A K-8 school adjacent to the federal immigration enforcement facility in South Portland, is moving, citing negative health and safety impacts of federal officers’ response to protests.
With Cottonwood School of Civics and Science teachers expected back in the classroom Aug. 18, and students by Sept. 2, school officials say federal agents’ frequent use of tear gas on Portlanders protesting at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, facility endangers students.
The school’s board of directors voted 4-2 to approve a move to the Southwest Portland building in a contentious three-hour board meeting Aug. 4. The approval allows Cottonwood to temporarily sublease the building from Bridges and start its school year on time amid a challenging budget cycle.
Deliberations on where the school will end up caused tension between those who want to move to a nearby building — the former Bridges Middle School — and those who say the school should take an option further north, because of concerns about the Bridges building’s landlord.
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While the move does nothing to protect other neighbors from clouds of tear gas — including a ballet school, nearby restaurants and residential highrises — some city councilors say they are pursuing an idea to ban the use of tear gas in Portland altogether.
Cottonwood announced plans to begin searching for a new property May 9, expecting a yearslong process to decide on a location. But with federal agents frequently deploying tear gas and other munitions against protestors this summer because of President Donald Trump’s expansive deportation efforts, school leaders and parents say the quiet neighborhood south of downtown is no longer safe.
“All students and our families matter,” Alicia Moody, a board member, said in a statement to parents immediately following the vote. “Safety is first and foremost to continue to repair and come together as a community as we work to expeditiously relocate and support our students and family for the upcoming school year, and work on a long-term plan for the school.”
With the start of the school year fast approaching, school leaders, building owners and the city’s permitting bureau need to move quickly. Cottonwood told parents it had two options if it wanted to start the school year as scheduled. First, it could move to the Bridges building off Naito Parkway, one mile north of Cottonwood’s current location.
Bridges is in the process of moving to Northwest Portland, and city permitting officials are working to support the moves on a short timeline, according to Elliott Kozuch, Portland’s Community and Economic Development public information manager.
Second, Cottonwood could have moved to a North Portland building owned by Portland Public Schools, further from its current location, and at nearly double the current rent. Proponents of the move to Bridges said the school can’t afford to risk losing a significant number of students whose parents answered a survey saying they would disenroll if the board voted for the location to North Portland. Others said the survey data showed students of color were the most likely to leave if the board chose the Bridges building.
The city, for its part, is working fast.
“The city is working within its purview to expedite reviews of this permit,” Kozuch said.
The city expects to issue the building permit with a temporary certificate of occupancy, allowing Bridges to move into its new building, under the condition that necessary seismic upgrades will be addressed after an evaluation this fall, according to Kozuch.
“This will support Bridges Middle School and Cottonwood School’s efforts to change locations ahead of the 2025-2026 school year,” Kozuch said.
But several board members, staff and students’ parents said moving to the Bridges building could leave immigrant students at risk.
That building is owned by local real estate company Lindquist Development, which also owns the building ICE leases. Stuart Linquist, the company’s president, struck a protester with his Mercedes outside the ICE facility in 2018, and later threatened to fight anti-ICE protestors in an interview with Willamette Week about the incident.
Some Cottonwood staff and board members fear Lindquist could allow ICE agents into the building while students are in classes, according to sources who spoke to Street Roots on condition of anonymity.
In a newsletter and survey sent to enrolled families July 27, Cottonwood recognized the conflict in values, but said with just two options in the city for school-zoned buildings, the choices were limited.
“Cottonwood acknowledges that this may be a complex and sensitive issue for some members of our community,” the newsletter said. “We want to honor those perspectives and are open to hearing your thoughts. At the same time, after much consideration, we know that our choices are limited and this remains an option for a short term solution where we can continue to carry out our mission while we strengthen the school’s financial footing as it moves toward securing a long-term home.”
Removing danger
The move comes as a petition calling on city officials to revoke an ICE building permit garnered over 17,000 signatures — a move local immigrant rights advocates and lawyers say could make it harder for immigrants to access critical legal aid. Activists from across the city want city officials to remove the dangers federal agents pose — one way or another.
In written testimony submitted to the Community and Public Safety committee July 7, Sade Rivers, an educator and parent at Cottonwood, wrote in support of the city revoking the permit. Rivers said the “so-called ‘less lethal’ weapons have no place near schools or residential neighborhoods.”
“We should not have to choose between educating our children and protecting them from harm,” Rivers wrote. “Our community deserves better, and our kids deserve peace.”
