On Nov. 12, a spot in Newport’s city council chambers was the hottest ticket in town.
An emergency meeting was set for 6 p.m. and the small chamber quickly swelled to capacity, packed with Newport residents waiting to hear how the council would react to what many saw as a dire threat.
“We’re going to do everything we can to fight this,” Mayor Jan Kaplan told his audience, to wild applause. “That’s where we stand.”
Days earlier, rumors had begun to blow through Newport like a stiff sea breeze. By the time of the meeting, many in the small coastal city were convinced: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was looking to build an immigrant detention center in town.
Evidence seemed to be growing by the day.
To start with, the U.S. Coast Guard helicopter that for decades stood ready to rescue imperiled crabbers and fishermen had disappeared from the city-owned airport. On the brink of a dangerous Dungeness crab season, the closest rescue aircraft was now 100 miles away.
“That ocean can get up on its hind legs and it can smack you down,” one man, a Navy veteran, testified at the emergency meeting. “We need that helicopter here.”
All signs of what might be on deck to replace the helicopter pointed in one direction.
On Nov. 4, a federal defense contractor wrote the city, asking to lease 4 acres of land at the local airport – right next to the base where the helicopter had lived.
Then other contractors popped up. One began asking about the cost of trucking thousands of gallons of human waste away from the airport every day. Another posted want ads for ICE detention officers in Newport.
The conclusion was inescapable to many residents: ICE was coming, and those who’d gathered in City Hall wanted none of it.
Some in the crowd wept when a teenage girl explained how frightening and sad her life had become since September, when her father was detained by ICE and sent to a detention center in Tacoma, Wash.
“No one deserves to get picked up,” the girl said. “My dad was my everything.”
With its scenic bayfront, popular aquarium and sizable commercial fishing fleet, Newport is an emblem of the Oregon coast – and, with 10,000 residents, one of its largest cities. But weeks after the meeting, the city finds itself in a sort of limbo.
Facing down twin crises – one over the wellbeing of its crabbers, the other over the wellbeing of its immigrant community – it’s still not sure when, or if, immigration agents might arrive.
ICE, the Coast Guard, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have declined to provide details to local officials, members of Congress and the press. ICE may have backed off in the face of public blowback. Or it might be regrouping.
“Nobody within the administration, within DHS, has treated this city with a modicum of respect or courtesy,” Kaplan told OPB. “It’s like, ‘We’re going to perch on your doorstep, and you only know it because maybe there’s a rumor.’”
An empty air base
Taunette Dixon thought helicopter drama was behind her.
In 2014, the Coast Guard announced it intended to close its air base in Newport to save money. Dixon was one of those who fought back.
A nonprofit she volunteers with, Newport Fishermen’s Wives, sued to block the closure, alongside the city of Newport and Lincoln County. Congress wound up finding money to keep the base open.
In the years since, Dixon says the Coast Guard had been communicative and helpful. Any time the helicopter needed to travel away from Newport, for any reason, officials would call the Fishermen’s Wives to explain.
But suddenly, history was repeating itself.
“I had somebody call me and say, ‘I am pretty sure that the Coast Guard has removed itself from the air station,’” Dixon said in an interview with OPB last week. “I’m like, I can’t believe that’s true. We worked so hard to keep the helicopter here.”
The timing could hardly have been worse.
In the self-proclaimed “Dungeness crab capital of the world,” the beginning of December is something of an early Christmas, Dixon says.
Crabbing boats are preparing to start the season with a two-week sprint that will dictate whether or not they are successful.
“If it’s not good seas, then that’s a very unsafe position for boats to be in – especially the small boats,” said Dixon, who co-owns a boat with her husband. “Between the ocean, between the tides, between the environment, it doesn’t take long to lose your life.”
A sturdy pavilion perched above the Pacific Ocean illustrates what’s at stake. The Newport Fishermen’s Memorial Sanctuary is a pew-lined structure in a local state park, where houseless residents sometimes seek shelter.
At the building’s heart is a monument bearing the names and pictures of local fishermen who have died at sea. The Newport Fishermen’s Wives keep the vigil and assist families when it adds a name.
“Almost every year, I’m making phone calls to families because we have lost a boat and somebody hasn’t survived,” said Dixon, who is part of a generations-old fishing family that has lost loved ones in the Pacific Ocean. “If anybody had to meet these families, I think they would have a better idea of how crucial it is to have this rescue helicopter here.”
But the Coast Guard has refused to explain its decision.
Dixon says the agency has rebuffed her efforts to learn more about the helicopter.
U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle, a Democrat who represents Newport, says the same. On Friday, Hoyle joined both of Oregon’s U.S. senators in sending a letter to the Coast Guard demanding answers.
