With President Trump and Portland, Ore., locked in a fierce battle over immigration policies, the city’s leaders face increasing pressure from their progressive constituents to become more creative in the fight.
So Portland leaders are trying the strategy they know best: land use.
Oregon has one of the most complex sets of zoning and land use laws in the nation. Supporters of the policies say they encourage neighborhoods to be walkable and filled with independent businesses while also preserving vast open spaces and farmland. Critics say the rules have stymied housing construction and kept home prices high.
But in the city’s fight against the Trump administration, those land-use rules may prove to be a not-so-secret weapon, in large part because the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland may be uniquely vulnerable to the codes.
“This is so Oregon of us, so Portland of us,” said Elana Pirtle-Guiney, president of the Portland City Council, “to distill a huge federal policy issue that is also a moral issue that is also about the fundamental question of who we are as a country into a land-use problem.”
The General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, typically leases space for ICE from other government agencies or private prisons in industrial areas that are away from residential centers or popular commuter routes. The large ICE facility that has drawn protests in Illinois, for example, isn’t in Chicago, but rather the suburban village of Broadview.
Yet when federal officials looked to move Oregon’s ICE “subfield office” from a historic post office near downtown Portland 14 years ago, they chose to lease privately owned property just three miles away in the South Waterfront, a showcase for the state’s history of innovative urban design.
That has kept ICE under the intense scrutiny of both protesters and city planners. In mid-September, city leaders issued the owner of the ICE facility, the developer Stuart Lindquist, a land-use violation notice, telling him ICE had breached the terms of their original agreement for the property.
About 30 years ago, Portland and the city’s largest employer, Oregon Health & Science University, began investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the South Waterfront on the Willamette River. New medical offices, high-rise apartments and condominiums were built. A streetcar and an aerial tram connected the neighborhood to the rest of the inner city and the medical school’s main campus, high on the hills southwest of downtown.
ICE became contentious in the area long before Mr. Trump began his mass deportation campaign. In 2011, when the agency began negotiating to rent and expand a former Bank of America office building on the edge of the waterfront district, residents and business owners worried about what a federal building might look like, the presence of armed officers and “the possibility of demonstrations and/or protest activities,” according to notes from a hearing officer who ruled on the proposal. a .
But neighbors’ biggest concern was that ICE might release dangerous criminals in the neighborhood late at night after buses stopped running. So the Portland City Council, eager to fill vacant real estate spaces, unanimously backed a compromise. ICE was allowed to add 101 parking spots and a 5,198-square foot detention center on one condition: People could not be detained for more than 12 hours or overnight.
That covenant has become ICE’s biggest potential vulnerability. According to the land-use notice issued to ICE’s landlord last month, observers outside the facility who track who enters and leaves noted 25 instances over a 10-month period in which ICE detained people for too long.
“What I appreciate about this approach is that it isn’t a political conversation,” said Natalie Lerner, a board member with the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition. “This is about data.”
Representatives of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
The property owner, who has filed paperwork contesting some of the city’s evidence, faces monthly fines that start at about $1,000 if he does not fix the problem. The federal government rents the building for more than $2.4 million annually.
The more serious conversation will come later this month, when city regulators are scheduled to begin reconsidering ICE’s conditional-use permit for the building. Eventually, the matter could end up in front of the full City Council, whose members have been outspoken in their opposition to the president’s plan to send the National Guard to Portland. For now, they said they must choose their words carefully about the ICE building’s future because they may have to rule on it.
Protesters are not so reticent. On Oct. 12,Holly Brown, an organizer, put the demands on city hall succinctly at an anti-ICE rally. “You can’t just sit there doing nothing. You must act to get ICE out of Portland.” She then led the crowd of 100 or so people in a chant of “revoke the permit.”
Leaders in other cities facing ICE protests and potential federal military force are also looking for ways to use the tools of local government to assert their authority. In Broadview, Ill., town leaders successfully convinced a court to force ICE to remove a fence around the immigration processing facility because it was erected without a permit.
But the Broadview facility and most of the buildings in which immigration officers detain people are owned by either the federal government, a private prison company or another government entity, according to records from the General Services Administration, and are thus harder to regulate through permitting and taxes.
Portland leaders are trying to take advantage of how unique the situation is. When the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, visited the city earlier this month, she demanded that officers with the Portland Police Bureau close off a one-block radius around the building and limit how close protesters can go. Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said that was both against city values and simply not feasible in a quasi-residential neighborhood with few routes in or out.
Mr. Wilson said Corey Lewandowski, an adviser to Ms. Noem, suggested during their meeting that the city might consider buying the property or taking over ICE’s lease. The mayor rejected that idea.
“I would love for this facility to be somewhere else, because South Waterfront is about the worst place you could put it,” Mr. Wilson said. “But this is something the federal government has to figure out. We just want them to comply with our laws.”
It is not clear if Portland leaders actually have the power to fully revoke the permit or simply make detaining people much harder, if not impossible. Some immigration advocates wonder whether that’s even a good idea. If ICE cannot hold detainees in Portland, the next option is to send them two and a half hours away to the Northwest Immigration Detention Center in Tacoma, a 1,575-bed campus that can be hard for lawyers to access and even harder for detainees to leave.
“Tacoma is an actual detention center,” said Angelita Morillo, a Portland City councilor, “so they can actually disappear people there.”
In addition to the land-use process, Ms. Morillo said she planned to ask her colleagues to create an impact fee on detention centers within city limits, essentially a one-time charge similar to those many cities place on new residential subdivisions or shopping centers to offset the cost of adding roads, water lines and other basic public services. In this case, Ms. Morillo said, an impact fee would cover public costs such as cleaning up environmental damage caused by the use of tear gas against demonstrators.
She said such a fee could add hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions to the cost of a property like the ICE building.
That might not force “ICE out of Portland,” as protesters chant, but it could convince private property owners not to do business with federal law enforcement.
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