If people in the Portland area think they’ve spotted ICE, there’s a number that many organizations, such as the ACLU, suggest they call: the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition hotline.

The Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition (PIRC) was founded two decades ago by a group of activists and became an independent nonprofit organization in 2021, but since Donald Trump came into office promising a mass deportation campaign, the coalition’s hotline has kicked into high gear. 

“We’ve seen a huge increase in the number of reports of ICE activity since the change of administration—and while some of that is related to folks knowing about us, there's unquestionably been a huge escalation in terms of ICE enforcement across Oregon,” Natalie Lerner, a spokesperson for PIRC, said.

Lerner said over the last month, the PIRC hotline has received more than 700 calls—some of which have come from people reporting possible ICE activity, while others have come from people looking for resources or information about their rights.

The increase in calls to the PIRC hotline comes with many in the state on edge about the presence of immigration enforcement officials and broader threats against Portland. 

While Oregon has not yet seen the scale of ICE activity that other states are dealing with, there have been signs that activity could be scaled up: ICE began detaining migrants outside of immigration court hearings over the summer, and the Trump administration has since ordered the deployment of federal troops to the city. 

“The racial profiling has gotten stronger,” Amber Rose, a staff organizer with the Rural Organizing Project based in the Columbia River Gorge, said. “We’re getting more people questioned simply because they’re speaking Spanish.”

PIRC’s hotline is designed to help protect communities against the federal threat. PIRC is connected through the immigrant justice organization Oregon for All to a network of rapid response organizations across the state that have trained people on how to verify the veracity of reported ICE activity, support people who are being detained, connect with legal support, and provide legal observation. 

The verification work in particular, Lerner said, is key. 

“We shouldn't spread fear and panic,” Lerner said. “There is already so much fear in immigrant communities ... we really care about not spreading unsubstantiated rumors.”

If PIRC is able to confirm that ICE has detained a resident, their next step is often to contact attorneys with the Equity Corps of Oregon (ECO) to try to find legal representation as quickly as possible.

Jess Montoya, the network director for Oregon for All, illustrated how effective this network can be: When a group of people were detained in the Woodburn area several months ago, local rapid responders were on the scene collecting information about the detentions and liaising with ECO attorneys in just 20 minutes. 

"Sometimes, just having eyes on ICE can make ICE go away. Because ICE, even though they have these horrible brazen tactics, they ultimately do not like to be filmed."- Natalie Lerner

“We need to respond quickly, and support folks who are actually being detained as fast as possible with as many tools as we can use,” Lerner said. 

Speed is of the essence, both because the rapid response networks want to support the families of people who have been detained, but also in part because PIRC wants to get detainees legal representation before they are transferred from the Portland area to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, further away from their support networks. 

The question of whether PIRC may alert the wider community to ICE’s presence at a particular location depends on several factors, including the wishes of the detainee and the location where ICE activity is taking place—if immigration officers are confirmed at a person’s home, PIRC’s practice is to safeguard the person’s privacy by not sharing the address publicly.

In other instances, the decision about whether to disseminate information about where ICE is operating may have to do with the organization’s capacity. 

“We are still a small, primarily volunteer-run team, and our focus has to be directly supporting the folks who are experiencing detention—and when that’s our focus, that also means we’re not immediately able to publish everything about it,” Lerner said. 

Still, Lerner said, it never hurts to watch or record ICE activity, particularly prior to when a detention has been made.

“Sometimes, just having eyes on ICE can make ICE go away,” Lerner said. “Because ICE, even though they have these horrible brazen tactics, they ultimately do not like to be filmed. That's part of why they wear masks, part of why they operate in sneaky ways, like in unmarked cars—it's not just to trick people, but to avoid people monitoring them.”

PIRC is only one node of a statewide rapid response network that has been strengthened during Trump’s second term. PIRC is part of the Oregon for All rapid response network—a collection of roughly 20 organizations that do rapid response work in their respective communities throughout the state.

Montoya said Oregon for All’s founding leaders began to develop plans for the network in May of last year, when it appeared Trump was well-positioned to retake the White House, and launched it in February—drawing on the legacy of One Oregon coalition, as well as other immigrant defense groups like CHIRLA in Los Angeles. 

All of the organizations that are part of the Oregon for All rapid response network have received $15,000 grants to bolster their operations, which Montoya said have been used in a variety of ways. Participating organizations are also able to apply for further, supplementary grants of between $5,000 and $20,000. 

The individual organizations in the network bring their own particular histories to an increasingly coordinated, statewide effort to stand up to the excess of ICE. The Hood River Latino Network, for instance, first organized its rapid response infrastructure in 2017—and Rose said that experience has helped communities in the Gorge look out for each other this year.

“One of the things that have shifted here in the last ten years—I know, because I've lived here for 25 years—is the way people have come together and gotten to know one another, and showed up in mutual aid ways that include immigration, but go far beyond that,” Rose said. 

Now, however, there is a renewed urgency in ICE response work. Montoya said Oregon for All has been working with its organizational partners over the last several weeks to develop a crisis response plan for a potential surge in federal antagonism. 

“This is something that is unprecedented, so we’re kind of building it as we go,” Montoya said. 

What is clear to organizers across the region is that people are interested in aiding rapid response efforts: Lerner said PIRC has trained hundreds of ICE legal observers in the Portland area, while hundreds more are part of ICE Watch. Rose said she believes there may be more than a thousand trained rapid responders in the Gorge.

Rose said the interest extends to people who may not be able to respond to calls frequently or at all, but still want to know best practices and share information with their communities. 

“We want people to be educated and know how to protect one another,” Rose said. “All of us want to get up, get through the day, and come home at the end of the evening to our beds and to our families.”