Crabs, A Helicopter, and One Town’s Fight Against ICE

In recent months, Americans have grown used to seeing armed troops in our metropolises—Immigration and Customs Enforcement seemingly in every city, most notably Minneapolis, and, in addition to ICE, National Guard troops in some of the most prominent urban centers like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. What startles is the thought of masked and helmeted recruits in paradise, but that may be coming.

The 363-mile Oregon coastline between the mouth of the Columbia River and the California state line holds so many natural and scenic treasures that one lifetime is not enough to appreciate it fully. Beyond the beaches (public by law), the region houses temperate rain forests beloved by hikers; the mouths of 12 major river systems; the largest sea cave in the United States, home to the only sea lion rookery on the West Coast; the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, a 31,500-acre preserve of shifting sand, small lakes, and bogs whose bleak majesty inspired Frank Herbert’s famous novel Dune; Depoe Bay, the smallest natural harbor in the world, which is also the vantage point to see migrating gray whales and orcas; and 11 historic lighthouses overlooking the rocky sea. If I can’t go to the Oregon Coast when I die, I will reluctantly settle for heaven. 

People along the Oregon Coast have a certain stubborn streak, and indeed, sometimes an eccentric one. The city of Yachats (population 994) celebrates the Fourth of July with a procession of oddities known as the “La De Da Parade.” The Sylvia Hotel, in Nye Beach near Newport, is a fully literary-themed hotel, with rooms named for authors from Agatha Christie to William Shakespeare, and for genres from romance to literary non-fiction. 

Florence, Oregon, is home to the infamous “exploding whale” incident in 1970, when an ill-fated attempt to dynamite a beached whale carcass resulted in a shower of blood and blubber raining on its terrified citizens. After the ridicule, though, Florence embraced its hapless attempt to remove the rotting whale corpse; in 2020, it created the Exploding Whale Memorial Park. The “Exploding Whales” is the official nickname for a local minor-league baseball club. 

Everyone on the coast knows that for all its splendor, the Pacific is an unruly neighbor. Residents know the quickest route to a tsunami evacuation zone; beachgoers maintain a wary eye for deadly “sneaker waves,” formed miles out, that can sweep the unwary out to sea; fishermen and sailors stay alert for potential tides and storms. 

Tourism is the region’s main source of income; the second is commercial fishing. From 10 commercial fishing ports, boats depart to catch tuna, salmon, shrimp, cod, and, most valuable of all, Dungeness crab, prized by chefs for its unique buttery flavor. The delicacy is found from Alaska to California but is concentrated in the Pacific Northwest fishery, which centers on Newport, a city of about 10,000, 130 miles south of the Washington state line. 

Dungeness crabbing is a dangerous trade; indeed, Newport is the most hazardous fishery in the United States, including Alaska. It was the subject of a season of the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch reality series. Boaters from Newport face a dangerous passage over “the bar,” where the fresh water from the shallow Yaquina River meets the deep seawater of the Pacific. The collision’s treacherous swells and powerful tides generate waves that can capsize a good-sized craft; as recently as August, the Coast Guard rescued three crew members of the crabbing vessel Das Bug. A fourth remains missing. 

Newport might seem an unlikely setting for a cautionary tale, as the federal government attempts to mount what candidate Donald Trump promised during his 2024 campaign to be “the largest deportation operation in American history.” But in Newport, a stolen helicopter, a gourmet catch, and a confluence of circumstances carry a warning for American communities, large and small. As the president’s mass deportation grinds on, no place, however idyllic, is safe. 

Lost fishing vessels are tragedies for individuals and families. They can also be tragedies for the community. 

Newport Fishermen’s Wives was founded in 1970 to cope with the loneliness that fishermen’s families endure. Fifty years later, women are increasingly involved in commercial fishing, but crews, male or female, still leave families on shore. While the Fishermen’s Wives—the group is open to anyone concerned by conditions for Newport fishers—originally focused on social support for families, by 1975, it had become a charitable corporation woven into the life of Newport. The Wives now sponsor a “Salmon Relief” program providing financial help to salmon fishermen at season’s closure; a community-wide “Home Port Dinner” to celebrate those who work in the fishery; and an annual “Blessing of the Fleet.” The Wives raised money and helped plan the Fishermen’s Memorial Sanctuary, a simple structure with a roof and no walls, including an altar honoring fisherfolk lost at sea since 1900. A tablet there lists some 150 names, about half of whom are followed by an asterisk, signifying “remains recovered.”

