On Nov. 12, a spot in Newport’s city council chambers was the hottest ticket in town.
An emergency meeting was set for 6 p.m. and the small chamber quickly swelled to capacity, packed with Newport residents waiting to hear how the council would react to what many saw as a dire threat.
“We’re going to do everything we can to fight this,” Mayor Jan Kaplan told his audience, to wild applause. “That’s where we stand.”
Days earlier, rumors had begun to blow through Newport like a stiff sea breeze. By the time of the meeting, many in the small coastal city were convinced: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was looking to build an immigrant detention center in town.
Evidence seemed to be growing by the day.
To start with, the U.S. Coast Guard helicopter that for decades stood ready to rescue imperiled crabbers and fishermen had disappeared from the city-owned airport. On the brink of a dangerous Dungeness crab season, the closest rescue aircraft was now 100 miles away.
“That ocean can get up on its hind legs and it can smack you down,” one man, a Navy veteran, testified at the emergency meeting. “We need that helicopter here.”
All signs of what might be on deck to replace the helicopter pointed in one direction.
On Nov. 4, a federal defense contractor wrote the city, asking to lease 4 acres of land at the local airport – right next to the base where the helicopter had lived.
Then other contractors popped up. One began asking about the cost of trucking thousands of gallons of human waste away from the airport every day. Another posted want ads for ICE detention officers in Newport.
The conclusion was inescapable to many residents: ICE was coming, and those who’d gathered in City Hall wanted none of it.
Some in the crowd wept when a teenage girl explained how frightening and sad her life had become since September, when her father was detained by ICE and sent to a detention center in Tacoma, Wash.
“No one deserves to get picked up,” the girl said. “My dad was my everything.”
With its scenic bayfront, popular aquarium and sizable commercial fishing fleet, Newport is an emblem of the Oregon coast – and, with 10,000 residents, one of its largest cities. But weeks after the meeting, the city finds itself in a sort of limbo.
Facing down twin crises – one over the wellbeing of its crabbers, the other over the wellbeing of its immigrant community – it’s still not sure when, or if, immigration agents might arrive.
ICE, the Coast Guard, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have declined to provide details to local officials, members of Congress and the press. ICE may have backed off in the face of public blowback. Or it might be regrouping.
“Nobody within the administration, within DHS, has treated this city with a modicum of respect or courtesy,” Kaplan told OPB. “It’s like, ‘We’re going to perch on your doorstep, and you only know it because maybe there’s a rumor.’”
Taunette Dixon thought helicopter drama was behind her.
In 2014, the Coast Guard announced it intended to close its air base in Newport to save money. Dixon was one of those who fought back.
A nonprofit she volunteers with, Newport Fishermen’s Wives, sued to block the closure, alongside the city of Newport and Lincoln County. Congress wound up finding money to keep the base open.
In the years since, Dixon says the Coast Guard had been communicative and helpful. Any time the helicopter needed to travel away from Newport, for any reason, officials would call the Fishermen’s Wives to explain.
But suddenly, history was repeating itself.
“I had somebody call me and say, ‘I am pretty sure that the Coast Guard has removed itself from the air station,’” Dixon said in an interview with OPB last week. “I’m like, I can’t believe that’s true. We worked so hard to keep the helicopter here.”
The timing could hardly have been worse.
In the self-proclaimed “Dungeness crab capital of the world,” the beginning of December is something of an early Christmas, Dixon says.
Crabbing boats are preparing to start the season with a two-week sprint that will dictate whether or not they are successful.
“If it’s not good seas, then that’s a very unsafe position for boats to be in – especially the small boats,” said Dixon, who co-owns a boat with her husband. “Between the ocean, between the tides, between the environment, it doesn’t take long to lose your life.”
A sturdy pavilion perched above the Pacific Ocean illustrates what’s at stake. The Newport Fishermen’s Memorial Sanctuary is a pew-lined structure in a local state park, where houseless residents sometimes seek shelter.
At the building’s heart is a monument bearing the names and pictures of local fishermen who have died at sea. The Newport Fishermen’s Wives keep the vigil and assist families when it adds a name.
“Almost every year, I’m making phone calls to families because we have lost a boat and somebody hasn’t survived,” said Dixon, who is part of a generations-old fishing family that has lost loved ones in the Pacific Ocean. “If anybody had to meet these families, I think they would have a better idea of how crucial it is to have this rescue helicopter here.”
But the Coast Guard has refused to explain its decision.
Dixon says the agency has rebuffed her efforts to learn more about the helicopter.
U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle, a Democrat who represents Newport, says the same. On Friday, Hoyle joined both of Oregon’s U.S. senators in sending a letter to the Coast Guard demanding answers.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
