Judge strips ICE of presumption of honesty after finding agent fabricated Oregon arrest record

A federal judge ruled this week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has repeatedly violated a court order limiting warrantless arrests in Oregon, finding that one ICE officer fabricated an arrest report under oath and ordering the agency to turn over sweeping new documentation, including body-camera footage, for nearly every civil immigration arrest it makes in the state.

In a 50-page opinion and order filed Monday in M-J-M-A v. Hernandez, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai found that ICE agents have continued making warrantless arrests in Oregon without the individualized, pre-arrest finding that a person is likely to flee, as his own February injunction required, and that the agency's paperwork can no longer be trusted to show otherwise. "The presumption of regularity," which directs courts to assume government officers have acted lawfully absent clear evidence otherwise, "no longer holds for Defendants," Kasubhai wrote. "One must earn credibility by acting with integrity."

A Fabricated Arrest Record

The clearest example, according to the order, came from a July 26 traffic stop near Ashland. ICE Deportation Officer J.G. and his partner ran license plates at a Medford Walmart and obtained an arrest warrant for the driver of a Honda CR-V. They had no warrant, and no prior knowledge, of the passenger, identified in court papers only as H-D-G-H-, a Guatemalan national. Officer J.G. testified that he nonetheless wrote H-D-G-H-'s official arrest record, known as a Form I-213, to make it appear agents had identified and lawfully arrested him on a warrant — because he had "already written the narrative" for the driver's arrest and "pretty much wrote" the passenger's the same way, but "made the mistake of not correcting" the copy. Kasubhai did not accept that it was a mistake. The officer, a sworn police officer for several years before joining ICE, "lied in an official record to facilitate the impression he was conducting a lawful warrant-based arrest," the judge wrote, adding that it "defies logic" to call such an error inadvertent.

"It is not lost on this Court that Defendants have attempted an end-run around compliance with both the law and the preliminary injunction," Kasubhai wrote. "What they claim to be warrant-based arrests in this record are simply not. And no amount of insistence or table-pounding will make them so. Defendants, through their own conduct, have lost trust."

Hundreds of Arrests, a Fraction Reported

The numbers at issue are substantial. Between Feb. 5 and July 31, ICE made 574 arrests across Oregon, 504 of them so-called non-custodial arrests made in the community rather than at a jail, according to data presented at a two-day evidentiary hearing in September. Of those, the government told the court only 13 were warrantless and subject to the injunction's reporting requirements. Kasubhai rejected that accounting, writing that the true number of unlawful warrantless stops was "significantly more than thirteen." He noted that at oral argument, government attorneys claimed — without producing supporting records — to have separately turned over documentation on roughly 25 additional warrantless arrests that never appeared in the required monthly reports. The case, filed as a habeas petition in October 2025 by an Oregon woman identified as M-J-M-A- after her own warrantless arrest in Woodburn, was later certified as a class action covering everyone arrested in the district without a warrant since September 2025.

Two More Disputed Stops

The judge's opinion details other arrests the government could not justify. J-C-C-V-, a Hood River delivery driver with a pending asylum claim, was surrounded by roughly six ICE vehicles in June and held for nearly three months at a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, before a federal judge there granted him habeas relief in September. His arrest report, Kasubhai found, misdescribed his vehicle as his brother's car and placed the arrest nearly 300 miles south, in Napa, California, rather than Hood River. In a separate case, H-F-M-J-, a Eugene landscaper, testified that officers pressured him into signing an English-language "voluntary departure" form he did not understand, in exchange for a promised $2,500 payment, before a judge ordered his release the same day.

A Pattern Beyond Oregon

Kasubhai's findings track a broader pattern that has emerged in immigration litigation nationally this year. A Massachusetts federal judge wrote in September that, "after repeated misrepresentations by ICE officers," it is "with profound regret" that she no longer extends the presumption of regularity to the agency, and a judge in Brooklyn found in October that ICE agents had prepared "a substantially false administrative warrant" to justify an arrest. The Oregon case also surfaced a January memo from ICE Director Todd Lyons instructing agents on how to assess whether a person is "likely to escape" before a warrant can be obtained — a standard plaintiffs argue is being stretched to justify arrests the injunction was meant to stop. Kasubhai declined to rule on the memo's legality for now but said ICE "remains obligated to obey the law and this Court's preliminary injunction" regardless of its contents.

What's Next

The government is already appealing Kasubhai's original February 4 preliminary injunction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Monday's enforcement order is likely to become part of that fight. In the meantime, Kasubhai ordered ICE to retransmit the terms of his injunction to every officer, employee and contractor involved in Oregon arrests every 30 days and certify that it has done so; to reproduce all past arrest records without redaction; to disclose documentation, including body-worn camera footage, for every arrest made on or after September 1 — whether or not the government calls it warrant-based — or swear under oath that none exists; and to turn over records tied to any individual arrest within seven days of a request from the plaintiffs.

Jordan Cunnings, an attorney with Innovation Law Lab who represents the plaintiffs, called the order "validating" and said it would help "bring to light any future non-compliance" by the agency. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to reporters' requests for comment on the ruling in the days after it was issued. The litigation continues before Kasubhai in Eugene even as the appeal of his original injunction remains pending.