The story of ICE and Newport begins with that social group and brings us to the helicopter. And the helicopter brings us to the loss of the F/V Lasseigne, a 73-foot shrimp boat designed for the Gulf of Mexico, not the Pacific Northwest. Soon after it was launched in 1980, the craft was brought north to Newport and converted into a trawler—a conversion that required heavy equipment bolted to the deck, possibly making Lasseigne top-heavy. (It was never given a stability test.) 

On November 15, 1985, the Lasseigne, in moderate-to-heavy seas 20 miles off Siletz Bay, Oregon, developed a steep list. The captain, Kenneth Lasseigne, radioed to shore that the inaccessible hold was filling with water. “I can’t get to my fish hold to find out where the water is coming from. We’re taking it on real—it looks real bad.” The Coast Guard advised the captain and crew—deckhands Randy Bacon and Jean Yves Guinsbourg—to don life jackets. “Got ‘em on,” Lasseigne responded.

At 7:28 a.m., the Coast Guard launched two rescue helicopters—one came from Astoria, to the north; the other from North Bend, to the south; both over 100 miles away by air. By the time rescuers reached the Lasseigne, she had capsized. The captain and Randy Bacon were found floating in the frigid waters and died of hypothermia shortly thereafter. Guinsbourg’s body was never found. 

At this point, the Fishermen’s Wives mounted a four-alarm response. Why should helicopters be stationed so far away? Survival times in the frigid waters off Newport were at best 15 minutes, particularly in Dungeness season, which begins around December 1. The Wives contacted government officials and members of Congress; in response, in 1987, the Coast Guard stationed a helicopter at the Newport airport, a few dozen miles by air from where the Lasseigne had been lost. 

In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, citing budget needs, publicly announced it was moving the copter back to North Bend. The Fishermen’s Wives—and the people of Newport—let Congress know they were unhappy, even filing suit to block the transfer. A federal court dismissed it as moot after Congress passed a special statute, 14 U.S.C. Sec 912, that requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to make specific findings, give public notice, notify members of Congress, and wait 18 months for public comment before closing any Coast Guard air facility. This was normal policy and politics. The government made a decision to which it was entitled. Citizens objected. Lawmakers came up with a solution. Since then, the Newport chopper has been involved in about 500 rescues, including saving some 30 commercial fishermen. 

Then came the second Trump administration. By fall, rumors began spreading that the rescue chopper was gone. Indeed, the Coast Guard had removed the signs identifying the Newport air station as a Coast Guard facility. Come November, the former rescue helicopter had been assigned to duty on the Mexican border, monitoring illegal crossings. Arresting migrants took precedence over protecting Newport’s fishers’ lives, and, as the agency later acknowledged, it had simply ignored the statutory requirements of a finding of necessity, public notice, and an 18-month waiting period.

Meanwhile, Newporters spied other signs that the Trump administration had designs on their slice of paradise. A federal contractor specializing in rapid housing construction had applied to lease land adjacent to the air facility. Other contractors were seeking bids for functions such as removing 10,000 gallons of human waste from an as-yet-to-be-announced facility. In November, a local TV station reported that a federal contractor, Team Housing Solutions of Texas, approached local hoteliers to rent 200 rooms for federal personnel. Another contractor, Acuity International, sent out job notices for guards, nurses, and other personnel. 

Although no announcement had been made, in January, ICE confirmed in court filings that it had been planning a detention facility at the airport. It would make sense for them, given Trump’s mass deportation project. Oregon, like a third of American states, has no permanent full-time ICE detention facility; immigrants seized in Oregon are routinely sent to Tacoma, Washington. During intensified deportation efforts in the second Trump administration, ICE has searched for places to hold immigrants. Newport’s air facility was a logical choice, as deportation flights could come and go easily. In February, The Washington Post reported that ICE has a $38 billion plan to transform warehouses into detention facilities. That doesn’t include building new facilities.

