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Months after job listings from a government security contractor suggested there were plans for a federal immigrant detention facility at the Portland International Airport, there is no evidence any such project has been actually moving forward.
“We have no new detention centers to announce at this time,” a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson wrote to WW on May 29. However, they added, “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”
Meanwhile, neither ICE nor its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, have communicated with the Port of Portland about any potential facility. “There are no updates,” Molly Prescott, a Port of Portland spokesperson, tells WW. “PDX has not received any communication or request to use airport land or facilities for ICE operations.”
Todd Lyons, ICE’s former acting director, whose last day was May 31, wrote a similar assurance in a March 31 letter to U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-Ore). “ICE is not currently planning to expand current detention facilities or open any new long or short-term detention facilities in Oregon,” Lyons wrote. (David Venturella has replaced Lyons as acting director. Venturella was previously an executive at the private prison operator GEO Group, whose facilities hold about a third of current immigration detainees. He left GEO to oversee ICE’s detention contracts in 2023.)
Reports of a potential facility at the airport first emerged in early December 2025, after the government contractor Acuity International posted job listings on its website and on Indeed for a detention facility at 7000 NE Airport Way, the airport’s address. Those postings were listed as “notional,” suggesting Acuity was hiring in anticipation of winning a government contract.
As of early June, the listings have disappeared from both Acuity’s website and Indeed. Acuity did not respond to a request for comment.
Acuity did list some new positions with the Portland airport’s address in the past two weeks. Those jobs include “Senior Guard (SRG) - WPS III (Somalia),” “Vehicle Mechanic - (VM) WPS III (Iraq)” and “PSS/Paramedic (PSS/PARA) - WPS III (Iraq),” all of them full-time positions.
All three listed dozens of other locations. The Somalia guard job lists 30 total locations, the Iraq mechanic job 64, and the Iraq paramedic job 82. The Iraq jobs’ descriptions name the location as Erbil, Iraq, in Iraqi Kurdistan; the Somalia job’s description names no location. It’s unclear why the Portland airport’s address is part of any of the postings.
Oregon is one of few states where ICE does not operate a long-term detention facility. Those arrested and detained by ICE are sometimes held at ICE’s field office on the South Waterfront—which has been the site of frequent clashes between protestors and local and federal law enforcement—before being moved to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Wash. Federal immigration officers have arrested over 2,100 immigrant Oregonians under the second Trump administration, a DHS spokesperson previously told The Oregonian.
“Oregonians believe in fairness and in keeping families together. ICE detention threatens both. For decades, communities across the state have rejected ICE detention. The proposed sites keep changing, but our answer doesn’t,” Isa Peña, director of strategy at Innovation Law Lab, wrote in a statement to WW.
In November 2025, reports emerged that ICE was planning to build a facility at the Newport, Ore., municipal airport. Following massive public resistance, the city of Newport filed a lawsuit to stop the plans. In a late February court filing, ICE pledged not to build a facility in Newport or anywhere in Lincoln County. Newport Mayor Jan Kaplan has raised concerns that ICE’s pledge does foreclose reviving such plans in the future.
