ICE affirms in court documents there are no plans to build detention center in Newport

No new Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers are slated for construction in Newport, Oregon, anytime soon, and the federal government will provide at least a month’s notice to city officials before any environmental permitting would get underway.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security agreed to those terms through Aug. 1, 2027, as part of a settlement with the Oregon Department of Justice filed in federal court in Eugene on Friday.

“ICE doesn’t get to skirt the law to build a facility for locking up and deporting our neighbors,” said Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, in a news release. “Oregon stood up, we made the federal government answer for its plans in court, and now they have to follow the law.”

The possibility of a new ICE detention center coming to Newport arose last fall amid concerns that federal immigration authorities were scouting the Oregon Coast for a long-term holding facility, including at Newport’s U.S. Coast Guard municipal airport site.

Newport’s city leaders went public with their concerns shortly after, and strong opposition grew from residents and the state’s Democratic leaders, who also took issue with the temporary removal of a life-saving rescue helicopter from the city’s Coast Guard facility.

Rayfield successfully sued the Homeland Security Department over the helicopter’s removal, securing a court order that it be returned to Newport, and asked a federal judge to halt any construction on an immigration detention facility at the site.

In that case, which is behind the recent settlement, lawyers for Oregon’s Justice Department argued that the federal government had been skirting federal environmental and coastal land use regulations by trying to build a facility on the municipal airport site without providing advanced notice to state and local leaders. The Oregon Justice Department agreed to drop the case following the federal government’s commitment to providing advance notice should efforts to build a detention center in the area resume.

The notice period required in the lawsuit does not apply to other Oregon cities, though the settlement notes ICE is not planning to expand or create any detention facilities or processing centers in the state.