Home/ Oregon — State Police Shared LEDS Data With ICE 1.4M Times/Year, Lawsuit Alleges (May 2026)
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Oregon — State Police Shared LEDS Data With ICE 1.4M Times/Year, Lawsuit Alleges (May 2026)

OR

Summary

On May 5, 2026, the nonprofit Rural Organizing Project sued the Oregon State Police (OSP) in Multnomah County Circuit Court, alleging that OSP violated Oregon’s sanctuary law for years by allowing federal immigration authorities to access Oregonians’ data through shared law enforcement databases. The lawsuit claims immigration authorities queried state-run databases approximately 1.4 million times last year alone. This is the structural complement to the documented Flock/ALPR sharing in southern Oregon: the statewide database itself is the backdoor.

Why It Matters

Oregon is the nation’s oldest sanctuary state (1987) with zero 287(g) agreements and zero detention facilities. The formal legal framework holds, but this lawsuit alleges the single largest data conduit to ICE operates through routine database access, not formal cooperation. If 1.4 million queries/year are accurate, that dwarfs the county-level Flock lookups and represents a statewide sanctuary-evasion mechanism that no single county fight can close. It reframes the Oregon story from “sheriff backdoors” to “the state’s own data infrastructure.”

Key Details

  • Plaintiff: Rural Organizing Project (statewide grassroots nonprofit)
  • Counsel: Heather Marek, Oregon Law Center
  • Filed: ~May 5, 2026, Multnomah County (FIPS 41051) Circuit Court
  • Database at issue: Law Enforcement Data System (LEDS) — operated by OSP, holds warrants, criminal histories, license plate and driver’s license information
  • Scale alleged: ~1.4 million immigration-authority queries of state-run databases in the prior year
  • Legal theory: Violation of Oregon’s Sanctuary Promise Act / 1987 sanctuary statute prohibiting use of state resources for federal immigration enforcement

Context

This filing lands amid a wave of Oregon enforcement litigation: the February 2026 Judge Kasubhai ruling that ICE’s warrantless arrests violated the 4th/5th Amendments; the April 23, 2026 PCUN/nurses/educators sensitive-locations suit; and Innovation Law Lab’s FOIA suit over ICE detention placement/transfer policies. It also follows the full disclosure (April 15-17, 2026) that Operation Black Rose ran Sept 27, 2025 - March 1, 2026 with 100+ federal officers and 1,100+ arrests, relying heavily on surveillance technology to locate targets.

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Last updated: May 29, 2026