Homeless camp in Oregon national forest to be cleared
The U.S. Forest Service on Thursday is set to evict dozens of homeless people living in an encampment in a federal forest in central Oregon.
The federal agency has been working for years on plans to close part of the Deschutes National Forest near Bend for forest restoration and wildfire mitigation. But the number of people living in that part of the forest has grown, with many losing homes during the coronavirus pandemic due to job losses and high housing costs, said Jesse Rabinowitz, spokesperson for the National Homelessness Law Center.
People who refuse to leave could face one year in jail, $5,000 in fines or both, Rabinowitz said.
He said it will be the Trump administration's first significant homeless encampment eviction. It also comes on May Day, which commemorates the struggles of the working class for fair wages and better working conditions around the globe.
Four people living in the encampment, along with two homeless advocates, filed for a restraining order to stop the closure earlier this month. The claim argued it would cause irreparable harm to more than 100 people who were living there, many of whom have disabilities.
U.S. District Court Judge Michael McShane has yet to issue a written opinion, but the federal court posted on its docket Tuesday that the restraining order was denied, The Bulletin reported.
Up to 200 people were living in the forest several months ago when they were told that the forest area would be closed May 1, Rabinowitz said.
Local homeless advocate and retired attorney Chuck Hemingway, who filed the claims, told the newspaper he estimated 80 people remained there as of Friday, and at least 40 would likely still be there on May 1.
Chris Daggett, who lives in the forest, told KTVZ-TV this week that his family has been in Bend for several generations and that living in the forest doesn't make him or anyone else a bad person.
'It's incredibly difficult to get back on your feet once you've been knocked down,' Daggett said. "If they force us out on May 1, we still won't have anywhere else to go. It'll just make it even tougher for us to rebuild our lives.'
The Cabin Butte Vegetation Management Project, a wildfire mitigation treatment on some 30,000 acres (12,000 hectares) of the forest, is prompting the closure. The goal of the work is to reduce wildfire risk and restore damaged habitats where development encroaches on natural areas near Bend, Deschutes National Forest officials said in a statement. Recreation sites and trails in that area will be closed through April next year.
Deschutes National Forest spokesperson Kaitlyn Webb told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the government's goal is 'voluntary compliance,' but Forest Service officers and staff will patrol and 'enforce the closure and ensure public safety.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Native American boarding school funding under scrutiny in lawsuit
The tribes are demanding a federal accounting of an estimated $23.3 billion in funding taken from those funds, saying the government has never detailed how the monies were used. The lawsuit was filed last month in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, where one of the boarding school system's most notorious campuses - the Carlisle Indian Industrial School - once operated. "The United States took upon itself the sacred trusteeship over Native children's education - a trust responsibility that has remained unbroken for 200 years," said Adam Levitt, founding partner of DiCello Levitt, one of four law firms representing the tribes, in a news release. "At the very least, the United States has a legal and moral obligation to account for the Boarding School Program, including a detailed explanation of the funds that it took and spent." Federal trust responsibility "was born of a sacred bargain," according to the lawsuit. Through numerous treaties, Native Nations promised peace and ceded land; in exchange, the U.S. would provide for the education of their children. "The land was ceded; the peace was a mirage," the lawsuit said. "And the primary victims of decades of ongoing statutory and treaty violations were the Native Nations' children." The lawsuit names Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education as defendants. Alyse Sharpe, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, told USA TODAY the agency as a matter of policy does not comment on litigation. "The Department of the Interior remains committed to our trust responsibilities of protecting tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources, in addition to its duty to carry out the mandates of federal law with respect to American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages," Sharpe said. A shameful chapter in US history More than 18,000 children, some as young as 4, were shipped off to 417 federal boarding schools, many run by religious organizations, between 1819 and 1969. The system's detrimental effects were both immediate and long-lasting. Under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the department's first Native American director, the agency released reports in 2022 and 2024 detailing the program's abuses, including death, forced labor and physical and sexual abuse. The investigation confirmed the deaths of at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children in the boarding school system. According to the lawsuit, the program sought to destroy children's links to their Indigenous families, language and cultural practices, depriving them of skills necessary to participate and succeed in their own communities, indoctrinating them into menial positions and more broadly breeding cycles of poverty, violence and drug addiction. "The Boarding School Program represents one of the most shameful chapters in American history," Serrell Smokey, chairman of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, said in the news release. "Our children were taken from us, subjected to unimaginable horrors, and forced to fund their own suffering. This lawsuit seeks to hold the U.S. government accountable for its actions and to ensure that the truth is finally brought to light." The lawsuit says the program was not only "a national disgrace" but violated the government's duty to provide Native children with an education, an obligation that continues today based on a "unique and continuing trust relationship with and responsibility to the Indian people for the education of Indian children." "The Boarding School Program inflicted profound and lasting harm on our communities," said Amber Silverhorn-Wolfe, president of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. "We are seeking justice not only for the survivors but also for the generations that continue to suffer from the intergenerational trauma caused by these schools." Faith E. Gay of Selendy Gay, another firm representing the tribes, noted the Interior Department reports revealed not only the scale and scope of the government's actions but that key information related to program financing remains under federal control. Those reports said the boarding school system was part of a pattern of forced assimilation policies pursued or allowed by the U.S. for nearly two centuries and recommended an official apology. President Joe Biden formally apologized for the program in October. "The harm inflicted by the Boarding School Program endures in the broken families and poor mental and physical health of survivors of the Boarding Schools and their descendants," the tribal lawsuit reads. "It endures in the cycles of poverty, desperation, domestic violence, and addiction that were born of the Boarding School Program. It endures in the silence of lost language and culture, and ... in the missing remains and unmarked graves of the children who died."