At this point, Newport went on high alert, as concern spread that an ICE prison could harm its economy. Whatever jobs were created in the prison business, more and better ones would be lost due to locals facing deportation. Their removal would cripple tourism and fishing. Plus, no Newporter thought camo, semi-automatics, and masked agents would enhance the town’s appeal. The area votes Democratic, but even if it did not, it’s not surprising that Newport and its surroundings reacted with rage: A town meeting on November 14 attracted 800 people (about 8 percent of the town’s population), and residents expressed outrage both at the clandestine theft of the helicopter and at the idea of an immigration prison in their community. About 16 percent of Newport’s population is Latino, with roughly half being foreign-born. “I urge you to remember that these families are a fundamental part of not only our community, but also our economy,” Sarah Yaeggy said. She was a member of Conexion Phoenix, which runs educational and other programs for the Latino population. “We’re talking about working families who have spent their lives working in tourism, restaurants and hotels, seafood-packing companies, and in construction,” she said.

The uplifting thing about this meeting was that, despite the administration trying mightily to divide Americans and grabbing the nearby helicopter to pursue undocumented migrants instead of protecting fishermen, it brought Newport together. The issue didn’t divide along pro- and anti-Trump lines; instead, it engaged anyone interested in the town’s future. “It makes you question yourself: Is this what I voted for?” one crabber told The New York Times. “It just doesn’t seem like these are decisions about the people who live and work here.”

True to form, the Wives took the case to the U.S. District Court, joined by Oregon’s attorney general. A month later, Judge Ann Aiken issued an injunction forbidding the Coast Guard from removing the helicopter. Aiken noted that the government made no pretense of following the law: “Defendants admit that they did not follow any of the procedures outlined in 14 U.S.C. § 912(a) before indefinitely reassigning the rescue helicopter from AIRFAC Newport.”

Instead, the government argued, in effect, that the helicopter was none of the plaintiffs’ business: “the Government asserts that Plaintiffs have alleged only a ‘generalized interest in how Coast Guard search and rescue operations are conducted’ and seek ‘to obtain relief on behalf of non-party hypothetical individuals’ based on ‘anecdotal concerns about past conduct not before this Court.’” Since no plaintiff was drowning at the moment, there could be no case. The government’s brief added a breezy statement: “The Government further argues that the Coast Guard has no duty to assist vessels or persons in distress.” 

Aiken ordered the helicopter returned pending a full trial on the merits. 

Former DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin attacked the court’s order: “These efforts to micromanage U.S. Coast Guard operations via lawsuit are completely intrusive, and they obstruct the work of the Service’s patriotic men and women,” she said—adding that questions about helicopters from North Bend or Astoria would reach distressed sailors in time was “an insult to the hard, heroic work the men and women of the Coast Guard put in every day.”

On December 4, Oregon’s two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, stated that the Coast Guard had promised to return the helicopter. “The acting commandant assured me that they had returned the helicopter because of the court action, but they had intended to return it by the start of crab season anyway, and it was back in Newport to stay,” Merkley said in a video on X. 

But promises from the Trump administration have a somewhat elusive quality. Three days after the senators declared victory, the government’s lawyers filed a brief curtailing their limited commitment. The Coast Guard would maintain the helicopter only “through spring 2026 as it did last year, at which point it will assess its resources for the summer season as it has for the past several years.” And early this year, the acting director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations assured the court that ICE had indeed begun planning for a detention facility at the airport, but had stopped the planning. No worries, Newporters. Last month, an ICE official filed a sworn declaration that ICE has “no plan or intention to begin construction or to open a temporary holding/processing facility in or around the City of Newport, Oregon, or anywhere within Lincoln County, Oregon.”

