Oregon State Police Violated Sanctuary Laws by Letting Federal Immigration Authorities Query Oregonians’ Driver and Criminal Records

Oregon State Police have violated state sanctuary law for years by intentionally allowing federal immigration authorities to query state residents’ data 1 million times each year, according to a lawsuit filed on May 5.

The civil complaint, filed by the Rural Organizing Project in Multnomah County Circuit Court, says OSP must immediately stop sharing state and local resources — which include data — with federal immigration authorities include Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Protection.

“Federal agents are storming into our communities, targeting people based on how they look, and disappearing our neighbors,” Martha Ortega, the nonprofit’s director of immigrant centers, said a press release. “Oregon State Police are helping them do it. When the state gives our private information to ICE, it is breaking the law and breaking Oregonians’ trust. How many families have been torn apart by OSP giving their names and photos to federal agents?”

The complaint says federal immigration authorities queried state-run data about Oregonians 1.4 million times between February 2025 and February this year.

That’s an average of 3,835 queries each day.

According to the complaint, OSP has entered into user agreements with federal immigration authorities, granting access to the LEDS data, since 2007. Most recently, in December and February, OSP Captain Adam Turnbo signed contracts with ICE Enforcement and Removal Assistant Field Office Director Jeffrey Chan, allowing the agency to query its LEDS database.

Inexplicably, in these agreements, ICE-ERO and HSI “agree not to share data derived from this system for the purpose of federal immigration enforcement,” the Source verified.

Additionally, the contract allows for either party to end it with 30 days written notice to the other party.

In February, the Rural Organizing Project wrote a letter to OSP to terminate these agreements, which the state police agency declined to do, according to the complaint.

That’s when OSP joined up with the International Justice and Public Safety Network, known as the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, which is a communication system that lets agencies throughout the country trade driver and criminal justice information in seconds.

OSP maintains a hub of law enforcement information called the Law Enforcement Data System for all agencies in the state. That database is the home of investigative files, arrest and detention records, criminal histories, and Department of Motor Vehicle records, for example.

OSP controls which agencies can access the LEDS data, providing personal information to federal immigration enforcement agencies, such as the driver’s license data and photo, driving and criminal histories and vehicle registration data, according to the complaint.

In 1987, Oregon became the first state to put sanctuary laws on the books. Since then, it’s been illegal for state and local law enforcement or public agencies in Oregon to participate directly or indirectly in immigration enforcement without a judicial warrant, according to the Oregon Department of Justice.

Due to cooperation from OSP, ICE has unique access to criminal justice information not otherwise available in federal criminal justice databases, such as the National Crime Information Center, the central criminal records database, the FBI Interstate Identification Index; or the National Data Exchange, a national repository of criminal justice records sent in by agencies throughout the country, according to the complaint.

ICE can share immigration information to requesting agencies, through the Immigration Alien Transactions message keys, such as immigration status, deportation history, and whether the person is deportable. Whenever an agency makes a requisition, ICE get a notification if the person is under investigation or arrest.

The Rural Organizing Project says it wrote state police a letter in February indicating that it must deny access to federal immigration authorities; OSP indicated that they would not do so, according to the complaint.

Some states, like New York, put their foot down with its 2019 Green Light Law, blocking ICE and telling other law enforcement agencies that giving New York DMC records to ICE will result in access getting cut off. Additionally, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts and Minnesota have also blocked ICE from getting state DMV records, the complaint points out.

OSP controls which agencies can access Oregonians’ information, according to its contract with NLETS. OSP doesn’t vet queries before providing access to state residents’ private information; the process is automated, according to the complaint, yet there is an “immigration” option among queries’ “reason codes.” That “immigration” reason could be categorically blocked, yet OSP doesn’t restrict queries by reason code, according to the suit.

Authorized by state legislation, OSP developed and operates LEDS, which provides “a criminal justice telecommunications and information system for the state of Oregon and is the control point for access to similar programs operated by other states and the federal government.” LEDS also connects with the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services Branch, the State Marine Board, the Public Utility Commission, and other non-criminal justice agencies to make relevant information available to Oregon criminal justice agencies to help in the enforcement of state criminal and traffic laws and regulations.

Although LEDS users are only allowed to query specific persons for specific authorized reasons in the LEDS repository, according to the complaint, nothing alerts OSP if a user queries an entire group of individuals based on, say, “place of birth.”

“Oregon’s law has clearly prohibited this kind of information sharing for almost 40 years,” Heather Marek, the attorney at Oregon Law Center who’s representing ROP, said in a release. “Oregonians need Oregon State Police to respect the law and protect their data, immediately and permanently.”

Issues like this came up in a recent Source’s investigation “Federal Immigration Officials Made 279 Queries into Bend’s Flock Safety Data in its First Three Weeks,” published in the May 7 issue.