In February, Oregon legislators will return to Salem for their even-year short session. Reyna Lopez is ready.
Months ago, the executive director of the Woodburn-based farmworkers union Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste had crafted a legislative strategy to press for higher wages for farmworkers and secure their collective bargaining rights.
Then more than 2,000 of her fellow Woodburn residents disappeared — abducted by masked thugs carrying guns and badges.
“It’s been intense,” Lopez told Street Roots. “I’m not going to lie. At the beginning of last year, we had these grandiose ideas about what we were going to focus on. All of that literally went out the window.”
The exact number of people who have been abducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Woodburn area is hard to pinpoint.
ICE itself put the number at 1,800 several months ago. Lopez said it must be well more than 2,000 by now. To put that number in perspective, it would be the equivalent of the entire nearby city of Gervais vanishing in a matter of weeks — or the city of St. Paul vanishing four times over.
“Even that might be an undercount because we get our official numbers from ICE,” said Lopez. “The rest we have to piece together from the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition hotline and Innovation Law Lab numbers.”
Whatever the number, Lopez said, the abductions have upended practically everything in her agricultural community of 30,000 people 40 miles south of Portland.
Feeling the terror
“It really has been the Reign of Terror in Woodburn,” she said. “People are really afraid. People aren’t showing up to worksites. I’ve even been getting calls from labor contractors. You know it’s bad if labor contractors are calling the farmworkers union.”
Lopez struck a more confident tone when she was interviewed by Street Roots last May.
“We know that when we come together and have power in numbers, it really is a lot more difficult to target people,” Lopez said during a May Day rally at the Oregon State Capitol last year.
Turns out targeting large numbers of people is fairly easy. People are flat-out afraid, Lopez said. The killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis Jan. 7 has only deepened people’s fear, she added.
“That sent a chill through every corner of our movement,” said Lopez. “I see myself reflected in Renee Good, someone who was told that ICE was in her neighborhood and showed up to support her neighbors. It could have been anybody.”
Oregon is particularly vulnerable, she added.
“We are a target as a blue state, as a state that’s been proactively resisting the current administration and its policy and as a place that’s really come together to support our immigrant community,” she said.
Lopez now approaches the upcoming 35-day legislative session with an entirely different agenda than the one she had planned.
“We really switched up our priorities,” she told Street Roots. “We postponed a lot of those earlier campaigns, and we’re completely focusing on immigration and immigrant justice.”
Confronting Trump
“The biggest elephant in the room this session could be President Donald Trump,” Jill Gray, the government relations manager at Oregon Housing and Community Services, told members of the Housing Stability Council at a Jan. 9 preview of the session.
“Lots of changes are coming from the federal government, not only in regard to funding, but also the change in the relationship that the federal government is trying to create,” she said.
Oregon lawmakers talk about distancing themselves from the federal government, even when it comes to the state’s tax code. They want to disconnect Oregon’s tax code from the federal tax code.
“What will that look like?” Gray said. “That’s a conversation that will happen this session.”
Meeting deadlines
Justice comes with a tight deadline.
Oregon legislators convene for 160 days in odd-numbered years. Sessions in even-numbered years are constitutionally restricted to 35 days and are generally reserved for fine-tuning budgets and other tweaks.
This year, lawmakers already have a lot on their plates.
Gov. Tina Kotek wants them to scrap the $4.3 billion transportation funding package she championed last summer as they face a $242 million funding gap at the Oregon Department of Transportation.
Kotek wants money from the transportation bill earmarked for specific projects to go toward basic road maintenance.
A more comprehensive transportation package can be hammered out when the Legislature convenes next year, she told lawmakers.
Transportation funding comes in a long line of financial headaches for legislators. They won’t know the full extent of those headaches until the quarterly economic forecast is released Feb. 4. The short session is scheduled to end March 8.
“This is the revenue forecast that legislators are going to use to determine what actions they need to take during February to make sure that the state has a balanced budget going forward,” Gray said.
