Lincoln County Latino, Mesoamerican Communities Are Fearful as ICE Raids Mount

By Brian Bahouth

Listen: 6:03

The number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests is rapidly increasing in Oregon. Recent arrests in Astoria and Salem, Newport, and now Lincoln City have reverberated through the central Oregon coast’s Latino and Mesoamerican communities. 

Kim Puttman is the new co-executive director of Conexión Fénix, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the county’s Latino and Mesoamerican residents. I asked her about Conexión Fénix and its many roles. 

“I’m so proud and so honored that the community would trust me to be a leader of this amazing organization,” Puttman told me by phone. “I was part of its founding as a response to the Echo Mountain wildfires and the lack of culturally appropriate services being offered to Latino fire survivors, and since that moment, the organization has only grown to meet the needs of the Latino community. 

“Here in Lincoln County, we provide community in ways that are unique, with models that are really culturally specific, even to sitting down for a cup of coffee with your friends and doing some embroidery and being able to talk about what’s going on with your family and get support exactly where you live.”

Conexión Fénix is a decidedly nonpartisan organization focused on education and various assistance, to include GED classes in Spanish and health education classes, but with ICE scoping a detention facility at the Newport Municipal Airport, the Lincoln County Latino community is fearful and wary.

To better understand the mood among Lincoln County Latinos, we spoke with a community member who wishes to remain anonymous for their safety. I asked about the community psyche.

“It’s really hard because they are afraid to go to work. They’re afraid to go shopping and separate from their families,” the source told me by phone. “A lot of community family members, they are legal, so it’s really sad because this is affecting everyone in the family, not just one person when they take [a family member] to detention. The kids, they are suffering. They have a lot of bad memories, but it’s also traumatizing them from separation from parents.”

Many American citizens have been among those recently arrested and detained for days, apparently because they speak Spanish. The indiscriminate and cruel nature of ICE enforcement methods is particularly unnerving.

The anonymous community member explained, “A lot of people, like American Indigenous [people] are in the same [situation] because everyone is a target. We don’t have the freedom. 

“A lot of people in Latino communities are working really hard to survive and bring food to the tables for their families. We are a very, very good community. We pay taxes, we contribute a lot in different areas.

“So it’s really bad in these days in 2025 that we have this problem. We never imagined the elections could result in a political environment like this because we plan to be a better community, better economy, better opportunities for everyone. So it’s really hard, but not just for Latinos.”

The community member said the people who are being arrested are not criminals.

“I don’t think people who are criminals wake up at six a.m. to go to work every day. I don’t think so, but that is the kind of person who is detained. People go to work to cover the needs of their families and their children. They try to survive, and they detain them at six a.m., five a.m. every day in Salem, in Portland. I don’t think so. These are not the kind of people who are criminals, who go to work.”

But the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed into law in July 2025, significantly increased funding for ICE. The agency is set to receive an additional $75 billion over four years, which makes it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the federal government. That there will be more ICE activity in Lincoln County is a distinct possibility. I asked Kim Putnam about the current state of affairs.

“I have to say, we are appalled,” Puttman said. “I was born here in Oregon, and I know that this activity from ICE in our community doesn’t reflect the values that we have as Oregonians, where we value all of the people who live here as human beings, and we understand that we all contribute to having a good quality of life here on our beautiful Oregon coast.

“To think that a detention center could be located here where people are deprived of basic human rights and treated like animals is horrific. It’s not something I ever thought I would see in my lifetime. And as an organization, we will stand strong with the other people in our community who are appalled by this and do what we can to stop it.”

The small nonprofit provides whatever help it can to mitigate the psychological and financial impacts of ICE brutality, but the need for support multiplies with the growing possibility of even more ICE raids in Lincoln County.