Another parent at the school, Cassidy Richey, submitted written testimony July 7 in support of revoking the permit, saying the school has dealt with chemical weapons and rubber bullets littering the playground for years.
“Recently when picking up at the end of the school year there were masked ICE employees driving around in masks to intimidate protesters,” Richey wrote. “This is scary for school children.”
But the city pushed back on that idea, saying conditional use reviews and land use decisions are technically not permits. Instead, they are reviews by Portland Permitting and Development, or PPD, to ensure the use of the land aligns with the character, appearance and infrastructure of a surrounding area.
“One of the challenges we continue to work through is calls for us to revoke the permit,” Deputy City Administrator Donnie Oliveira said in a July 25 email to city officials. “There is not a permit to revoke.”
Enforcing a conditional use violation would require a lengthy process, according to an earlier memo Oliveira and Deputy City Administrator Priya Dhanapal sent to Mayor Keith Wilson and city councilors July 16.
The memo outlined the pathways available to the city if it was to receive a complaint about a violation at the ICE facility, as first reported by The Oregonian on July 22.
The process would likely unfurl at a much slower pace than the city’s timeline for permit approval for the Cottonwood move. To enforce the ICE building’s conditional use, which the city first issued in 2011, Oliveira said PPD would first need to receive a complaint alleging land use, building code, noise or nuisance violations. That complaint would begin PPD’s investigation process, including initial research into the building’s permit history. The department would then request access to the building through the property owner, and if the owner denied access, the city would petition a judge at the Multnomah County Circuit Court for an inspection warrant.
If the court found probable cause and issued an inspection warrant, PPD would access the facility, investigate the site, and, if it found violations, send a notice giving the tenants — in this case the federal government — 30 days to comply. If it found no violations, the case would be closed. If federal authorities violated the building code, the city could assess a monthly code enforcement fee. That’s a move the city took in 2020, when the Portland Bureau of Transportation fined the federal government $528,000 for installing a fence at the federal courthouse that blocked a lane of traffic.
The first step in that process happened last week, according to public records obtained by Street Roots. PPD received two complaints July 21, alleging violations of the conditional use, and initiated the steps outlined in the previous memo, according to the records.
In the July 25 email, Oliveira said another pathway could exist for City Council action if the investigation found violations and the federal government refused to remedy the infractions. He said PPD has limited enforcement jurisdiction, but the investigation could ultimately create a scenario in which the City Council could reconsider its 2011 land use decision.
Health and safety
Moving the Cottonwood School helps students entering into a new school year, but does not prevent federal agents from continuing to use tear gas in the residential neighborhood. City Council members — both in the Public Safety and the Climate, Resilience and Land Use committees — are working to ban the use of tear gas citywide.
City Councilor Sameer Kanal, a member of the Climate Committee and co-chair of the Public Safety Committee, told Street Roots the city is working to change and add to existing city rules in response to new threats to residents. He said people in the South Waterfront neighborhood near the ICE facility are the most vulnerable now, but added that those threats could happen anywhere in the city.
“Making sure that we’re protecting people from having their air and water be poisoned, including by the federal government, is a really high priority for me, to maintain public health and public safety,” Kanal said.
Like most legislative action in Portland government structure, the first steps are likely to include expert presentations in committees to ensure all parties agree on what impacts the munitions have, before making it to the full City Council, Kanal said. And even if an ordinance makes it through a full City Council vote, there is no guarantee that the federal government would act in accordance with city laws.
But Kanal said that’s no reason not to try.
“It’s definitely a concern that the federal government might go further into lawlessness in how they behave,” Kanal said. “But I think in Portland, we stand for the rule of law. We stand for due process, and I think we’re going to legislate with that assumption and then react according to how they comply or don’t comply.”
Kanal said the city is also working to address other issues, like the one Richey, the Cottonwood parent, raised in public testimony. Ensuring the city has rules requiring law enforcement at every level of government to disclose their name, badge number and organizational affiliation is a viable way to protect immigrants from unidentified agents trying to detain them, according to Kanal.
“Law enforcement has to disclose who they are, show their faces, their badges, and we should be treating anyone who’s trying to deprive a Portlander of their liberty, that is not willing to disclose and prove that they’re law enforcement, like they’re a kidnapper,” Kanal said. “Because that’s what they’re doing, is kidnapping Portlanders, and we need to focus on that with the urgency that it deserves.”
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This article appears in July 30, 2025.
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