And we have ICE’s word on that. After that declaration, Newport Mayor Jan Kaplan said he was waiting on something more. “We have not yet received assurances that ICE will not attempt to establish a facility in our community in the future. That’s why we are pursuing further assurances that ICE will not construct any detention facility, temporary or permanent.” Until then, he said, the case will continue. It remains to be seen whether the dismissal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month will alter the agency’s policy—and that will not likely be clear until a new secretary is confirmed. President Trump has nominated Senator Markwayne Mullin to succeed Noem, but the Oklahoma Republican’s confirmation will take time. Behind the scenes, there seems to be interest in a settlement in the various suits. “We are hoping to resolve it soon,” says Taunette Dixon, co-president of the Newport Fishermen’s Wives, of the helicopter suit. The state’s suit, aimed at any ICE facility, is also on hold for possible settlement.

At press time, news broke that ICE has been in touch with Drew Farmer, a member of the Coos County Board of Commissioners, about the possibility of an ICE facility in the coastal town of Lakeside, 80 miles south of Newport. Farmer apparently encouraged the agency’s interest, but has been smartly spanked by every other figure in the county. “I screwed up,” he told The Lincoln Chronicle. “The desperate situation our county is in and 60 percent of other counties are in … took me down a road that I shouldn’t have been going down,” he said. He’s not alone in balking at new ICE facilities. New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte proudly announced that ICE won’t be converting a warehouse in Merrimack, about 50 miles north of Boston. In Trump-red Western Maryland, in Washington County, there’s strong opposition to converting an empty warehouse into a facility for 1,500 detainees.

If ICE is still planning a dungeon for Newport, the locals have limited tools to resist. Under federal law, coastal states can enact state programs to manage development in their coastal zones; Oregon’s program is particularly strict. A contractor seeking to build a federal project on the coast asks the state to certify that its work is “consistent with” the state’s coastal regulations. If the state declines approval of a federal government project, federal law allows for a unilateral finding that is “consistent to the maximum extent practicable” with state law. The state or other players could challenge that determination in court. But Oregon can’t simply forbid the federal project. If the feds are patient and persistent, supremacy can win. 

If such an event occurred, immigrant workers would face a difficult choice—stay and risk an ICE encounter or flee. At the town hall meeting, Mica Contreras, executive director of the Linn Benton Lincoln Health Equity Alliance, predicted, “A facility like that would devastate families. When families live in fear, it doesn’t just affect them—it affects all of us.”

After Minneapolis, it’s not necessary to argue that ICE’s presence changes a community in profound and negative ways. How would it change Newport? I spoke with academics Nancy Hiemstra of Stony Brook University and Deirdre Conlon of the University of Leeds, England, who co-authored Immigration Detention, Inc.: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants, published last year. Hiemstra told me, “There have been studies showing that when there are detention facilities in an area, it is much more likely that people in the immediate surrounding communities will be pulled in.” The prospect of frequent, unpredictable ICE raids would make life dicey for fishmongers, hoteliers, and the like. And the sight of masked gunmen brandishing weapons and manhandling immigrants would play havoc with Newport as a getaway destination. As Gomberg, the legislator, dryly notes, “It changes the brand.” 

The scene inside ICE prisons would also change the brand. Private contractors often run ICE facilities, and inspections have revealed horrifying conditions inside. Perhaps for that reason, they tend to resist outside scrutiny. When Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, attempted to visit a facility there last year, ICE agents not only refused him entry, they arrested and handcuffed him—and, for good measure, they arrested Representative LaMonica McIver, an area Democrat, entitled by law to inspect without notice. She is now facing a federal indictment alleging that she assaulted the ICE personnel who detained her.

Once allowed into a city, the business of detention may be impossible to uproot. The detention business may displace existing businesses and become an indispensable part of the local economy. Hiemstra and Conlon carefully analyze the finances of several eastern communities, including Essex County, New Jersey, which includes Newark. They found that the federal contractors who operate, staff, and supply detention facilities became, through municipal contracts and payrolls, central to the community’s finances—and highly influential in local government and politics. 

The Trump administration says it’s aiming for “the largest mass immigration detention in American history.” But even that grim goal is misleading, since it suggests a temporary event, like “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s. Instead, the Trump immigrant purge and its network of private prisons bid fair to become a permanent fixture of American life. This will require hundreds of thousands of inmate beds. And so it’s clear why ICE has begun to target small communities, like Newport, around the country as future prison sites. 

