A federal judge in Oregon ruled on Monday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has "routinely violated" his court order restricting warrantless immigration arrests in the state, finding that the agency reported only a fraction of the warrantless arrests it actually made — and that at least one ICE officer lied in an official arrest report to make an unlawful arrest look lawful.
Source: Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB)
U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai issued the 50-page ruling on November 2 in M-J-M-A v. Hernandez (No. 6:25-cv-02011), a proposed class-action lawsuit brought by the Portland-based nonprofit Innovation Law Lab. The judge granted the plaintiffs' motion to enforce the preliminary injunction he issued on February 4, which bars ICE from making a warrantless civil immigration arrest in Oregon unless the officer first determines that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, and requires the agency to document every such arrest for the plaintiffs.
13 arrests reported — 'significantly more' in reality
According to the ruling, ICE arrested 574 people in Oregon between February 5 and July 31, and 504 of those arrests were made out in the community rather than in jails or prisons. Yet in the monthly reports the agency was required to file with the court, ICE acknowledged only 13 warrantless arrests between February and early August. After two days of evidentiary hearings in September — at which four immigrants arrested by ICE in 2026 testified that they had been arrested without a valid warrant — Judge Kasubhai concluded that ICE had conducted "significantly more than thirteen." At oral argument, government lawyers said records on about 25 warrantless arrests had been turned over; the court said it had no evidence those disclosures were ever made.
Source: The Oregonian
'He lied in an official record'
The ruling's sharpest finding concerns a July arrest in southern Oregon. An ICE deportation officer, identified in the ruling only by the initials J.G., wrote in the arrested man's report — the Form I-213 — that he knew the 22-year-old's immigration status before stopping him and that a warrant existed. Under oath at the September hearing, the officer conceded: "I did not have a warrant at the time." Judge Kasubhai rejected the officer's claim that the false entries were an oversight. "It defies logic that such consequential errors in the I-213 form are merely a 'mistake,'" he wrote. "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 judge also described the purported warrant in the case as "grossly defective."
Other arrest reports were riddled with errors, the judge found. One I-213 recorded an arrest as having taken place in California when it actually happened in Oregon; the paperwork for a June arrest listed the wrong vehicle and the wrong location; and a third man arrested in July was released the same day under a habeas order after the court found ICE's account of his arrest unreliable. The judge also condemned the boilerplate language in which officers repeated, person after person, that they were "unaware" of the arrested person's community ties — the very individualized flight-risk check his order requires. "This is sloppy work," he wrote.
"There is no telling how many other agents in Oregon engaged in similar misconduct, which calls into question the veracity of all I-213 forms completed by ICE officers in Oregon." — U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai
What the court has now ordered
Monday's order moves the court from trusting ICE's own reporting to auditing it directly. The government must now hand over all arrest documents in the case to Innovation Law Lab, and must produce body-worn camera footage for ICE arrests in Oregon conducted on or after September 1, 2026; where no footage exists, an officer must say so under oath. The Department of Homeland Security must also send the terms of the February injunction to every ICE agent working in Oregon every 30 days, and certify to the court that it has done so.
ICE denied at the September hearing that it had violated the order, and the agency did not immediately respond to Oregon Public Broadcasting's request for comment on Monday's ruling. The ruling does not hold ICE in contempt, and it does not stop the agency from arresting anyone named in a valid warrant. The government's appeal of the original February injunction is still pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Why it matters beyond Oregon
The legal rule at the centre of the case, 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a)(2), allows a warrantless immigration arrest only where an officer has reason to believe the person is in the country unlawfully and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. Judge Kasubhai noted that federal courts in Colorado and Washington, D.C., have imposed similar limits, and he cited rulings from Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and California as well. For immigrant communities in Oregon — including Punjabi families in the Portland and Salem areas and the truck drivers who cross the state daily on Interstate 5 — the ruling is a documented, court-tested record that immigration stops in Oregon were made outside the rules a federal judge had set, and that the paperwork behind some of those stops cannot be taken at face value.
What happens next: ICE's first 30-day certification to the court is the next deadline to watch, the Ninth Circuit will decide the government's appeal of the February injunction, and the underlying class action continues. For anyone arrested by ICE in Oregon since February, the ruling does not by itself cancel an arrest or a removal order — but it gives defence lawyers a federal judge's findings to put in front of an immigration court.