2,500 arrests, including a 3-year-old

By Alex Baumhardt | Senior reporter

Federal immigration agents have arrested more than 700 people in Oregon this year, and more than 2,500 since President Donald Trump started his second term in January 2025 — an eight-fold increase from the final two years of the Biden administration, when federal agents made nearly 300 arrests, according to the Deportation Data Project. Reporter Mia Maldonado brings us an Oregon-specific look at the latest updates to the database compiled by lawyers and researchers at the University of California Berkeley and UCLA, which offers the most detailed information available on Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests since the agency has increasingly stopped publishing its own data.

Among the findings: federal agents in Oregon detained an 83-year-old and a 3-year-old.

Also in today's edition:

A reporter in Washington learns to fight fire with fire.
A musician and free speech advocate who has won at the Supreme Court says voting needs similar protections.
Wyden, Dems demand investigation into USDA executive for allegedly deferring scarce firefighting resources to a blaze near his Idaho home.
Trump’s attempted restrictions on mail voting continue to be challenged in court.
Voters concerned about Trump tariffs on Canada.

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Immigration arrests in Oregon under Trump 2.0 by the numbers

By Mia Maldonado

A masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent knocks on a car window in Minnesota on Jan. 12, 2026. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

Federal immigration agents have arrested more than 700 people in Oregon this year as of early August, according to new data. Those arrests make up about a quarter of the more than 2,500 arrests federal agents have conducted in Oregon under the second Trump administration, according to the Deportation Data Project, a database run by lawyers and academics who collect national immigration arrest data from public records requests to federal agencies.

To protect forests, I learned to burn them

By Alex Brown, Stateline

A crew member uses a drip torch to ignite a prescribed burn in Southwest Washington. Leaders in Washington and other states want to empower more residents to lead burns like this on private lands. (Photo by Alex Brown/Stateline)

AUBURN, Wash. — In the back row of a small community college classroom, I sip my coffee and consider a cumulus cloud, a puffy white pillar over an expanse of blue. I’m not staring out the window, but at a presentation on a screen at the front of the room. My classmates and I make up the fifth group to take Washington’s Certified Prescribed Burn Manager course. It’s put on by the state DNR to encourage more residents to light carefully planned fires in overly dense forests to help ward off megablazes.