Some of the most powerful judges in the U.S. are weighing whether federal buildings and staff in Portland need protection from National Guard troops due to nightly protests.

Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice believe so. A primary data point in their argument: The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Portland building shuttered for 22 days over the summer. And the panel of U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit judges have been listening.

“The facility was forced to close. It was inoperable for almost a month from June 13 to July 7,” said Judge Bridget S. Bade at a hearing last week on a lower court order blocking President Donald Trump’s deployment of 200 Oregon National Guard members to protect the building.

“Are those not facts that are relevant for the president to determine the threat and whether there’s a threat to DHS being able to enforce the 400 laws it’s tasked with enforcing?” Bade asked Stacy Chaffin, an assistant attorney general with the Oregon Department of Justice who sought to stop the deployment.

Data reviewed by OPB show the assertion that the building has been out of commission is inaccurate. During the three weeks in question, ICE officers booked 25 people into the Portland facility. While that’s fewer booked than in May, in fact every processing center in the Northwest had fewer bookings in June and July.

Bookings continue

Since June, the South Portland facility has been the epicenter of protests against President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts. Physical confrontations mostly occur when federal law enforcement move to clear the building’s driveway for cars to come and go.

The building serves a number of functions for immigrants and federal agents. It’s a site of routine check-ins and a place for attorneys to visit recently detained people. Justice Department attorneys argued the closure caused delays to visits and reschedulings.

One of its other noteworthy functions, however, is as a way station for people arrested by ICE. They are brought into the facility and often held for hours before being moved again to a larger, more permanent detention facility.

That function seems to have been unimpacted by the regular protests.

Agents booked an average of 1.13 people per day into the building’s holding rooms from June 13 to July 7 according to federal government data collected through Freedom of Information Act requests by a group of academics and lawyers called the Deportation Data Project.

That’s not too different from the facility’s typical usage: It has averaged about 1.7 bookings per day since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. The most recent data captures bookings through July 30.

“It doesn’t sound to me like the facility was closed,” said Phil Neff, a researcher for the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights, which has also analyzed the datasets. “The data would suggest otherwise.”

Officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond Tuesday to multiple requests for comment.

Bookings surged during the month of May — officers booked 82 people into the Portland facility, nearly three people per day — but in June and July returned to a pace on par with the rest of the year, the data showed.

Similar holding rooms throughout the Pacific Northwest saw the same pattern as Portland’s ICE building, according to researchers at UW, with a spike in May followed by lagging numbers through July. It’s unclear what drove the trends across the region’s six facilities. DHS did not respond to a question about it.

Most detentions during the building’s stated closure lasted just a few hours, the data showed, and people were often then transported to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, or the Florence Service Processing Center in Florence, Arizona.

At the same time, federal law enforcement continued to clash with protesters. Massive ‘No Kings’ rallies took place across Oregon on June 16, three days after the facility closed, according to the government’s account.

That demonstration saw some protesters use a stop sign to try and batter the facility’s doors open, among other property damage. Plywood quickly went up all over the building’s doors and windows.

Other functions

The closure hamstrung some of the day-to-day work at the building, agency officials said. Staff had to work out of a temporary office space and non-detained aliens had to reschedule appointments.

“While the facility is again currently operational,” wrote regional ICE director Camilla Wamsley in court, “the windows on the building must remain boarded to prevent further damage to property or attempts at incursion and to provide security to those federal employees inside.”

Immigration attorneys agree in some respects, but push back on characterizing the building as essentially defunct during the summer.

Stephen Manning, executive director of Innovation Law Lab, said that while he and other attorneys’ had to navigate meeting with detainees during the closure, immigration arrests continued steadily at the facility.

“While ICE may claim that closures have limited their operations, our experience with the Portland ICE facility has been that the closures were actually focused on limiting public access or lawyer access and had little to no bearing on ICE,” Manning said.

The Trump administration’s broader deportation goals were unimpeded, Manning said.

“The ‘closures’ have been used to block our ability to access detained individuals even while ICE arrests, enforcement and removal operations continued,” he said.

The appeals court judges are expected to rule imminently on whether federalized members of the National Guard can deploy into the city. And yet another ‘No Kings’ rally is slated for Saturday.

Meanwhile, reinforcements of federal law enforcement have already come to the facility. After Portland drew Trump’s attention as a “war ravaged” city, protests at the building have resurged.

While the data currently ends before August, arrests continue.

In early October, an American citizen claimed he was detained by ICE agents. According to a letter he sent to DHS, agents arrested him and drove him past the protest site and into the Portland ICE building.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/15/portland-ice-building-closed-22-days-summer-immigration-arrests-detentions/