10 horas atrás 2

Feds Kept Local Sheriff in Dark About ICE Role in Cannabis Raid — Straining Oregon Sanctuary Laws

For the first 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.

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 “GEO Transport Inc.” emblazoned on its side.

Grace Warner, a volunteer who just arrived that morning to spot at the ICE facility, was immediately concerned.

“We’d never seen a bus like that there before,” she said. If GEO Group, a major private prison and ICE contractor was there, then immigration agents must be too.

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.

“This is not an ICE raid. This is just a drug bust.”

Outside, Warner was immediately approached by a spokesperson from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, which is barred from participating in most federal immigration enforcement by Oregon sanctuary laws.

“This is not an ICE raid,” Warner recalled the officer saying. “This is just a drug bust.”

That explanation would be echoed by spokespeople for other law enforcement agencies.

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.)

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’s office email ahead of the operation, seven of the locations raided had Jackson County sheriff’s deputies listed as the “primary” officials; a local police official was the “primary” at another site; a state trooper on a ninth site; and an official from the DEA on the 10th.

“While there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.”

When asked by The Intercept, however, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office denied knowing of any ICE activity that day.

“The DEA was the lead agency for this investigation,” Sheriff Nathan Sickler said. “The focus of this case was not immigration violations. While there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.”

“We did not detain anybody for immigration purposes.”

Who Knew What When?

Oregon’s sanctuary laws, which prevent local coordination on federal immigration enforcement without a signed judicial warrant, are a point of pride.

Though local agencies denied any direct cooperation with ICE — and, in case of the sheriff’s office, denied knowing about ICE’s involvement — federal authorities appeared to have pre-planned immigration enforcement as part of the raids in the Medford area. Under Donald Trump’s administration, situations like this are raising concerns about how Oregon’s sanctuary laws are being upheld.

“When collaborating with federal agencies, it is not good enough to trust things to be business as usual without verifying,” said Kelly Simon, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “We know the agenda, and it’s on our local leaders to take no part in it.”

Asked if local law enforcement detained workers during raids, Jackson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Aaron Lewis said it was “not outside the realm of possibility.”

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was assisting with a large, ongoing federal drug investigation through a regional “Illegal Marijuana Enforcement Team,” said Sickler, the sheriff.

“We follow the Oregon laws,” Sickler said. “We don’t communicate with ICE for those purposes.“

Capt. Kyle Kennedy, a spokesperson for the Oregon State Police, didn’t 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.

“OSP did not have a role at the off-site location where the presumed transfer of DEA custodies to ICE may have occurred,” Kennedy said. (The DEA declined to comment.)

In the Medford area raids, however, federal agents had anticipated ICE’s 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.

A Federal Protective Service official wrote in an incident report obtained by The Intercept that the support was necessary because of the potential for “collateral” detainees — 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.)

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 authorizing the DEA to carry out the “functions” of an immigration officer. Since then, collaboration has been close. A raid at a rural Kentucky restaurant in May, led by the DEA, was also shrouded in the language of “active investigation” and led to immigration detentions with no explanation of how it happened.

For three months, no further information was released about the July 30 raids and the ICE detentions, including the role played by local police.

Regional media has yet to cover the raids and detentions, and communication from government officials has remained opaque, leaving community members without answers.

“Oregon has one of the longest standing and strongest sanctuary laws in the country,” said Simon from the ACLU of Oregon. “It is imperative that our local law enforcement agencies are taking great care to protect local resources from being commandeered and used for this administration’s cruel deportation machine.”

ICE Detentions

The raids near Medford were part of a DEA-led federal drug investigation into psychoactive products sold at smoke shops around the country. Local, state, and federal agencies were serving a warrant targeting a licensed cannabis company called HempNova Lifetech Corp., according to a copy of the warrant shared with The Intercept.

Sickler, the Jackson County sheriff, said the raids were part of an investigation into, among other things, illegal trade of cannabis vape cartridges. (HempNova did not respond to a request for comment.)

