He was an Immigration & Customs Enforcement agent. Or that’s at least what the uniformed man said when he boarded a Cascade East Transit bus at the Hawthorne Station in Bend on April 28. He walked down the aisle, asked passengers their immigration status and rummaged through one passenger’s bag. Then he left.
An hour or so after the incident, suspecting the officer was an impersonator, a passenger called the Bend Police Department. The officer who responded contacted the bus station security, who said they hadn’t seen anyone matching the description but would keep an eye out, according to the department.
The Bend Police Department does not cooperate with ICE officials and does not discern immigration status during any stops or arrests, said Bend Police Public Information Officer Sheila Miller.
The alleged incident at Hawthorne Station is not isolated. It comes on the heels of a rash of cancellations of cultural festivals in Central Oregon this year. Event organizers, all people of color, cited a threatening political climate at both the national and local levels as reasons for ending their events this year.
On April 7, the Latino Community Association announced that the nonprofit would cancel its annual Latino Fest in Madras out of concern for attendees’ safety. In April, The Father’s Group pulled the plug on its Juneteenth celebration in Drake Park in Bend. (Two groups, however, have since announced a Juneteenth event on June 20 at Open Space Event Studios.) And on April 15, organizers at Central Oregon Community College pulled the plug on this year’s Latinx Fiesta Celebración, which was slotted later that month.
Catalina Sánchez Frank, the executive director of the Latino Community Association, said she and participating vendors, artisans and musicians were already uneasy about whether the Latino Fest would be a safe venture after President Donald Trump’s inauguration and ICE activity in Bend in January.
“[The festival] is an open public space. Every day, immigration enforcement actions change, so canceling it just makes sense,” Sánchez Frank told The Source in April. “It hasn’t been easy for the community to have certainty or peace of mind that nothing is coming. It’s more a matter of when will there be a raid? Are they going to come back?”
Sánchez Frank said she received threatening messages, mostly through social media, leading up to and even after the nonprofit publicized its cancellation.
Miller, the public information officer for Bend Police, said she doesn’t recall any service requests regarding threats to public gatherings involving minority groups. The Bend PD tries to be aware of public gatherings and events that may have safety issues, and if possible, coordinate with the people running those events, Miller said.
“If a group or person has been threatened because of their perceived minority, immigration status or other reason, we would urge them to report it to the police,” she added.
Senate Bill 577 and the Bias Crimes Report
People in Oregon have a more formal way to report such incidents to authorities than they did even a few short years ago, but the crimes remain far underreported, authorities say.
Nationally, approximately 250,000 hate crimes have been reported each year between 2004 and 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
In Oregon, the legislature passed Senate Bill 577 in 2019, which in part requires the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission to review all data pertaining to bias crimes and non-criminal bias incidents reported statewide and churn out a comprehensive report.
Its most recent Bias Crimes Report, which the OCJC revises and publishes each July and is available online, contains data from 2020 through 2023. The information is collected from sources that include the Bias Response Hotline (established by the Oregon Department of Justice); the Oregon State Police’s National Incident Based Reporting System; bias prosecution data from 34 district attorney’s offices (excluding those from Columbia and Umatilla counties); arrest data from the national Law Enforcement Data System; court data pertaining to bias crimes sourced from the state’s Odyssey database; and conviction and sentencing data for bias crimes from Oregon’s Department of Corrections.
The data sourcing is far-reaching, but as the Bias Crimes Report authors detail throughout the 125-page document, bias acts, due to their volatile nature, are chronically underreported. The rates of bias reporting differ by victims and community factors that include language and cultural barriers, fear of deportation or stigma, distrust of police and fear of being further targeted in retaliation for reporting. According to the Oregon Criminal Victimization Survey, in 2019 an estimated 7.9% of Oregonians were victims of bias acts.
Rates of bias-targeting are higher for people identifying as Black/African-American (28.8%), American Indian/Alaska Native (28.6%), Asian (17.4%) and Latino (10.4%). Folks who identify as non-binary (28.3%), gay or lesbian (25.8%) or bisexual (19.9%), also experience disproportionate acts of bias, according to the report.
Recent Bias Incidents and Bias Crimes in Central Oregon
Other high-profile racist and violent threats highlight the ongoing concern in our region. In Redmond, a dead racoon and a racist note was left at the law office of Mayor Ed Fitch. (A raccoon is a historically derogatory symbol for a Black person.) Police, who investigated it as a hate crime, said the message was directed at Redmond City Councilor Clifford Evelyn, who is Black, OPB reported in June 2023. Also in Redmond, a man was charged with assault when he threw rocks at members of a mariachi band as they practiced in a front yard, the Redmond Spokesman reported in April 2024.
