A handful of federal immigration enforcement officers in three unmarked SUVS waited outside a Woodburn apartment complex early on Oct. 30, describing the spot in a text exchange as “target rich.”
They spotted an unmarked white van, ran its plates and followed it as it left the complex and made stops to pick people up. Its registered owner wasn’t a U.S. citizen, so they pulled it over on a city street about 5:30 a.m.
Five officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol quickly busted out the driver’s window, unlocked the doors and slid open the side passenger door.
They pulled out a 45-year-old woman who refused to give her name or provide ID and handcuffed her. She said she wanted an “abogado” – Spanish for lawyer.
Details of the arrest and tactics used by immigration officers in Oregon — including phone apps to identify faces and the locations where immigrants gather — emerged in a two-day hearing this week in U.S. District Court in Portland.
An ICE supervisor also admitted during the hearing that he has created and signed arrest warrants for individuals shortly after they had been arrested without warrants on multiple occasions, including for the woman in this case.
Immigration lawyers are challenging what they called an “unlawful dragnet” by federal officers in Woodburn, the Oregon city with the highest share of Latino residents at 60%.
The federal agents involved were temporarily assigned to Portland on “Arrest Team 7” for a month, from mid-October to mid-November, and had an unwritten quota to arrest at least eight people a day, one officer testified.
The team members variously referred to their work as “Operation Fortifying the Border,” “Operation Black Rose” and “Operation Portland Sweep.”
In Woodburn, the officers handcuffed and arrested the woman, identified in court only as MJMA, and moved her quickly to the ICE detention center in Tacoma. They released her the next day without any conditions — but also without her phone or money. She caught a ride home with someone who was visiting a family member at the detention center.
Government lawyers, even when pressed by U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai, refused to explain why ICE officials let her go without requiring her to report to ICE officials in the future.
“Those decisions and the discussions are between our office and counsel for ICE and we consider those privileged information,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Ratcliffe said.
Attorney Stephen Manning, founder and director of the nonprofit Innovation Law Lab, argued that the federal officers stopped, arrested and detained the woman without probable cause.
He signaled that he plans to expand the petition challenging her detention into a class-action lawsuit fighting what he called an “ongoing scheme to violate statutory and constitutional rights of Oregonians” to achieve President Donald Trump’s mass deportation promise.
Federal agents are indiscriminately trolling people and places to make as many arrests as they can without any reasonable suspicion, he said.
Ratcliffe countered that the officers followed federal statutes, regulations and policies in arresting the woman. Agents can briefly detain people for questioning if they have a reasonable suspicion that they’re in the U.S. illegally, he said.
In this case, their reasonable suspicion quickly developed into probable cause based on the “totality of the circumstances” after officers interacted with people in the van, he said.
The judge said it appeared that the nine federal officers who testified generally did so openly and candidly, providing an inside account of their work that he hadn’t heard before.
And while Kasubhai said it didn’t seem as if the officers acted malevolently, he added: “We’re dealing with a system that may very well have violated the law.”
He gave each side time to submit additional written briefs before he issues a ruling on the woman’s petition.
Woman pulled from van testifies
MJMA had entered the U.S. at San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing on Jan. 19 with a B2 visa that expired on March 21. The visa covers tourism, family visits and temporary medical trips.
ICE officials said she had overstayed her visa and that was the reason for her arrest, once they figured out her identity.
In court, MJMA grasped a mini foam gavel as a stress reliever while she described on the witness stand how she and others in the van were heading to work that morning when they noticed police lights behind it.
Three SUVs surrounded the van as it pulled to the right side of the road, an officer’s body camera footage showed.
When officers suddenly yanked open the side door, they demanded to see everyone’s hands, yelling “manos! manos! manos!” she said.
The body camera footage played in court showed her speaking on her cellphone seated alone in the first row of seats in the back of the van. She said she called 911 “because we did not know who was detaining us and the reason why.”
She said she felt “paralyzed” before officers pulled her from the van, handcuffed her and placed her on the sidewalk against a building, then took her behind a mall to take her photo.
They drove her to the Portland ICE office, where she had her fingerprints and DNA taken, was held in a small cell and then asked if she would sign a document to voluntarily leave the country, she said.
If she did, officers told her that she would get out of custody a lot sooner, she testified. MJMA said she couldn’t read the papers because she didn’t have her glasses but signed her initials. By doing so, she waived her right to a hearing in immigration court and agreed to return to Mexico, her lawyers said.
Later, MJMA felt “un poco esperanza” — a little hope — when an officer brought her to a room to talk to lawyers, but then the same officer interrupted the session to load her onto a bus, she said.
She was with lawyers for about 10 minutes before she was “whisked away” with a chain around her waist and shackles on her ankles for her ride to Tacoma, according to her lawyers.
On cross-examination, she admitted that she had entered the U.S. about five times on her B2 visa.
Judge: ‘What if they spoke English with an accent?’
Federal officers, allowed to testify using only their initials, were pressed by the judge as well as MJMA’s lawyers to explain why they focused on the Woodburn apartment complex and the white van.
Officers testified that “target rich” — as described in a text introduced in court as evidence — could refer to a place where officers randomly run license plates looking for people who have had past contact with immigration officers or criminal histories.
