging federal agents deliberately deny detained immigrants access to their attorneys before transferring them out of state. The ACLU Oregon has filed its own cases in conjunction with Innovation Law Lab challenging the secret termination of an Oregon State University PhD student’s visa with no notice and no stated reason. These are not independent organizations, they are the same network, working towards the same goal: using multiple legal vehicles simultaneously to ensure that when one avenue closes, another one opens.
Oregon Worker Relief: The Money Handler
Oregon Worker Relief controls the purse. SB 1543 wrote it into permanent law as the designated fiscal agent for the Universal Representation Fund, and it now administers the statewide program, oversees the navigator network embedded in communities across Oregon, and runs what it calls the ECO Zone, a community legal clinic and meeting space in Portland.
Oregon Worker Relief is not a government agency. In fact, it is a coalition of activist nonprofits that the Oregon Legislature decided to hand public money to directly with no government intermediary, a structure that was not accidental because it means no meaningful oversight and no easy way for legislators or taxpayers to demand accountability for how the money is spent. Oregon Worker Relief governs itself through its own network of member organizations—the same activist coalition it was born from in the spring of 2020.
ACLU Oregon: The Political Cover
The ACLU Oregon provides political and legal credibility that makes the whole operation harder to attack. Sandy Chung, its Executive Director, sat on stage at a recent 350 PDX event alongside Portland City Councilor Sameer Kanal and described ICE agents as similar to “slave patrols” and detention centers as “ slave ships,” and she is part of the same coalition that pushed SB 1543 over the finish line. The ACLU Oregon’s board includes Innovation Law Lab founder Stephen Manning. These organizations share leadership, strategy, and the same ultimate goal.
The Out of State Money: Vera Institute
The intellectual framework for Oregon’s universal representation program came from New York, where the Vera Institute of Justice, a left-of-center criminal and immigration justice organization, developed the “Advancing Universal Representation” toolkit that Oregon’s program explicitly cites in its own standards and guidelines. Oregon Worker Relief and Innovation Law Lab did not invent the model—they implemented a strategic playbook that Vera had already written and actively shopped to receptive jurisdictions across the country.
Vera’s approach is calculated and well documented. Their SAFE Initiative used private foundation money as what they call “catalyst funds,” seed money placed in jurisdictions specifically to incentivize governments to commit public dollars with the goal of making programs permanent and then replicating them elsewhere. Oregon fit that model precisely—private money arrived first, which brought state dollars behind it, and by the time SB 1543 passed in 2022 the program was permanent and Vera could show this model works.
Who funds Vera? The Open Society Foundations—George Soros’s philanthropic network—has given Vera at least $11 million, with millions more coming from Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and MacKenzie Scott. The Trump administration terminated nearly $5 million in federal grants to Vera in 2025, citing opposition to the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda, and Vera called it political targeting while the administration called it a conflict of priorities.
Both were telling the truth about what this fight actually is.
The National Immigration Litigation Alliance: The Legal Muscle
The National Immigration Litigation Alliance, known as NILA, is a national impact litigation organization that co-counsels with Innovation Law Lab on multiple Oregon cases, with a stated mission of building the capacity of immigration attorneys to litigate in federal court—in plain English, training and funding lawyers specifically to fight deportation cases at scale. Their partnership with Innovation Law Lab is a direct example of national litigation infrastructure plugging into Oregon’s local legal program and amplifying it with resources and expertise that no Oregon-only operation could sustain on its own.
Why Oregon? And Why Does It Matter to You?
Oregon becoming the national model for immigration enforcement resistance made a lot of sense. The political environment was hospitable, the federal court district in Portland had a track record of favorable rulings, and the activist-to-government pipeline—the direct line between organizations like Innovation Law Lab and the legislators who fund and protect them—already existed after years of colluding together. Most Oregonians never understood the goal.
The more important question is not, "Why Oregon?" It is, "What comes next?"
Innovation Law Lab’s own website and materials make their ambitions clear, using their “Massive Collaborative Representation” model as something they explicitly designed for deployment at what they call “sites of resistance” across the United States, and their Big Immigration Law Project explicitly calls for building open infrastructure so other organizations can replicate what Oregon built. The Vera Institute is already making headway with its playbook in other states. Massachusetts allocated $5 million for immigration legal services in 2025; Colorado has its own legal defense fund; and New York started pushing legislation modeled directly on Oregon's SB 1543.
The organizations involved are completely transparent. They publish it on their own websites, present it at conferences, and use Oregon’s numbers as their sales pitch to lawmakers in other states—6,599 people represented in the first two years, with people who have legal representation five and a half times more likely to avoid deportation. These are the statistics that they shop around to other state legislatures. A very effective sales effort.
Oregon was where the model was first implemented and then fine-tuned. Your state is where they want to build it next, and the only question is whether anyone in your legislature will be paying attention when they show up with the funding in hand and the schematics for implementation ready to go.
MORE BLUE STATE RESISTANCE COVERAGE
Misuse of taxpayer money: How Leftist Politicians Used “Pandemic” Emergency Dollars to Build a Legal Defense Machine for Illegal Immigrants
Nullifying federal law: Oregon Taxpayers Are Funding a Legal Army to Fight Federal Immigration Enforcement
Assaults on federal law enforcement officers: EXCLUSIVE: Portland 'No Kings' Devolves into Riot, Federal Agents Doused with Lighter Fluid
We need your help to save America—chip in today.
Restoration News, a project of Restoration of America, is your trusted investigative news source for the America First movement. As a rapidly growing conservative news site, we focus on delivering accurate and insightful exposés on political news, immigration news, leftist lies, and other pressing issues affecting everyday Americans. Our uncompromising commitment to a hard-hitting, fact-based, America First, and faithful perspective ensures that you receive news that aligns with your values.
Every dollar gets us closer to winning the war on woke