That same month in Bend, during the public comment section of a Bend Human Rights and Equity Commission meeting, anonymous speakers, who’d logged in via Zoom, coordinated what police considered an organized verbal attack, OPB reported at the time. Epithets included antisemitic slurs, Nazi slogans and homophobic insults. One man recited the N-word.
So far in 2025, the Bend Police Department has received reports of nine bias crimes, including both aggravated and simple assaults. The department has tracked more than 60 local bias crimes since 2020. Seventeen bias crimes were recorded in 2024 and a record 22 in 2023. Bias crimes in Bend have included vandalism and intimidation or making criminal threats. Bend PD maintains an online database of bias crimes, viewable at its Bias Crimes webpage.
The Source reviewed 10 of 20 requested bias and hate crime case reports from 2024 and this year through a public records request to Bend PD. The cases withheld are still open, involve minors or have been expunged, and are therefore not available to the public, the department said.
The narratives in these reports make for chilling reading. On occasions, the victims are targeted for a presumed gender, race or sexual orientation. Often the violence is random, yet, in other instances, the two parties were at least acquainted with each other. Several reports were made by people experiencing homelessness. Another report pertains to a reported bias/hate incident between neighbors and a homeowner whose Gay Pride flag was ripped off a pole attached to the front porch, causing several hundred dollars’ worth of damage. Other cases include:
- A Middle Eastern man reported being attacked in the early morning hours of April 26, 2024, near Westside Tavern by a white man wearing a cowboy hat and a duster jacket. According to the report, the victim was told to go back to his country. Police were unable to identify or locate the perpetrator.
- A transgender woman of color, accused of shoplifting at a Fred Meyer, lobbed racist and homophobic insults while striking a store employee, witnesses and responding police officers on March 30, 2024.
- A female manager of an apartment building reported consistent homophobic and racist abuse from a tenant; the manager wife is a person of color. The manager’s reported having her face shoved by the tenant when confronting him about his designated parking spot on Jan. 31, 2025.
- On Sept. 20, 2024, a transgender woman experiencing homelessness reported a homophobic attack on NE Second Street that resulted in a hole in her cheek. The suspect was another unhoused person.
In discussing the 10 cases the Source reviewed, Sheila Miller, the Bend PD spokesperson, said she feels the weight of intolerance.
“They’re all disappointing (cases). I would love to live in a community where these types of crimes didn’t happen at all. I feel fortunate that we live in a community where hopefully these are rare instances,” Miller said. “And I hope that people who are the victims of these types of crimes will trust the police department to come forward and report them.”
Bias crimes reported to the police can be subjective. When officers investigate, they determine whether to deem it a bias crime. As mentioned above, the authors of the Bias Crimes Report note that this may account for some underreporting of bias acts. Law enforcement agency policies may influence victims’ reporting behavior. Agencies without a dedicated bias crime officer or unit, clearly defined bias crime polices, an established review process for each report, for example, tend to have lower reporting rates, according to the report. Although the Bend PD doesn’t have a dedicated bias crime unit, officers are run through bias crime training, Miller said, adding that the vast majority of these cases are handled by patrol, though some could be directed to detectives.
Keeping track of it all at the state level
In 2023, 3,623 bias reports (which include both non-criminal bias incidents and bias crimes) were made to the Oregon DOJ’s Bias response Hotline. For the year, 1,392 (38%) were made directly to BRH staffers or advocates; 836 (23%) reports were made through the online portal; 676 (19%) through the telephone hotline; 353 (10%) via its voicemail; 179 (5%) through law enforcement officials; and seven (.5%) were reported in person.
Since the hotline’s inception, incident reports have climbed upward, with 10 in January 2020 and 330 in December 2023 — a 3,200% increase. What should be considered is that as social awareness of bias acts, and awareness of — and confidence in — the hotline itself grows, so have calls to the hotline. It’s not necessarily the case that bias reports are up, so much as the means to track them has been increasingly utilized by people calling in to report bias acts.
The map, above, details the numbers of bias reports collected by the Bias Response Hotline in 2023. Multnomah County tops the list with 810 reports. Lane County experienced the highest growth in calls between 2022 and 2023, from 179 to 674 — a 277% spike. Deschutes County experienced a 38% decline in reports to the hotline, from 197 to 108 between 2022 and 2023.
All Oregon law enforcement agencies are required by law to report bias crime to the Oregon Uniform Crime Reporting Program, managed by the Oregon State Police, which compiles all the reported crime information in the state. The UCR Program also funnels that information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its national recordkeeping. Yet, eye-poppingly, not all state law enforcement agencies are fastidious about reporting bias crime to the UCR Program. In 2020, 55 state agencies missed one month, and 10 agencies provided zero data all year. Through 2023, these reporting rates have improved, yet in 2023, 28 agencies missed at least one month of reporting; 20 of those did not report any data during that year, according to the Bias Crimes Report. The authors attribute that non-reporting to a refusal or inability to make a software upgrade to present the reporting in a format that fits the reporting system’s updated format, which the FBI required Jan. 1, 2021. Factors like these make it hard for people and their governments to understand trends about bias acts in the state.