DR, an ICE officer from Iowa, said the team would go to various addresses in Woodburn that had an “immigration nexus.” When the judge asked him what that meant, D.R. explained it involved “some sort of connection between immigration law and where we may find those subjects for those targets.”
He initially testified that the potential target that morning was an “immigration violator with some sort of criminal nexus,” with possible involvement in “some sort of human trafficking.”
When asked what indicated that trafficking was occurring, DR said he didn’t recall, but then said the people in the van could be going to work without authorization or under duress.
“Generally criminal activity happens under the cover of darkness,” he said.
DR added that if people don’t respond to commands in English, he considers that they could be in the U.S. illegally.
The judge asked him: “Does that satisfy reasonable suspicion? What if they spoke English with an accent?”
DR said that wouldn’t make him suspicious, but that someone’s attempt to evade arrest or federal officers’ attention would.
JB, an ICE officer from Denver who made the call to stop the van, testified how the officers were doing “live targeting” of people for potential arrest.
The goal was to make eight arrests per team per day, he said.
“We had to develop our own targets,” he said.
He generated a page and a half of names and photos of people in a general area who had prior contacts with immigration officials at some point in their lives, he said.
He did that with help from a relatively new ICE app called Elite that maps areas identified as having a strong likelihood of people who have encountered immigration officers in the past, he said.
The five officers went to a parking lot at the Woodburn apartment complex and were “looking at multiple apartment doors” when a man came out and got into a van, he said.
He asked another officer to run the license plate to find the registered owner. When he heard the name, he said he thought he had that man on his informal list and they followed the van.
The owner had registered the van sometime after he had voluntarily agreed to leave the country because he had been in the United States unlawfully, JB testified.
Because the van stopped to pick up adults, he suspected it was involved in “either human smuggling or human trafficking … or just harboring people who are here illegally in the U.S.,” he said.
When they pulled over the van, he said he heard other officers order the driver to roll down the window. Within “a couple of seconds,” he smashed the window, noting his gloved right hand went straight through the glass and he cut it severely, he said.
JB said that the federal officers involved in the stop were outnumbered by seven people in the van. He acknowledged on cross-examination that he didn’t know if the driver was the van’s registered owner.
He said officers placed MJMA in handcuffs as a flight risk, pointing out that others in the van had tried to escape as officers detained them.
They chased and caught one man who hopped out of a federal car, he said. Another man climbed from the back seat into a front seat of a separate ICE car, setting off a horn in an attempt to escape, he said.
But did the woman try to escape, asked attorney Nelly Paola Garcia Orjuela, also representing MJMA.
“You don’t know until she actually does escape,” JB responded, but then conceded that she hadn’t tried.
Inaccurate reports and warrants signed after arrests made
MK, a Spanish-speaking Customs and Border Protection officer based at the San Ysidro border crossing, testified that she arrived at the stopped van and tried to identify MJMA.
When the woman refused and told other passengers from the van not to talk to the officers, MK used the Mobile Fortify facial recognition app on her phone to take the woman’s photo twice while she was in handcuffs outside the van.
The app first came up with the name Maria, but MJMA refused to say if that was her name, so MK took a second photo that returned a different name. Still, MJMA declined to identify herself, the officer said.
MK testified that she had probable cause to arrest MJMA on an allegation that she was in the U.S. unlawfully, noting that her primary language was Spanish, that the Mobile Fortify app turned up possible matches and that she was in a van with others who were “out of status.”
MK said the Mobile Fortify app runs facial recognition against databases of people who have had interactions with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
KK, an ICE supervisor from Nebraska who was working at the Portland ICE office, testified that he created and signed a warrant for the arrest of MJMA after she arrived at the office, although he knew officers had already arrested her without a warrant.
KK responded “that’s correct” when asked if he had done the same thing for other people who arrived at the ICE office after their arrests without any warrant in their file.
“And you did that across several cases?” asked Manning, one of MJMA’s lawyers.
“Correct,” he repeated.
Court testimony also disclosed that immigration forms describing MJMA’s arrest contained significant errors, including a narrative section that said federal officers walked up to her in a “consensual encounter” with no mention that officers pulled her from a stopped van.
RF, a supervisory ICE detention officer from Denver who filled in the narrative section, said she wasn’t involved in the van’s stop but arrived later and thought MJMA was arrested leaving a building.
BW, an ICE officer from Minnesota, acknowledged that he inserted a two-paragraph block of type at the start of the report that didn’t apply to MJMA.
It inaccurately said she had unlawfully entered the country and that such unlawful entries directly challenged the U.S. government’s ability to protect the nation from “foreign terrorists, transnational criminal organizations and other threats to national security and public safety.”
BW testified that he had received an email directing him to include those accusations for everyone arrested and taken to the Portland ICE building.
The judge asked BW if any information suggested MJMA was associated with foreign terrorists or transnational criminal organizations.
“From my professional experience, I can make inferences that when individuals break immigration law” they’re also “involved in other criminal activities,” he said.
AA, an ICE deportation officer from Oregon, testified that he halted MJMA’s meeting with lawyers at the Portland ICE office because the private transport company was ready to take her and others to Tacoma.
He said officers detained more than 50 people that day through the Portland ICE office.
The transports generally make two “runs” a day around 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., he said.
“They were about ready to go,” he said.
©2025 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