NBC News
6 days ago
- NBC News
Deported Guatemalan man back in U.S. after judge orders Trump administration to return him
A Guatemalan man who was deported by the Trump administration and then was ordered to be returned by a judge because of due process concerns is back in the United States, his attorney said Wednesday. The man, identified in court documents only as O.C.G., landed in the U.S. 'a few hours ago' and contacted his legal team upon arrival, Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance said Wednesday evening. O.C.G. was expected to be taken into federal custody, Realmuto said. The Trump administration deported O.C.G. to Mexico, where he had previously been held for ransom and raped as he traveled north to the U.S., in February. O.C.G. was put on a bus and sent to Mexico despite a federal judge granting O.C.G. a withholding of removal just two days earlier, court documents show. A withholding of removal is an order that prevents the United States from deporting someone to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened, based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group 'The Court has already found it likely that O.C.G.'s removal lacked due process,' U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy wrote in May, when he ordered the Trump administration to return him. Murphy, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, also wrote in that order that the government didn't put forth any evidence that due process was followed. 'The likelihood that O.C.G. is correct in asserting that his due-process rights were violated, in this Court's view, has long hovered near certainty,' Murphy wrote. O.C.G. is not the only person who has been deported from the United States only to have federal judges then order that the Trump administration return them. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a deported in March to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador, and the Trump administration has not yet facilitated his return to the U.S. as ordered by a federal judge. Politico reported in May that another man, Venezuelan national Daniel Lozano-Camargo, was deported to the same prison, and a judge has ordered the U.S. to return him as well. O.C.G. fled Guatemala, where he said he endured persecution and torture, and came to the U.S. to claim asylum in March of 2024, but was denied and deported, according to court records. He then tried again, and while in Mexico traveling north to the U.S. he was held for ransom, raped and targeted for being gay, he said in a court declaration. In May 2024, a U.S. asylum officer determined O.C.G. 'had a reasonable fear' to return to Guatemala and was taken into immigration custody to see his case through. In February, an immigration judge determined that O.C.G. would most likely be persecuted if deported to his native Guatemala, and granted him a withholding of removal, court records show. Instead, he was placed on a bus to Mexico a few days later, without any notice. Mexico then sent him to Guatemala, where he went into hiding, according to court records, before he was returned to the U.S. Wednesday.
NBC News
6 days ago
- NBC News
Judge orders Trump administration to provide due process to some migrants deported to El Salvador
A federal judge today ordered the Trump administration to provide hundreds of migrants sent to CECOT, a maximum-security terrorism confinement center in El Salvador, habeas relief, ordering the government to provide the individuals an opportunity to challenge their detention and removal under President Donald Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The order applies to all noncitizens removed from U.S. custody and transferred to CECOT "on March 15 and 16, 2025, pursuant solely to the Presidential Proclamation entitled 'Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua.'" It will not apply to migrants such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native removed from the country around the same time, but for reasons outside of Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. 'Defendants plainly deprived these individuals of their right to seek habeas relief before their summary removal from the United States — a right that need not itself be vindicated through a habeas petition,' U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote in the order. 'Perhaps the President lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Perhaps, moreover, Defendants are correct that Plaintiffs are gang members. But — and this is the critical point — there is simply no way to know for sure, as the CECOT Plaintiffs never had any opportunity to challenge the Government's say-so.' Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in March to target members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang deemed a foreign terrorist organization by the administration and accused of engaging in "mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens." By invoking the war-time law, Trump was able to swiftly detain and remove immigrants he claimed were members of the gang. One day after invoking the Act, the Trump administration announced it had deported hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members across at least two planes to El Salvador, even as Boasberg in a ruling at the time blocked the deportations and ordered any flights carrying migrants subject to the presidential proclamation return to the United States. The Trump administration challenged the block on its Alien Enemies Act deportations, but the ruling was upheld by the D.C. Circuit of Appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court later faulted the administration for giving the Venezuelan detainees only 24 hours to challenge their deportations before returning the case to an appeals court for further proceedings. Boasberg in his ruling noted that the Supreme Court unanimously agreed "that those subject to removal under the Act must be allowed to challenge their removability in federal court before being deported." "Defendants instead spirited away planeloads of people before any such challenge could be made. And now, significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations," Boasberg wrote. Boasberg has provided the government a week to propose a plan as to "how they intend to facilitate the ability of the CECOT class to seek habeas relief," making clear the Venezuelan migrants must be granted the opportunity to contest their removal under the Alien Enemies Act, but conceding that "such a remedy may implicate sensitive diplomatic or national-security concerns." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for the non-profit groups representing the migrants praised Boasberg's ruling as affirming that the right to due process extends to individuals in the country illegally. 'The court properly recognized that the government cannot send people to a notorious foreign gulag without due process and then wash its hands of the situation,' said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who serves as lead counsel on the case.