Compounding these “data gaps,” as the Bias Crimes Report authors put it, are the findings by the U.S. Department of Justice that about 42% of violent bias crimes are not reported to the police. The report, “Hate Crime Victimization, 2005-2019,” is available online. That’s to illustrate that folks who report bias acts to the Bias Response Hotline, for example, do not necessarily go on to report them to law enforcement (one of the many services the trauma-informed dispatchers help facilitate).
Ryan Keck, the CJC interim executive director, wrote by email: “Working with multiple independent data sources can produce data gaps. They try to fill these gaps by working with local partners, such as district attorney’s offices, which have played a key role in helping identify bias-motivated conduct referred for prosecution on non-bias charges only.”
The Office of Deschutes County District Attorney Steve Gunnels sends that information to the CJC. It also prosecutes bias crimes. Reached by phone, Gunnels said when it comes to sentencing, there’s an inner play between the statute and the sentencing guidelines. And juries or judges decide verdicts. Gunnels described a recent case. His office prosecuted a man who was accused of threatening someone because he didn’t like their race. A jury convicted him of unlawful use of a weapon but acquitted him on bias. He received a 24-month Department of Corrections prison sentence because of two prior felonies. The determination of the two-year bid came from the interplay between statutes, which are like caps on punishments, and the sentencing guidelines, which account for past offenses. The mechanism functions a bit like a flow chart.
Bias Response Hotline: the numbers
Reports to the Bias Response Hotline for all protected classes went up each year, according to the study, with a few exceptions. Reports regarding race bias in 2023, of which there were 1,201, are down from 1,298 the previous year. Reports regarding national origin in 2023 numbered 640 versus 638 the previous year. And disability bias reporting in 2023 decreased from 276 to 271.
White Oregonians
White Oregonians were targeted mostly because of sexual orientation and gender identity bias. 32 out of 115 or 28% of reporters experienced anti-white bias.
BIPOC Oregonians
Black and Indigenous people of color were targeted primarily because of race, but differences exist in bias motivation. According to the report, 95% of Black/African-American reporters were targeted due to race bias; 76% Asian, 63% Hispanic, and 59% American Indian/Alaska Native. Reporters that belong to another race were targeted due to religion bias (352 out of 420 or 84%), in particular anti-Jewish bias (342 or 81%). Asian (54 out of 141 or 38%) and Hispanic (259 out of 382 or 68%) were also targeted due to bias stemming from national origin bias. Reporters who did not disclose their race were primarily targeted for sexual orientation (530 out of 1,151 or 46%), according to the report.
Male Oregonians
Reporting male Oregonians were primarily targeted because of race, national origin and color bias. Between 2020 and 2023, men made 2,100 reports (28%).
Female and gender non-conforming Oregonians
Female callers to the hotline were primarily targeted by biases due to race, national origin and religion (mostly Jewish). Gender non-conforming citizens were targeted mostly due to gender identity bias and sexual orientation bias. Between 2020 and 2023, women and gender non-conforming made 2,026 reports (28.25%).
Oregonians over the age of 60
Hotline reporters who are 60 and older mostly detailed disability and religion biases. Both subcategories were evenly reported at 42 out of 150 individual reporters, or 28%.
Minor Oregonians
Bias act victims who are legal minors mostly described bias acts regarding gender identity (119; 35%) and sexual orientation (105; 31%). Throughout 2020 and 2023, minors up to age 17 made 1,043 reports (12.25%).
Most Frequent Setting
A victim’s home has consistently been the most-common setting for bias acts between 2020 and 2023, accounting for an average of 26.5% annual reporting. The category “other,” which includes libraries, malls, parks, institutional settings, driving, jail and place of worship, averages 24.5% of reports. Place of employment accounts for an average of 11.75% of settings throughout the four-year period, followed closely by internet/cell phone at an average 11.5%. Schools make up an average of 10.75% of reported bias act settings.
An alienating experience, rare in isolation
The reporting and analysis of this massive dataset doesn’t conclude that we live in an inherently racist or bigoted society; simply that while people continue to express bigoted attitudes, there will be a similar number of people who must add that pain and distraction to their daily lives. And if nothing else is clear, it seems that very little — not race, gender, class, housing status, nor religious affiliation — can completely insulate us from intolerance.
—This story is powered by the Lay It Out Foundation, the nonprofit with a mission of promoting deep reporting and investigative journalism in Central Oregon. Learn more and be part of this important work by visiting layitoutfoundation.org.
This article appears in Source Weekly May 29, 2025.
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