Portland Lawyer Fights ICE From the Inside

The phone call came on a Tuesday afternoon. A man detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement was calling from a facility two hours outside Portland, his voice thin with the kind of exhaustion that comes from watching days blur into months. He had been locked up for five months. His green card interview—the one that should have made him legal—kept getting pushed back. He was terrified. This is where Portland immigration attorney Sarah Chen stepped in, and what happened next matters far beyond the federal courthouse downtown. Chen, who runs an immigration practice focused on LGBTQ clients, took the case of a Caymanian national who had been detained before his scheduled green card interview. The man had a job waiting in Portland. He had community ties. He had a partner. By every reasonable measure, he was exactly the kind of person who should have been released pending his interview. Instead, ICE kept him locked up. One month became two. Two became three. By month five, Chen knew she had to move. What Chen discovered during her representation wasn't just bureaucratic incompetence—it was a pattern. LGBTQ immigrants, particularly those from Caribbean nations, were being held at disproportionately high rates in Oregon's federal detention system. The reasons varied on paper: flight risk, criminal history, lack of ties. But when Chen dug into the actual cases, the connections to sexual orientation or gender identity kept surfacing. Some men had been arrested for sex work. Others had no criminal history at all but were flagged because of their immigration status combined with their visibility in Portland's gay community. "The system doesn't see LGBTQ people as having roots," Chen said during an interview at her office near the courthouse. "Even when we can point to employment, family, community—it doesn't register the same way." Her client's case moved through the system in the way these cases do: motions filed, arguments made, the slow machinery of federal law grinding forward. But Chen was relentless. She documented her client's employment prospects. She gathered letters from his partner, from employers, from people in Portland who could speak to his integration into the community. She argued, correctly, that his green card interview was the reason he should be released—not detained pending it. After 150 days, he was freed. The victory might sound modest in isolation. One person released. One family reunited. One life that gets to move forward instead of languishing in a detention facility. But in the ecosystem of Portland's LGBTQ legal advocacy, it's significant. Chen has since taken on three additional cases with nearly identical patterns. Two have been resolved in favor of release. The third is pending. She's also begun consulting with other attorneys in Oregon who handle immigration cases, trying to build awareness of how sexual orientation and gender identity intersect with detention decisions. While outlets like the Washington Blade covered immigration detention from a national policy angle, here in Portland the story is about one attorney and her clients, about the specific mechanics of how federal detention works in Oregon, and about what happens when someone decides to push back systematically. Chen's work has also caught the attention of local LGBTQ organizations. A nonprofit focused on immigrant rights in the Portland area has begun referring cases to her practice. Word travels fast in Portland's gay community, and her reputation as someone willing to fight ICE—someone willing to spend months on motions and arguments for people with limited resources—has spread. What makes Chen's approach different from standard immigration law is her refusal to separate the person from the legal category. When she talks about her clients, she doesn't use the sanitized language of immigration procedure. She talks about the man who was terrified of being deported to a country where homosexuality is criminalized. She talks about the vulnerability of being both undocumented and queer, both conditions that society has learned to treat as disqualifying. "The law sees immigration status and sexual orientation as separate things," Chen explained. "But they're not separate for my clients. They're the same person, living in the same body, facing the same system." The Caymanian man who was detained for 150 days is now working in Portland. He's living openly. He's rebuilding the relationship with his partner that detention nearly destroyed. He's one person. But he's also evidence that the system can be challenged, that detention isn't inevitable, that someone paying attention—someone willing to file motions and argue and refuse to accept the default answer—can change the outcome. For Portland's LGBTQ immigrant community, that matters. It means there's someone in the courthouse who knows their names, who understands what they're facing, who will fight. It means the detention facility two hours away isn't the end of the story. Chen is planning to host a workshop this fall for other attorneys interested in immigration law and LGBTQ representation. She's also working with a local law school to develop curriculum around the intersection of immigration and sexual orientation. The work is slow, unglamorous, and essential. One person freed after 150 days in detention doesn't make national headlines. But in Portland, it changes everything for that person. And it's starting to change how the system itself operates.