In a statement to OPB, the Coast Guard declined to address the relocation, only noting that it is “always ready to respond to search and rescue needs on the Oregon Coast.”
But the difference between rescuing a person and recovering their body can be minutes in the frigid waters off of Newport. With the closest rescue helicopter now in North Bend, 100 miles south, Dixon and others worry the odds are not in the fishermen’s favor.
“I feel like that is the pressure I’m under right now,” she said. “If I don’t get to communicate with the Coast Guard, if our group doesn’t make any headway, how are we all going to feel when that first boat goes down?”
‘People are terrified’
Sara Yaeggy is feeling a different kind of pressure.
From her role with the local nonprofit group Conexion Fenix, Yaeggy has watched as the Latino community on the central coast has grown more fearful this year.
ICE detentions, typically rare on the coast, are increasing.
A local conservative group crashed a recent legal briefing on immigrant rights that Yaeggy’s group arranged, prompting some people to leave.
Now, there is word of a new ICE facility.
“People right now are really scared,” Yaeggy said last week. “Some people are terrified to leave their homes.”
Exactly what ICE has – or had – in mind for Newport remains hard to pin down. But there is clear evidence that the city’s residents are right to suspect the agency has seriously considered a detention facility.
There was the cryptic request to lease land at the airport, which was retracted when the city signaled it would fight. And there were the job postings for detention officers, which have also been deleted.
But not all traces of a plan are gone.
A federal contractor called Acuity International continues to advertise healthcare jobs in Newport that appear keyed toward an ICE operation. It’s the same organization that inquired about hauling human waste away from the airport.
ICE, like the Coast Guard, has not offered much insight.
In a statement to OPB on Nov. 12, the agency said the government is “working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport the worst of the worst.”
The statement referenced detention centers that have sprung up in other parts of the country, many with alliterative nicknames like Alligator Alcatraz, Louisiana Lockup and Cornhusker Clink. It didn’t mention Oregon.
Subsequent inquiries to DHS have gone unanswered.
“The reason they wanted Newport is there’s an airstrip,” said Kate Sinkins, a Lincoln City attorney who believes she is the only person practicing immigration law on the Oregon coast. “They want to be able to put people in a detention facility and not give them due process and then fly ‘em to home country without anyone really paying attention. That is not going to happen. We are paying attention.”
Advocates say uncertainty over ICE’s plans is taking a toll.
A food distribution event Yaeggy helped arrange earlier this month was upended when families decided they couldn’t risk showing up. Yaeggy, a U.S. citizen born in California, says she’s begun to question whether attending public events is worth the risk of being swept up.
“You would think that I’d feel just like nothing’s going to ever happen to me,” she said. “But the reality is that I am another brown person in the crowd.”
If ICE does set up in Newport, advocates for the area’s Latino community say they expect many families to leave.
Alex Llumiquinga Pérez says that’s what he hears from people who seek services from Arcoíris Cultural, the community organization he runs out of a Presbyterian church in Newport.
“I don’t think I’m going to leave this place,” Llumiquinga Pérez said. “I’m also preparing to not see a lot of people that have been part of my life for the last 20-plus years.”
The impact could be significant for an area that relies on commercial fishing and tourism. The city’s hotels, restaurants and fish processing facilities all rely on Latino workers, locals say. A quarter of its K-12 students are Latino or Hispanic.
“It will change the fabric of Newport, Depoe Bay, Toledo, Lincoln City, because people will move out,” said Sinkins. “People will not want to stay in a place where they’re afraid that they’re going to be pulled over and racially profiled and perhaps detained.”
Shadowboxing
The question bedeviling Newport officials and residents is how to respond to a threat they can’t entirely define.
After being stonewalled by DHS and the Coast Guard, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden showed up at Newport’s airport on Sunday looking for answers, but he came away with little clarity on why the helicopter disappeared.
No other elected official has fared better.
“It feels like we’re shadowboxing,” said state Rep. David Gomberg, a Democrat from Otis, about 30 miles north of Newport. “If they determine that it’s not workable, they can say, ‘These are just rumors you are overreacting to.’ We know that it’s more.”
About all anyone can say for sure is that the Coast Guard helicopter is gone – and they have a playbook for what comes next.
On Friday, the Newport Fishermen’s Wives and Lincoln County filed a lawsuit against the Coast Guard, just as they did the last time the aircraft was threatened. Attorney General Dan Rayfield announced the state would follow suit.
Next to join the fray — almost certainly — will be the city of Newport. Kaplan, the mayor, supports the lawsuits. But he would only say in an interview prior to the legal action that the city is exploring its options.
“It’s not a matter of not tipping our hand,” he said. “It’s hard to figure out what your hand is when you don’t know who you’re playing against – only that somebody’s not treating you well.”
