Federal lawyers admit errors in officer deployment numbers to Portland ICE building

On Monday, lawyers for the federal government admitted that they had made two mistakes in sworn statements given to the 9th U.S. The Circuit Court of Appeals looked into how far the federal officials went to secure Portland’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.

Robert Cantu, deputy director of the Federal Protective Service Region 10, which includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, said that since June, the region has had to send 115 Federal Protective Service officers from other parts of the country to Portland to “maintain a 24/7 operational tempo” at the building. The updated brief makes it clear that 115 was the “number of deployments,” not the number of officers sent. In fact, 86 Federal Protective Service personnel from different areas had been sent to the facility.

The federal government made another mistake while trying to fix the one that Oregon lawyers pointed out last week. They said it was “undisputed” that almost a “quarter” of the agency’s entire Federal Protective Service had been sent to Portland “due to the unrest there.”

Andrew M. Bernie, a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice, wrote to the court that just approximately 13% of the agency’s inspectors had been sent to Portland since June.

Bernie apologized on Monday to the 9th Circuit for giving false information in sworn declarations and papers.

He said, “Federal government lawyers take their duty to give the Court accurate and up-to-date information very seriously, and we are very sorry for these mistakes.”

The state petitioned the 9th Circuit last week to toss out its Oct. 20 verdict that sided with the Trump administration because the federal government gave false information.

Lawyers from the state said that only a small number of the 115 Federal Protective Service personnel who said they had been moved “was ever” in Portland at any given time. At best, 31 of them were in the city from July 15 to August 12.

Source: https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2025/10/federal-lawyers-admit-errors-in-officer-deployment-numbers-to-portland-ice-building.html

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