Tag Archives: gresham

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Detention Centers and Worse: It Can Happen Here

“Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration centers and hiring 10,000 new ICE agents. One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once. bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure.” David Wallace-Wells, 1/25/2026

Update, 1/30/2026 – The Washington Post reported that local officials are raising logistical and humanitarian concerns in 23 towns where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to convert industrial buildings into detention centers that combined would hold up to 80,000 people. ICE has offered few details about its plan since The Washington Post first reported on it  in December 2025. One detention center the Department of Homeland Security wants to open would be a more than 1 million sq. ft. industrial warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia that would be retrofitted to hold 8,500 detainees and hundreds of staff, more than the city’s total population. The City Manager, Eric Taylor, has said the city does not have the water or sewer infrastructure to support the facility. Unaddressed is the question of why the government needs such huge detention facilities when it says it’s objective is to deport people.

Update, 2/12/2026 – It’s not just more detention centers coming down the pike. Wired reported that ICE and DHS have quietly carried out a months-long expansion, securing more than 150 new leases and office expansions across nearly every state, often in or near major metro areas. Many new facilities sit near schools, medical offices, and places of worship, with DHS pressing the GSA to bypass standard procurement rules and hide lease details under claims of “national security.”

Update, 2/21/2026 – Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired has expired and Democrats have made   10 demands to rein in Trump’s surge of deportation forces into U.S. cities. One of those demands is “Compliance with Basic Detention Standards and Oversight of Facilities.” Think about it. Incarceration facilities are already legally required to be humane and hygienic., but as Radley Balko has reported on SubStack in The Unpopulist, there is a growing pile of reports from attorneys, journalists, human rights groups, judges, and others about shocking, inhumane conditions at facilities around the country.

Update, 3/7/2026 – So far, DHS has completed the purchase of 10 of the 23 detention center properties it initially pursued, spending more than $890 million, according to deed records or statements by local officials. Efforts to acquire 10 other properties — in Indiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — have failed, according to statements by local officials or building owners.

In the years preceding his death in 1875, George Templeton Strong, a prominent Wall Street attorney, kept a voluminous journal of his life and times. In April 1865, near the end of the American civil war, he wrote, “These four years have reduced me to something like pauperism, But I am profoundly grateful for them nevertheless. They have given me — & my wife & my boys, — a country worth living in & living for, & to be proud of.”

I can’t say President Trump’s inhumane crackdown on immigrants and harassment and murder of American citizens in the past year have given me a country worth living in, living for and to be proud of.

I doubt 7-year-old Diana Crespo, a second grader at Gresham’s Alder Elementary School, and 5-year-old Liam Ramos, the bunny-hatted child detained by immigration agents in Minneapolis, see America as a country worth living in and living for and to be proud of either. They are both being held at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Texas.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has spread its detention center tentacles across the United States: 

Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reported on January 29, 2026 that ICE is planning another detention center in Newport, Oregon as soon as May.

The spread of these. detention centers reminds me of another brutal time.

Most of us know the names of a few Nazi concentration camps, like Dachau,  Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died. But they were part of a massive complex of more than 850 ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labor camps and extermination camps CNN has identified. They stretched from France and the Netherlands in the west to Estonia, Lithuania and Poland in the east that the Nazis established during the 12 years Adolf Hitler was in power. Their purpose — to  segregate  , oppress and persecute their opponents.

Like the ICE detention centers, the Nazi system started small and then metastasized like a cancer, according to the Wiener Holocaust Library. 

Initially there were so-called SA camps. (Sturmabteilung (SA), or “Brownshirts,” was the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing). After the Night of Long Knives in 1934, the SS and Heinrich Himmler shut down the SA camps and consolidated control of all camps in Germany. Himmler and the SS used Dachau, an original SS camp, as a blueprint  for all camps. From 1934 onwards, the SS developed and then operated the camp system, which lasted until Germany’s defeat in 1945.

The SS started building major camps, beginning with Sachsenhausen in 1936, then Buchenwald in 1937, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen in 1938 and Ravensbrück for women in 1939. Political prisoners were the first inmates. Then people with previous criminal convictions. Next were the  so-called “asocials”, such as Roma, homosexuals, prostitutes, the homeless and the “work-shy”. The mass imprisonment of Jews began in 1938 after the Anschluss and  Kristallnacht.

As the Second World War began in earnest, foreign citizens from newly occupied countries such as Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands began to be imprisoned , followed by Soviet prisoners of war (POW’s) after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Those who believe U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can and will be restrained under the Trump administration might want to stop and reconsider.