Immigrant detention is not necessarily short-term. Not every immigrant ICE seizes will be deported quickly, if at all. Some migrants have countries of origin that will not take them back, either because they have given up citizenship or because they do not accept that the migrant is actually their citizen; private prison operators would happily hold them indefinitely, receiving per diem payments from Homeland Security.

Even if all undocumented immigrants could be removed, there would be other supplies of inmates for the private prisons. For one thing, the administration has announced a program to expand “denaturalization” operations, searching the records of foreign-born citizens in the U.S. who may have lied—or simply made mistakes—on their citizenship applications, or who have been convicted of crimes since gaining citizenship. In those cases, the government can go to court and seek to strip migrants of their citizenship if authorities find errors or misstatements in their citizenship papers. Denaturalization has historically been rare, even during the first Trump administration; between 2017 and 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services considered a total of 120 denaturalization cases. Now, however, DHS is calling on local field offices to supply 100-200 cases per month. These will not only include “fraudulent” applications, but also immigrants accused of financial fraud, gang membership, or involvement with drug cartels. Currently, about 26 million American citizens have gained citizenship through naturalization. Even a small percentage of this population, stripped of citizenship, would keep ICE facilities full for decades—especially since their countries of origin may not take them back. 

Trump’s program doesn’t stop there. On his first day in office, Trump announced an end to birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, for all children born to undocumented parents on or after February 20, 2025. The Supreme Court will review that order later this year. 

If it upholds the order, the result will be a bountiful harvest of detainable “aliens.” Eventually, the Trump rule would produce an undocumented population of 2.7 million by 2045. Many of those children would have no citizenship anywhere. Beyond that, if Trump’s far-right interpretation of the amendment is upheld, there is no legal basis for limiting its reach to children born after the 2025 executive order. Any person of any age whose parents were undocumented would be vulnerable to losing their citizenship. (During the 2024 election, Trump associate John Eastman wrote an op-ed claiming that Kamala Harris was not a citizen.) These people have no country of origin; they may become stateless—and subject to indefinite detention. 

And beyond that, of course, it is no secret that the president is itching to strip citizenship from Americans he dislikes, even if they are American-born and children of American citizens, from flag-burners to the comedian Rosie O’Donnell. Citizenship is central to Trump’s political brand. He entered electoral politics attacking America’s first Black president’s citizenship; he has repeatedly stated that he would take it from those whose First Amendment activities—such as burning the flag—he disapproves of. 

It’s too easy to dismiss the talk of taking citizenship from native-born Americans as extreme; there is evidence that it has been and may remain a long-term goal of the American right. Early in 2003, leaks from the Bush-led U.S. Department of Justice revealed a draft bill (informally called “Patriot II”) that would, among other things, have revoked the citizenship of any American (natural-born or naturalized) who provided “material support” to a “terrorist organization.” Revoking citizenship now can follow a judicial determination that a citizen intended to renounce their citizenship; Patriot II would have made the act of material support itself, without more, proof of that intent. The bill faced widespread opposition and was never introduced. But it’s hard not to suspect that the idea remains dormant, not dead, in the authoritarian imagination that inspires so much Trump-era policy. Indeed, the recent attempt to invent a legal category called “domestic terrorist organizations” may be a step toward this chilling goal.

The power to create “illegal aliens” by administrative proceedings would fill ICE detention centers indefinitely. 

Once ICE facilities are built, the problem of producing inmates for them to hold will be easily solved. The damage to our society will be irreversible.

Newport does not want to be part of the new society that mass deportations will produce. But it’s getting a taste of it. A helicopter, dedicated by law to search and rescue, was taken away and used to patrol the borders. The government simply ignored a bargain struck by the U.S. Congress with a group of constituents who had played by the rules of democracy, using the First Amendment right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

If the nation looks away from the deportation industrial complex, it will grow. The work will affect and warp its institutions, laws, and communities, large and small, even the ones in paradise. 

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