Judge orders ICE to release Oregon arrest data after finding officer lied in report
A federal ruling mandates the agency provide all body camera footage and documentation for warrantless seizures in the state.
By Amina Howard ·
U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai issued a new order on Monday requiring federal immigration officials to turn over all arrest documents and body-worn camera footage for detainees taken into custody in Oregon since September 1, 2026. The directive comes after the judge determined that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has continued to make arrests without warrants in direct violation of a February preliminary order.
The legal dispute began last year when attorneys from Innovation Law Lab filed a class action suit against the agency. They argued that ICE could not legally detain individuals without a warrant. In February, Kasubhai limited ICE’s power to make warrantless arrests to cases where a person was likely to flee and required the agency to send documentation of those arrests to the law firm. Lawyers for the plaintiff claimed ICE ignored this, conducting hundreds of warrantless arrests, while federal attorneys denied the allegations.
During a September hearing, four immigrants arrested in 2026 testified that officers detained them without valid warrants. An ICE deportation officer admitted that agents used license plate readers to identify two of the detainees. Kasubhai concluded on Monday that ICE failed to properly document these instances and that the agency’s records contained false information.
The judge was particularly critical of an agent identified as J.G. During testimony, J.G. stated that he wrote false information in an I-213 arrest report for a man detained in Medford in July. The report claimed the agent knew the detainee’s status before the stop, an assertion J.G. later retracted. Kasubhai wrote that the errors were not simple mistakes but deliberate fabrications designed to make the arrest appear lawful.
“It defies logic that such consequential errors in the I-213 form are merely a ‘mistake,’” Kasubhai wrote. “The Court finds that he did not make a mistake in the I-213. He lied in an official record to facilitate the impression he was conducting a lawful warrant-based arrest.”
The ruling also criticized the consistency of the agency’s paperwork. The judge noted that some reports contained basic errors, such as listing an Oregon arrest as occurring in California. Other forms used nearly identical boilerplate language regarding community ties. Kasubhai described this repetitive phrasing as evidence that officers were failing to perform basic investigative duties.
“ICE agents’ boilerplate repetition of their ‘unawareness’ of community ties is a clear example of their failure to conduct simple law enforcement investigative duties. This is sloppy work,” the order stated. The judge also questioned the federal government’s claim that only 13 warrantless arrests occurred between February and August 2026, calling that figure highly unlikely given the number of invalid warrants presented.
The new order was issued while Kasubhai considers a related case in Eugene. On Monday, a man identified as L.A.M.A. testified that he was arrested in an Albany Walmart parking lot on June 18. He told the court that agents said they would drive him to Tacoma but instead left him on the streets of Portland, forcing his son to drive from Albany to pick him up. He stated he was never shown a warrant and described the experience in Spanish as causing “anguish, quite a bit of it. Anguish, frustration.”