“The Legislature has already informed us that they expect there will probably be some evening and weekend sessions, but they are committed to ending by March 8,” Gray said. “So it’s going to be a lot in a short amount of time.”
Predicting cuts
Short sessions are challenging, Gray told councilors at the session preview.
“Since it’s a short session year, session kind of starts with a bang,” she said. “There’s no ease into it. We start running, and it is really a marathon sprint until the end of the short session.”
Still, Gray said, it will likely end with some whimpering.
“The Legislature has informed us that they expect they will be making reductions during the short session,” she told councilors.
Lopez said she’s braced for frustration.
“The governor, and the Senate president and the speaker of the House have all already told us we have to manage expectations,” she said.
While many people are passionate about protecting immigrant rights, Lopez said she understands money is tight and time is short, and basic spending bills command the lion’s share of attention.
“Going in with a sober mind, we’re not going to get everything we want, but there could be some good stuff that comes out of this,” she said. “We’re being cautiously positive about it.”
Whatever bills come up this session, Tanisha Rosas said none of them will come directly from Oregon Housing and Community Services.
Rosas, the agency’s senior legislative and government relations strategist, also addressed members of the Housing Stability Council on Jan. 9.
“There are going to be no bills that the agency itself brings,” she said. “We don’t have any legislative concepts. That’s for our long sessions.”
Nonetheless, she told council members, there will be housing bills this session.
Facing homelessness
Andrea Bell, the executive director of Oregon Housing and Community Services, told councilors the agency will be involved in numerous discussions with lawmakers this session.
“There are two budget notes that we will be spending some time on, one related to eviction prevention and homelessness prevention, and the other regarding shelter,” she said.
Bell said state officials have only been actively engaged in addressing homelessness since 2019.
“That was the first of the state really having a muscular approach, an identity in what our role and responsibility is in really helping and investing in communities to address homelessness,” she said.
Despite spending millions of dollars on homelessness over the past six years, Bell said it has taken lawmakers some time to figure out how to help people living without shelter.
“The Legislature, rightfully so, is beginning to ask some larger questions — one around what does the funding structure look like for shelter?” she said. “How do we ensure that we’re getting what we’re paying for? What are the various shelter models and how do we ensure that those investments in the people we’re serving are also connecting them to housing?”
In the final analysis, she added, the problem is really basic.
“People don’t have a place to live, so we have to make sure that those services and people are connected to long-term housing solutions,” she said.
Raising voices
The killing of Renee Nicole Good not only changed Oregon’s political landscape for PCUN and other immigrant advocates, but for many average Oregonians.
Just three days after the killing, people protested in communities throughout Oregon. More than 1,000 people converged on the Oregon State Capitol.
One of them was the Rev. Monica Jacobson of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem.
She told Street Roots her advice for legislators as they begin their session would be to remind them of their core obligations.
“I think it’s the work of the state Legislature to protect the people of the state and to stop them from being tyrannized and kidnapped by federal overreach,” Jacobson said.
Exactly how to do that is less clear, she added.
“I don’t know what form that takes,” Jacobson said.
A protester who identified herself only as Julie had some ideas.
“I think they ought to narrow the definition of what it means to be a sanctuary city and use the model of what other cities have done,” she said. “Apply some funds to help out the families of people who have been kidnapped by ICE. A lot of the breadwinners in the families have been kidnapped and taken away.”
Defending immigrants
Those are among the actions outlined in PCUN’s revised legislative agenda, dubbed the Immigrants Rights Package.
A press conference July 14 brought together eight Democratic lawmakers and representatives from six advocacy organizations (including PCUN) to talk about the package.
They discussed upcoming bills to:
- Prevent the federal government from illegally withholding much-needed resources from Oregon communities.
- Strengthen legal protections for immigrants so they can work, access the legal system and participate in their communities without fear.
- Empower Oregonians to sue federal agents for violating their constitutional rights.