According to a list of seized items from one raid, the DEA found cannabis products packaged for brands that sell gummies and vape cartridges online and across the country.

The list of “primary” officials for each of the raids came in an email from Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Jesus Murillo-Garcia ahead of the operation. Out of 10 raid locations connected to the investigation, Jackson County Sheriff’s deputies are listed as the “primary” officials on seven. Central Point Police Department, from a nearby city, had an officer in charge of one, and the Oregon State Police brought in their SWAT team to lead operations on one location. (Central Point Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Sickler described his office’s involvement as “area liaisons” to help “out of area” agents.

The authorities seized videotapes, tested and destroyed plants, and broke into safe boxes. Three people connected to the HempNova farms were booked at the Jackson County jail and later extradited on undisclosed federal charges to North Carolina, which has been a focus of the nationwide DEA investigation.

Seventeen other workers were loaded into unmarked vans, according to activist observers on site, and eventually transferred to ICE.

Detainees’ families scrambled to locate their loved ones. At one raid led by the Jackson County sheriff, an immigrant worker sent a video to his family that showed him being zip-tied. The family went to the sheriff’s office to locate the worker and got no answers: The officials at the office said they couldn’t discuss the case.

The family then called 911 to file a missing person report. Dispatch records obtained by local researchers reveal confusion at his whereabouts.

“That doesn’t make sense,” the dispatcher says at one point when confronted about the disappeared family member. “I am not seeing anything here.”

The emergency dispatcher called the Jackson County jail with the family on the line, but the administrator there was perplexed. Neither was certain where the workers went.

“He never came to the jail,” the jail administrator said in a recording of the call shared with The Intercept. “I think they took a group up to Washington — I don’t know.”

“I think they took a group up to Washington — I don’t know.”

According to activists, who monitored the raids and the federal facility in Medford, the agents loaded two groups of people from the vans onto the idle bus at the federal facility, which set out for Washington shortly thereafter.

One protester was arrested at the Medford facility for laying down in front of the bus.

For weeks, it was unclear how many — let alone who — was detained by ICE and sent to Washington. Eventually, Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, which runs a statewide hotline, confirmed that a detainee arrested during the July 30 raids arrived at the Washington ICE facility.

Only two months later was The Intercept able to confirm the number of the people bused across state lines to ICE’s detention facility.

Blurring the Mission

In the past, federal law enforcement officials working on issues surrounding Oregon’s cannabis industry said their focus was on “human trafficking.”

Since the Huffman memo expanded the purview of DEA operations, however, the line between drug and immigration enforcement is blurring.

“I think it’s fair to say that ICE is doing whatever it can to raise its arrest numbers,” said David Hausman, co-director of the Deportation Data Project and a law professor at University of California, Berkeley. “Overall, that is sweeping in more people who would never have been priorities for enforcement in the past.”

In Oregon, cannabis farms often operate outside established legal markets. Oversupply and cratering prices left farmers to turn to more profitable gray and black markets. Inconsistent regulation across the country created loopholes for businesses to sell psychoactive products — marketed as hemp-derived — across state lines.

In a recent statewide report in Oregon, all “hemp“ flowers bought and tested by the Oregon and Cannabis Commission were in excess of legal limits on THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis that is banned in some state, complicating interstate trade.

“What we have seen from this administration is the emphasis on crime as a pretext to make immigration arrests.”

Why the DEA picked the raid at HempNova is unclear. Federal enforcement in southern Oregon’s cannabis industry is rare, and raids and investigations are handled largely by local law enforcement agencies.

Simon, of the ACLU of Oregon, warned of the consequences of the blurring missions of local and federal law enforcement agencies.

“What we have seen from this administration is the emphasis on crime as a pretext to make immigration arrests,” she said. “It would be twisting the intent of Oregon sanctuary law to rely on the pretext of some other purpose being present to justify participating in immigration enforcement.”