Oregon’s sanctuary law could be in danger
Ballot measure could end immigrant protections
PORTLAND, Ore. – When Julieta Cordova declined to leave a tip at a Portland-area restaurant in early October, she didn’t expect her ethnicity to become an issue.
Cordova, a second-year law student at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, decided not to tip after receiving what she described as “poor service.” She asked to speak with management. Cordova then explained her decision to not add a gratuity to the manager, who responded by sneering, “This is America, and in America we tip.”
Cordova, a 27-year-old who was born and raised in Oregon, was stunned. She can’t be sure, but she’s confident the comment was a direct response to the color of her skin – brown – which she believes the manager interpreted to mean she was not from the United States and didn’t belong.
Cordova’s experience highlights a growing national trend of immigration issues bulldozing their way to the front of conversations, often in stark – and formerly taboo
– ways. Anti-immigrant groups are popping up everywhere – even in reliably blue Oregon.
In November, Oregonians will vote on Measure 105, a ballot initiative that seeks to repeal the state’s sanctuary law protecting immigrants from discrimination and federal immigration laws. It’s the oldest of its kind in the nation and often cited as a pillar of Oregon’s national reputation as a liberal paradise populated by tree-hugging progressives.
The local organization pushing the ballot measure has been linked to white nationalism and was labeled an antiimmigrant hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Sheriffs from half the counties across the state have backed the initiative, one of four conservative-leaning measures on the November ballot, which also includes an anti-abortion measure.
From a distance, it’s a surprising flur- ry of right-wing activity for a state that has voted blue in every presidential election since 1988.
“The people who characterize us as being really liberal,” Cordova said, “they haven’t spent much time in this state.”
❚ One of seven: In the simplest terms, sanctuary status means local police cannot detain individuals based solely on their immigration status and/ or inform federal immigration agents about a person’s immigration status. While sanctuary cities are relatively common in the U.S., Oregon is one of only seven sanctuary states.
Andrea Williams, executive director at Causa, Oregon’s largest immigrant rights organization and chair of the campaign against the ballot measure, said critics misunderstand the existing state law and how it relates to practices carried out by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“It’s important to know that this is not a law that protects people from being deported,” Williams said. “A true sanctuary law would be one where undocumented families feel safe. But they don’t, because ICE is out there doing their job on the daily. And there’s nothing the state can do to prevent that.”
To Williams’ point: ICE announced in April 2017 that 84 undocumented immigrants had been arrested in a threeday sweep of the Pacific Northwest, including 23 Portland-area residents.
The roundups are part of the Trump administration’s efforts to carry out the president’s agenda. Since announcing his campaign for president in 2015, Trump has accused Mexico of sending murderers and rapists to the U.S. and promised to build a wall along the southern border. In his first year of office, he oversaw a 41 percent spike in the number of undocumented immigrants arrested, up from 2016. He’s also enforced a policy of separating children from their parents at the border and overturned temporary protections for immigrants from countries that suffered war or major natural disasters.
Oregonians For Immigration Reform, the organization trying to repeal Oregon’s sanctuary law, has a “what do we got to lose?” attitude when it comes to Measure 105. They figure if there’s any time to act, it’s now.
“We’re in favor of the same level of immigration we had for the first 200 years, in which we grew to be the greatest country in the world: 230,000 people a year,” said Jim Ludwick, communications director for the group. “But we think it’s important to get rid of this sanctuary policy that rewards people who are in the country illegally.”
Immigrants made up just 4.7 percent of the U.S. population in 1970, according to the Migration Policy Institute. In
2016, that number had risen to 13.5 percent, or more than 43 million people.
❚ Home to the KKK: Oregon is the only state in the U.S. that explicitly began as whites only; when Oregon became a state in 1859, its constitution banned blacks and “mulattos,” or people of mixed ethnic heritage, from living in the state. Historians estimate the Ku Klux Klan boasted upward of 35,000 members in Oregon in the 1920s, when the KKK had widespread influence throughout the state Legislature and law enforcement. Oregon was a “white utopia,” explained Juliet Stumpf, a professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland who studies the intersection of criminal and immigration law.
“We had lash laws on the books for years. The whole idea was that no African-Americans could enter the state or remain here after sundown, and if they did, they were subject to a certain number of lashes,” said Stumpf, a 14-year Oregon resident who was shocked to learn about the state’s past. Oregon did not fully ratify the 14th Amendment – including the equal protection clause – until 1973, more than a hundred years after it became part of the Constitution.
According to the 2010 Census, 78 percent of Oregon is white, while 12 percent is Latino and 4 percent is Asian. African-Americans and Native Americans each make up 2 percent.
The state’s ballot initiative process also reflects Oregon’s unique political landscape. Experts refer to Oregon’s ballot as “cheap” because the number of signatures needed is so low that it doesn’t cost much to pay a signaturegathering group to collect them. To get the anti-sanctuary state measure on the ballot, for example, organizers only needed to collect 88,184 signatures in a state home to 4 million people.
❚ Where it began: Passed in 1987, Oregon’s law was originally written as an anti-racial profiling law rather than a so-called sanctuary state law, according to the bill’s author, Rocky Barilla, a retired Oregon attorney and legislator.
Barilla proposed the law after Delmiro Trevino, an Oregon resident of Mexican heritage who was living in Independence, experienced harassment by local police in 1977. While eating dinner at a restaurant, police demanded proof of Trevino’s immigration status. The questions infuriated him. Together with Barilla, Trevino filed a lawsuit against the Polk County Sheriff ’s office, arguing that local authorities had no business doing the work of federal immigration agents. The case was dismissed, but Barilla and the U.S. Attorney’s Office agreed local police wouldn’t act as federal immigration agents anymore.
Ten years later, Barilla’s bill was approved by the Oregon state Legislature; there were only two “no” votes combined in the state House and Senate.
Barilla, who now lives in California, and others working against Measure 105 worry that if it’s passed, immigrants will retreat to the shadows because of the threat of deportation.
“The people who characterize us as being really liberal, they haven’t spent much time in this state.” Julieta Cordova Law student in Oregon