- Protect families, students and educators by requiring schools to notify parents and guardians when ICE has been confirmed on school campuses.
- Prohibit state contracts with businesses that participate in deportations to ensure no Oregon tax dollars support ICE enforcement activities.
- Ensure local and state governments will not collaborate with federal efforts to sell off public lands outside of Oregon cities.
- Strengthen data privacy to safeguard sensitive health and immigration information.
- Demand accountability and visibility from law enforcement by establishing guardrails on masking and officer identification practices and protecting Oregonians from federal overreach.
“Oregon families and Oregon values are under attack,” state Rep. Willy Chotzen, D-Portland, told reporters during the press conference. “The federal administration is threatening our health care, our economy and our safety. They are disappearing our immigrant neighbors, targeting our trans community and attacking our right to speak out. Oregon deserves better. We value the freedom to live without fear, and we believe diversity is a strength, not a threat.”
One of his bills would withhold money from the federal government if the administration illegally withholds funds from the state. His other big bill this session strengthens anti-discrimination laws to protect immigrants.
“We will not tolerate unconstitutional attacks on our neighbors or allow hate to take root in our state,” Chotzen said. “That’s why we’re fighting back.”
State Rep. Sarah Finger McDonald, D-Corvallis, is sponsoring the bill to inform students, parents, faculty and staff at all public schools and universities when ICE agents are on campus.
“We have a moral and legal obligation to teach every child who comes to school,” she told reporters. “It is unacceptable that this obligation could be used to target families. Schools are second home. We must ensure they are safe.”
When Avelo Airlines had a federal contract to fly ICE detainees out of the country, citizen Mark Fromuth began working with the organization Avelo Out of Oregon.
“These people were being treated like cargo, not people,” he told reporters. “These people are not abstractions or headlines. These people are our neighbors, coworkers and family members.”
Avelo executives responded last year by ceasing all their West Coast operations.
Now Fromuth champions the bill that prohibits any private contractor from receiving money to help ICE.
“Oregon taxpayers should never be funding trauma, family separation and due process violations,” he said.
Chotzen said no Republicans have lent their support to the bills outlined Jan. 14. He hopes that changes.
“The values that underscore it (the package) are values I know our Republican partners hold, and we will welcome as much bipartisanship as we possibly have,” Chotzen said.
Lopez said PCUN is also asking for $5 million for the Oregon universal representation policy, which is the core funding mechanism for Equity Corps of Oregon.
“Nothing really compares with it,” she said. “It’s one of the only places where people can get deportation defense services, especially with the huge uptick of people needing them. That funding is getting very close to being depleted.”
Equity Corps of Oregon is also a pillar program for the Oregon For All Coalition and its 150 organizations coming together to build up defense mechanisms.
Channeling rage
Good’s death might give legislators the political will they need in this moment, Lopez added.
“The energy is there,” she said. “People want to know what they can do. People want to know how we can protect our state, how we can protect our communities and how we can invest in our communities in a time when there are so many threats and so much uncertainty and violence.”
Paul and Doreen Negstad of Salem also protested at the Capitol on Jan. 10.
They belong to the local chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign, which meets at the Salem First Presbyterian Church just around the corner from the Capitol.
Paul Negstad said legislators need to keep society’s most vulnerable members in mind when they make financial decisions.
“A budget is a moral document,” he said. “I want to see us put our priorities in child care, education and fighting homelessness.”
A protester who identified herself as River said solutions need to be more systemic.
“I want to restore Cascadia to what it should be,” she told Street Roots. “We’re part of a land mass. We’re not part of their imaginary borders. This is about nature. This is about women. This is about minorities. We need to rise up. Everyone needs to rise up. We need to overthrow this tyranny. Period.”
Lopez said such emotions are palpable in this bleak, dystopian political landscape.
“You can see that it’s really taking a toll on people, and there’s a really big need to direct that anguish and outrage that people are feeling,” she said.
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This article appears in January 21, 2026.