On July 30, 2025, local, state, and federal law enforcement executed 11 search warrant raids on cannabis farms and locations related to these farms across Southern Oregon, according to records obtained by Information for Public Use. Seventeen workers from the raids were arrested by ICE and brought to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington. At the time, these appeared to be the largest known ICE raids in Oregon since Trump re-took office in 2025, although ICE has since ramped up large-scale operations in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
The ICE raids were first documented by Migra Watch RV, a grassroots social media page in Southern Oregon, and local community members raised concerns about the raids to elected officials in August 2025. Oregon’s media and politicians largely neglected to discuss the raid publicly until the national investigative news outlet The Intercept broke the story on November 3, 2025. The silence from legacy media and elected officials calls into question their capacity to respond to the disappearance of community members and the federal government’s increasingly unprecedented tactics.
Theo Whitcomb, the reporter who covered the story for the The Intercept, used a combination of evidence from community organizers, public records, and federal government memos to document how federal authorities “pre-planned immigration enforcement as part of the raids in the Medford area.” For example, local organizers documented a large bus operated by GEO — the business that operates the Northwest ICE Processing Center — was staged at the Medford ICE field office during the raid; an incident report from the Federal Protective Service, which provides security for federal agencies, confirms its officers were present to ensure ICE could smoothly carry out its operations; and a memo that grants DEA the same power as ICE to carry out immigration enforcement, which DEA has increasingly used across the country to support the Trump Administration’s deportation goals. Information for Public Use obtained hundreds of pages of records from local and state agencies, and provided these to The Intercept.
Raids like this, in which drug enforcement appears to be used as a pretext to make immigration arrests, call into question whether local and state law enforcement did their due diligence to adhere to Oregon’s sanctuary law — a law that is supposed to prevent local coordination on federal immigration enforcement without a signed judicial warrant. According to The Intercept, “local [law enforcement] agencies denied any direct cooperation with ICE — and, in case of the sheriff’s office, denied knowing about ICE’s involvement — federal authorities appeared to have pre-planned immigration enforcement as part of the raids in the Medford area.”
Even if that is true and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was duped by federal agencies, their behavior in the immediate aftermath and following months suggests that they hoped these arrests would be swept under the rug. Shortly after the raids, a local right-wing social influencer associated with the Jackson County Scanner Page admonished community members: “Stop drinking the Kool Aid. Today’s activities have nothing to do with ICE.” By declining to offer any public statement regarding the ICE raids, Jackson County Sheriff’s Office allowed this type of disinformation to circulate.
“When collaborating with federal agencies, it is not good enough to trust things to be business as usual without verifying,” Kelly Simon, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, told The Intercept. “We know the agenda, and it’s on our local leaders to take no part in it.”
Information for Public Use is publishing a small selection of records we obtained from local emergency communications and various law enforcement agencies. We have redacted personal information including the names and addresses of individuals who were impacted by the law enforcement raids. These records do not give us a complete picture of the 7/30/25 events, but they help to tell a part of the story:
- JCSO-ECSO search warrant emails.pdf (pages 1-2) is an email from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office to the local 911 dispatch agency; it lists 10 of the 11 sites that were raided on 7/30/25 and details which agencies and officers served as leads for the sites, including the Sheriff’s Office, Central Point Police, Oregon State Police, and the DEA.
- 25-4390.pdf (pages 3-4) is a Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) log from the Central Point Police, which shows a partial timeline of one of the residences that was raided by Central Point police.
- 25-4390 Email.pdf (pages 5-6) is an email chain regarding the Central Point Police’s involvement in the Green Park search warrant and references an additional “assignment where we will be helping with searching and destruction of marijuana” on 7/30/25.
- 612 redacted.pdf (pages 7-9) is a Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) log from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO), which shows a partial timeline of one of the marijuana farms that was raided by JCSO.
Information for Public Use obtained hundreds of pages of records, which reveal the 11 sites and many individuals that were impacted by these raids, and which we shared with The Intercept. Researchers, journalists, and community groups can request a copy of these additional records by emailing us at info4publicuse@protonmail.com.
For more information, we encourage readers to read “Local Cops Aren’t Allowed To Help Ice. Did the Feds Dupe Them Into Raids That Rounded Up Immigrants?” by Theo Whitcomb on The Intercept’s website.
Media Generated
The Intercept, November 3, 2025
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