Immigration advocates say federal agents are mainly targeting people in their cars, rather than at their homes or job sites. by Abe Asher For much of its nearly two year existence, Miguel Alvarado-Lopez has been a fixture behind the scenes at Moonshot Tavern on NE 28th Ave.  “He started off as a dishwasher, and then we realized we didn’t really need a dishwasher and he ended up quitting once he got his hours cut,” Josh Love, a partner and bartender at the tavern, said. “But we made a promise to him that we’d bring him back in any way we could, and we were able to do that months later.” Alvarado-Lopez returned as a cook—and quickly made himself an integral part of both the kitchen and the tavern’s culture.  “He was the nicest person I’d ever met,” Love said. “Anytime that we needed him to do something, to go above and beyond, we’d try to thank him and he’d say, ‘It’s fine. You’re my family.’ He considered us his family.”  Several weeks ago, however, Alvarado-Lopez’s association with the bar came to an abrupt end. Early in the morning on January 24, Alvarado-Lopez was sitting in his car at a gas station in Northeast Portland when he was set upon by immigration enforcement agents.  “As far as I know—and I don’t know a ton—he was detained while at a gas station and had his window busted open and was grabbed from his car,” Love said. Alvarado-Lopez was with his brother-in-law, Edwin, at the time. Both men were detained. Alvarado-Lopez was quickly transferred to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington and then transferred again to Arizona. As of last week, he was waiting to be deported to Guatemala, where his wife and son live. A GoFundMe has been set up to support Alvarado-Lopez and his family. The January arrest is part of a pattern that has emerged recently in the way ICE is tracking and detaining people. Immigration advocacy groups say it’s become more common for federal agents to detain people in their cars.  Love said Alvarado-Lopez is the first member of Moonshot Tavern’s staff who has been detained by ICE, and while he said the bar’s leadership had considered how they might try to protect their staff if immigration agents ever tried to enter the bar, there was, in this instance, nothing he or his team could do.  “It’s such a helpless, hopeless feeling,” Love said.  The manner of Alvarado-Lopez’s detention—on the streets, within the city of Portland proper, by way of a smashed car window—speaks to new trends in how ICE has been conducting its immigration enforcement mission in the Portland area since the beginning of the new year.  “At bare minimum, a quarter to a third of the detentions we’re seeing are happening in vehicles, and another quarter are out in [the] community—which could be on the street,” Alyssa Walker Keller, a coordinator with the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition (PIRC), said.  For the most part, ICE is not detaining people at their places of work. They also largely have not, unlike in Minneapolis or Chicago last year, showed up at local schools or restaurants. During the last four months of last year, just eight percent of detentions documented by PIRC happened at workplaces.  Instead, as Alvarado-Lopez’s case shows, ICE in recent months has used a different tactic. Walker Keller said her understanding is that the agency is increasingly using surveillance technology to track people classified as enforcement targets, waiting until those people are in their cars, away from their homes or workplaces, and then descending on them.   “It seems like the strategy has been to [detain people] from vehicles: they are able to position multiple vehicles from their agency around someone’s vehicle, then just break a window and pull them out,” Walker Keller said.  The effects have been stark: Walker Keller said there was a period of time when she felt like “the streets of certain parts of town would have just been littered with glass because of the number of people who were being taken from their vehicles.”  Since the beginning of January, however, the landscape of ICE activity in the Portland area has changed. The overall number of detentions reported to PIRC in January fell to around 80—a steep decline from the nearly 380 reported in November.  “For a while we were seeing a lot of masked agents in plainclothes, and we’re starting to see an increase in tactical vests, the militarized border patrol units, the SRT units, who come with vests and weapons, and some of the detentions we started to see in the fall involved breaking into people’s homes with explosive devices,” -Alyssa Walker Keller, PIRC.  The geography of those detentions shifted as well. Over the last four months of 2025, as ICE activity spiked in the Portland area, detentions were largely clustered in East Portland, Washington County, and Marion County. In January, however, the percentage of ICE detentions taking place within Portland city limits increased significantly even as the overall number of detentions dropped—a development Walker Keller suggested could be related to the agency’s outsized efforts elsewhere in the county.  “I think that the change in strategy we’re seeing this month is really related to resources,” Walker Keller said. “In order to do something on the scale of what they’ve done in Minnesota, they’ve lost capacity in other places.” The Trump administration surged more than 3,000 federal agents to the Twin Cities in December and January as part of “Operation Metro Surge,” an enforcement mission that has seen agents shoot and kill two U.S. citizens in the last month-and-a-half. That operation ended on Thursday.  Portland has not yet seen anywhere near that level of immigration enforcement activity, but Walker Keller said some of the tactics ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agents have used in Minnesota have nevertheless surfaced locally.  “For a while we were seeing a lot of masked agents in plainclothes, and we’re starting to see an increase in tactical vests, the militarized border patrol units, the SRT units, who come with vests and weapons, and some of the detentions we started to see in the fall involved breaking into people’s homes with explosive devices,” Walker Keller said.  Walker Keller pointed to the January shooting of two people from Venezuela near the Adventist Health Primary Care facility in East Portland, during which federal agents shot into a vehicle, as an example of the increasingly flagrant use of force on Portland area streets.  Another change, Walker Keller said, is that ICE and CPB agents appear increasingly willing not only to be identified as such, but also to be seen on the street with guns.  The uptick in violence has been evident not only in ICE’s interactions with potential enforcement targets, but also in its dealings with bystanders and protesters—another feature of its conduct in the Twin Cities.  In late January, federal agents fired chemical munitions at a group of peaceful protesters participating in a labor-led demonstration outside of the ICE facility in South Portland—prompting a lawsuit and prompting Mayor Keith Wilson to call on ICE employees to “resign.” “As we prepare to put that law into action, we are also documenting today’s events and preserving evidence,” Wilson wrote in a statement. “The federal government must, and will, be held accountable.” Walker Keller said she doesn’t know whether ICE’s increased level of aggression represents a government strategy or is simply the result of the agency’s expanded ranks and the Trump administration’s steadfast support of its tactics, but the effects on people’s lives are largely the same.  The upside for organizations like PIRC, particularly in the wake of the killings of Reneé Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, has been a surge of interest and engagement from volunteers that has accompanied multiple high-profile protests across Portland.  “What we have is each other,” Walker Keller said. “Scale up your skills now. Prepare now. Make sure your loved ones know your biographical information now, connect with legal services if you can now. Prevention really is worth a pound of cure.”  ...read more read less