_{Thumbnail photo by Ken Lund via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons License}

Curry County Commissioner Patrick Hollinger said he didn’t intend for his colleagues to take official action on a resolution honoring detainer requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Taken verbatim from a similar resolution Coos County commissioners have been discussing since January, Hollinger asked his colleagues to consider Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state and the possibility that the Trump administration may cut its federal funding as a result.

“That will directly affect our county as well,” Hollinger said Wednesday. “We use those funds for our DA office. We use those funds for our sheriff’s office. And it’s those two offices that can help with the human trafficking and drug trafficking [occurring] throughout our county.”

Still, the county commissioner said he had spoken with Judge Cynthia L. Beaman, a member of Oregon’s 15th Judicial District who hears cases from Curry County, as well as the Curry County District Attorney. Hollinger said both the DA, Joshua Spansail, and the judge hadn’t had a case involving an undocumented immigrant in several years.

That revelation elicited a smattering of laughter from several residents who opposed the resolution. Referring to its statement that rural communities face “disproportionate challenges due to crimes committed by individuals who are in the country illegally,” they asked commissioners to show data to back up that claim.

They also took issue with the Board of Commissioners choosing to focus their energies on immigration and ICE at the expense of other concerns, including potential cuts to Medicaid as well as Head Start and early education programs and services for seniors.

One woman, Harbor resident Vicki Bradley, reminded commissioners that later this month, she and other Curry County residents will be asked to vote on a levy to hire more patrol deputies for the sheriff’s department.

Bradley said the proposed resolution makes her want to vote the levy down.

“Just as the people before me have spoken, [the resolution] talks about all of the crime that’s being committed in this county at the hands of immigrants,” she said. “We can’t even get statistics out of the sheriff’s department and from the commissioners about the crime stats for me to make a judgment on how to vote on that levy. And this just kind of put me over the top because this makes me feel like this is the kind of stuff we’re going to be spending our taxpayer dollars on. I’m not for it and I don’t want you to pass it.”

Another speaker, Gold Beach resident Janet Jeffrey, asked commissioners to think of the lessons they “probably gleaned” when they were children, one of which is to treat others as they want to be treated, the second, to follow rules and laws and the third, to get the whole story before taking action.

Jeffrey pointed out that the Fifth and 14th amendments in the United States Constitution guarantees everyone the right to due process. She called the proposed resolution an overreach and urged the Board to stay in their lane.

“Tonight you are asking us whether or not we agree to an overreach of our elected sheriff’s authority,” she said. “We elected him to be our sheriff, not an ICE agent. If he wants to be an ICE agent, he should apply for a position in that federal department. We elected him to consistently enforce laws within the confines of his job description and not to use capricious ideologically driven beliefs.”

The proposed resolution did have some supporters. The first supporter, Gold Beach resident Joe Wilson was the first of two speakers to mention Trump by name and said that he carried a majority in Curry County during the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.

“The No. 1 priority for Donald Trump is getting rid of illegals,” Wilson said. “Every one should be deported and anybody that helps them should be charged with crimes also.”

Brookings resident Thena Lyons also mentioned Trump, as well as his predecessor, when saying she supported the proposed resolution to honor ICE detainer requests. She said her 14-year-old nephew was killed by a drunk driver who was in the country illegally, adding that “unless it happens to you personally, you don’t understand what that’s like.”

“When they took the person that killed him to the hospital, the police just let him go,” Lyons told commissioners, adding that it was his “third strike,” though she doesn’t know his criminal history. “I don’t hate the man. But he was on his way to pick up his small children. It could have been he made it there and then the whole family would have been killed because he decided to drink. He got government assistance. He was bipolar, but he decided instead of taking bipolar medication he decided to drink and my 14-year-old nephew died because of that.”

ICE issues immigration detainer requests to federal, state or local law enforcement agencies, asking that they be notified “as early as possible” before the agency releases an undocumented immigrant. An immigration detainer also asks the agency to hold the immigrant for up to 48 hours beyond the time they would ordinarily be released so the Department of Homeland Security can assume custody of the individual.

Though he acknowledged that a local judge and the district attorney hadn’t dealt with cases involving undocumented immigrants in previous years, Hollinger cited the National Human Trafficking hotline, which stated that they had received 461 calls in 2023 from Oregon.

His colleague Jay Trost, who was made the chairman of the Board of Commissioners following the resignation of his predecessor Brad Alcorn last month, referred to a drug bust that occurred off of Winchuck River Road in 2021 that he referred to as a “large cartel bust.”

On July 30, 2021, the Curry County Sheriff’s Office raided an illegal marijuana grow at a property on Peavine Road off the Winchuck River Road, arresting six Hispanic males and recovering $15 million in cannabis plants, the Curry Coastal Pilot reported.

On Wednesday, Trost used that example as a response to those asking for data to back up the resolution’s claim that rural communities face disproportionate challenges due to criminal activity attributed to people living in the country illegally.

“It was real. It was in our community. That was in our backyards,” he said. “I understand this is an emotional topic for many people and we have to recognize that.”

Lynn Coker, the county’s newest commissioner, said that discussing the impacts illegal immigration has on rural communities like Curry County is, for him, a “grand exercise.” He referred to his work as a life coach and addiction counselor with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and implied that the influx of drugs members of the prison population are addicted to are brought into the country by illegal immigrants.

Coker also reiterated Hollinger’s statement about the proposed ICE resolution being used as a shield against possible cuts to federal funding and federal support, bringing up Curry County’s previous opposition to offshore wind energy generation.

“I want to make certain that when people back in the Interior Department and the Department of Agriculture, when they start thinking about counties and people, communities, that will be totally wiped out as a result of some of these very exorbitant plans for placing offshore wind turbines out there, they don’t say it’s just Oregon, they’re blue,” Coker said. “I want them to look at us as a group of families that are bound for success at the county level.”