Sal Peralta: Deportations demand strong local response

##Sal Peralta

About the writer: Sal Peralta maintains an enduring interest in public policy, reflected in a long record of public involvement. He helped found the Independent Party of Oregon and has long served as party secretary. He ran unsuccessfully for state representative and county commissioner before winning appointment, and later election, to the McMinnville City Council in Ward 1. His passions include history, music and native plants. 

I have received a great deal of correspondence from residents in recent weeks asking the city to address community concerns about federal immigration enforcement actions in McMinnville and around the nation.

We are entering a time in which immigration enforcement in our community, and our country more broadly, is likely to intensify dramatically.

Based on the funding levels approved by Congress, public statements from federal officials, and documented actions already taken in 2025, it is clear that we are only at the beginning of a national policy aimed at forcibly detaining and removing millions of people from the U.S.

This policy affects U.S. citizens, immigrants with lawful status and undocumented workers alike. Although I am a U.S. citizen with deep family roots in this country, these actions affect me personally and directly impact up to 20 percent of McMinnville residents, including roughly 25 percent of the people living in my ward.

I want our community to understand how unprecedented this moment is: No stable Western democracy in the 20th century has carried out interior policing and detainment on the scale required to physically remove 10 to 20 million people.

Democracies generally do not enforce immigration policy through mass deportation operations against long-settled residents. When we look for historical analogues in North America, the only examples are periods we now recognize as grave violations of civil rights:

-- The forced displacement and reservation resettlement of Native American tribes.

-- The wartime internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the 1940s.

Beyond these episodes, similar large-scale internal policing in the 20th century occurred only within failing democracies or authoritarian regimes such as Vichy France, Apartheid South Africa, Communist China and Nazi Germany. And these are not governing models we should look to for guidance.

When I was sworn in to serve on the city council, I took an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, the Oregon Constitution and the McMinnville City Charter. Based on documented federal actions, I believe constitutional rights are already being harmed for hundreds of thousands if not millions of immigrants in the following ways:

-- Arresting individuals actively pursuing lawful naturalization in the courts.

-- Eliminating lawful immigration pathways mid-process and then deporting those affected.

-- Deporting residents despite judicial orders that they remain.

-- Deporting individuals to third-party nations with which they have no connection.

-- Refusing to complete naturalization for applicants from certain countries.

-- Imposing mandatory detention and denial of bond, resulting in U.S. citizen children confined in jail conditions, often separated from their parents.

-- Attempting to end birthright citizenship.

-- Requiring children, including toddlers, to navigate immigration proceedings without legal representation, or even adult guidance.

Local governments are not responsible for immigration enforcement, and Oregon law prohibits local police from participating in federal immigration actions. But local governments are responsible for public safety and assurance that the constitutional rights of every resident, citizen or noncitizen, are respected.

I have faith that elected leaders at all levels of government will meet this moment. In my view, then, any Oregon city should at a minimum:

-- Require local police to obtain identifying information when an individual is seized by federal immigration agents, so families can be notified, consistent with lawful community-caretaking responsibilities.

-- Document and respond to claims of unlawful use of force by any federal or local agency operating within city limits, both for public safety and to uphold constitutional standards.

These steps do not interfere with federal authority. They simply ensure that cities like McMinnville fulfill their responsibility to protect the rights of people who live here and preserve the constitutional principles we are sworn to uphold.