A racist letter campaign in Oregon is encouraging white people to report people of color they suspect are undocumented to DHS.Brandon Bell/Getty
Trump’s mass deportation agenda is already taking shape—for a second time—in coastal Oregon.
A racist letter reportedly circulating through Lincoln County, which has a population of about 50,000 people and is located on the state’s western coast, encourages residents to surveil and report “brown illegals…who you suspect are here in our country on an illegal basis” to the Department of Homeland Security.
The letter implores white locals to help facilitate “the largest round-up of brown illegals in our history,” referring to Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations of approximately 11 million people, and promises white residents a chance to seize the victims’ homes.
In starkly racist language, it proceeds to outline a dystopian vision for surveillance of people of color everywhere from churches to schools and grocery stores:
Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate [number] of brown folks. This is extremely important if you attend a catholic church—many brown folks are catholics!! Shopping, again if you see a bunch of brown folks getting in a car—write down the plate [number]. Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate [number]. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate [numbers]. If you see a construction crew and/or a landscaping crew who have brown folks—write down the name of the company and a phone [number].”
🚨This is the full letter being distributed around Lincoln County Oregon👇 pic.twitter.com/VlvbzFldzZ
— Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 (@RachelBitecofer) December 20, 2024
Perhaps most disturbing are the ways that the letter directly echoes some of the Trump administration’s own anti-immigration talking points: Attacks on sanctuary cities, promises of detention, and allegedly solving the housing crisis through mass deportations, which the letter compares approvingly to Japanese internment.
The letter claims Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state makes it especially fitting for its perverse anti-immigrant demands: “We have received information brown folks, who are currently in Idaho and Montana, are planning to move to our state, because they believe it will be ‘safer’ for them. So don’t limit the license plate to just Oregon—brown folks from any state will be able to be reported to the Department of Homeland Security.”
And it outlines Trump’s vision for how deportations will be enacted, writing, “the brown folks will remain [in county jails] until the camps are completed in Texas—then these folks will be transferred there,” referring to the detention camps that, as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s acolytes plan to build.
“When the brown folks are rounded up,” the letter continues, “their properties will be confiscated just like the properties belonging to the Japanese in California were during World War II. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable.” (Again, experts say otherwise.)
It is unclear how many people have received the letter, but the recipients included local lawmakers in the city of Toledo, including its mayor, who received a copy in the mail, Portland NBC affiliate KGW reported. He, and other local officials, have publicly condemned the letter: In a Facebook post, Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers characterized it as “harmful, divisive, and inconsistent with the values we uphold as public servants and community members.”
“We strongly advise against engaging in activities such as those outlined in this letter, including collecting or sharing information about individuals based on their demographic or perceived immigration status,” Landers added. His post also notes that state law “generally prohibits the inquiry or collection of an individual’s immigration or citizenship status, or country of birth,” and that the sheriff’s office “does not inquire about, document, or share such information with” ICE. The sheriff could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.
Oregon’s Democratic Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum also condemned the letter. ABC affiliate KATU of Portland reported that the FBI’s Oregon office is aware of the letter, and encouraged “community members who feel they are being physically threatened” to report concerns to local law enforcement.
Oregon’s Democratic senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, do not appear to have publicly commented on the letters, and their offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday afternoon.
The letter is reminiscent of the racist texts, now the subject of an FBI investigation, sent to Black people in the days after the election, demanding they “pick cotton,” as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time; other texts also targeted Hispanic and LBGTQ people. Anna also reported on a theory of where they originated:
Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.
“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.”
While the identities of the senders of those texts, and the letter in Oregon, may be unknown, one thing is clear: Right-wing racism is gaining steam.