With an administration where cruelty is the point, it can happen here.

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Could Sale of the Pamplin Media Group Threaten Local News?

The word is Pamplin Media Group, publisher of the Portland Tribune and 23 other local community papers in Oregon, is being shopped around for sale. 

Simultaneously, the Group is closing its Gresham Outlook printing facility and laying off its approximately 20 employees, an indicator of financial stress.

A Portland Tribune story noted earlier this year that the Pamplin Media Group “…has weathered numerous upheavals in the journalism business, three recessions that reduced advertising revenues and the COVID-19 pandemic that reduced revenues even more than the previous recessions.”

With all the bruising changes affecting the local newspaper industry, sale of the group may well lead to another upheaval. 

In early 2023, when Mark Garber handed off the position of president of the Pamplin Media Group to become president emeritus, he commented that when he’d started his newspaper career as a reporter in 1979, “We used manual typewriters and handed our copy to an editor, who marked it up, literally cut and pasted it, and then sent it to a human typesetter.”

The changes in the local newspaper business since those days have been massive, butchering a once robust news ecosystem in the United States.

The loss of local news has had far reaching implications. “As everyone knows, the internet knocked the industry off its foundations, ” James Bennet,  former editorial page editor at The New York Times, wrote in The Economist in mid-December. “Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.”

Just since 2005, the country has lost one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists. So far in 2023, an average of 2.5 newspapers have closed each week according to a State of Local News Report by Tim Franklin, Senior Associate Dean and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News and Director of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University.  Most were weekly publications, in areas with few or no other sources for news.

“The underlying infrastructure for producing local news has been weakened by two decades of losses of newsrooms and reporting jobs,” noted an October 2022 report from the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. “And news organizations today…often sense they are swimming against the tide of economic, technological, political, and cultural changes that threaten the long-term viability of local news production.”

In Oregon’s current troubling time, when misinformation is on the rise, the civic damage from a decline in trusted, quality local newspaper coverage can be particularly severe. Even more so when local papers rip more of their content from national news outlets or run stories to satisfy distant corporate owners. “Communities that lack robust local news also tend to experience lower rates of civic engagement, higher rates of polarization and corruption, and a diminished sense of community connection,” the report said.

The recent acquisition of many legendary local newspapers by hedge funds and private equity groups shows what could await the Pamplin Media Group. 

The Register-Guard in Eugene was locally owned until 2018 when it was sold to GateHouse Media Inc.  In 2019, GateHouse Media’s parent company, New Media Investment Group, acquired Gannett, the parent company of USA Today and more than 100 other dailies, creating the largest newspaper company in the country, with the combined company adopting the Gannett name. 

Management of the new company was left to Fortress Investment Group, a private equity firm in New York City. Fortress, which controlled New Media Investment Group, the parent of GateHouse, was owned by SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate. 

There were about 21,255 employees at Gatehouse and Gannett at the time of the merger; Gatehouse had 10,617, Gannett 10,638. Gannett has since dramatically cut costs, reducing its headcount to 11,200 at the start of 2023.

Over the years, the Register-Guard has suffered right along with Gannett. At the time of its sale to Gatehouse in 2018 the Register-Guard had over 40 employees. Its website currently lists just 3 News reporters, 3 Sports reporters and 1 Multimedia Photo Journalist. Hardly enough for robust local coverage.

The Alden Global Capital hedge fund is another company eviscerating local newspapers. Alden, which owns about 200 publications, including the Chicago Tribune, is the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country, behind Gannett. Alden is perhaps best known for acquiring and then gutting the Denver Post.

In July 2023, Los Angeles billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong sold The San Diego Union-Tribune to an affiliate of the MediaNews Group, which is owned by Alden, for an undisclosed amount. The Voice of San Diego called Alden “the most terrifying owner in American journalism” and said the sale put the Union-Tribune “back in the American newspaper doom loop.” 

Word of cutbacks was swift. The same day as the sale announcement, the MediaNews Group sent an email to the paper’s employees saying cutbacks would be needed to “offset the slowdown in revenues as economic headwinds continue to impact the media industry” and informing staff that the new owner would be offering buyouts. If enough employees didn’t take buyouts, the company said it would lay off additional employees. 

As of the end of October 2023, employees estimated that somewhere between 60 and 80 people were left from the 108-person newsroom under Soon-Shiong.

The Voice of San Diego said the sale of the Union-Tribune to Alden put it “back in the American newspaper doom loop.” Let’s hope the sale of Pamplin Media Group doesn’t put its community newspapers in the same place.