On December 1st, the Dungeness crab season will start in Newport, Oregon. Crab season is a point of pride for the small city of around 10,000 people on Oregon’s central coast, which has declared itself the Dungeness Crab Capital of the World. But residents are all too aware of the perils that can accompany Dungeness crabbing, which is one of the deadliest jobs in the United States.
For decades, the fishermen of Newport have relied on a Coast Guard (USCG) rescue helicopter stationed at the municipal airport to help get them safely through the season. Strong currents and dangerously cold water temperatures mean that rescuers have only minutes to reach people who have been thrown overboard or whose ship has capsized before hypothermia sets in.
But the helicopter that is the key to the Coast Guard’s rapid rescue response is no longer in Newport.
On November 9th, 2025, community members discovered that the helicopter had been relocated weeks earlier – without public notice – to North Bend, 95 miles down the coast. The helicopter’s new position would add at least 30-45 minutes to any rescue attempt in Newport, a delay which will be the difference between life and death, according to Taunette Dixon, spokesperson for the local advocacy group Newport Fishermen’s Wives.
Taunette Dixon, spokesperson for the Newport Fishermen’s Wives, in front of crab pots at the port of Newport, Oregon. (Photo by Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder)
“Every minute is crucial,” Dixon told the Daily Yonder. “If [the helicopter] is an hour away, half an hour away, it won’t be making rescues. It will be recovering bodies.”
The helicopter’s sudden removal violates federal statutes, which prohibit the Coast Guard from closing an air facility without notifying Congress and providing opportunities for public comment. Furthermore, the law specifies that an air facility can only be closed if the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, determines air support is no longer needed, either because the marine and weather conditions don’t require rapid response, or because the necessary search and rescue capabilities exist without air support from the Coast Guard.
The helicopter was removed without any of these requirements being met. Local leaders, including city officials, state representatives, and Oregon’s U.S. Senators, have requested information about the helicopter’s removal from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees the Coast Guard. But as of the date of publication, they have received no response.
In the absence of concrete, publicly available information, emerging evidence has created speculation that the airport property where the helicopter was previously housed is being considered as a location for a new immigration detention center.
On November 10th, Newport City Officials released a statement announcing that they were “made aware of information that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is in the process of evaluating locations along the Oregon Coast for a potential U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) immigration facility, and that the Newport Municipal Airport has been identified as a possible location for this facility.”
In addition to the removal of the helicopter from its hangar, other activity around the airport has provided further evidence supporting this theory.
“It seems to me like they’re already moving in here,” said local pilot Jeff Shapiro in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “I come to the airport almost daily to work on or fly my airplane, and in the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen containers brought in, they just disassembled the Coast Guard sign. I’ve never seen this much activity in the building.”
USCG signage was recently dismantled at the Coast Guard’s air station located at the municipal airport in Newport, Oregon. (Photo by Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder)
On November 4th, a government contractor called Team Housing Solutions submitted a letter of intent to lease an additional 4.3 acres of property at the airport. Though the letter was withdrawn on November 12th, the statement of intended use included “operational staging in support of the federal project,” “placement of temporary facilities,” and “installation of a 12-foot security fence around the leased area for controlled access.”
State Representative David Gomberg and reporters at KOIN 6 identified job postings for clinical staff, as well as for “Detention Officers” and “Transportation Officers” to “to provide care, custody, and control to those in ICE custody” in Newport. A Lincoln County septic company also received an inquiry on November 10th “about costs to pump 10,000 gallons of sewage per day for up to three years, for tanks that would be located at the airport,” according to Gomberg and KOIN 6.
In an interview with the Daily Yonder, Gomberg speculated based on this evidence that DHS was making plans to house as many as 500-1000 detainees at the Newport Municipal Airport. He noted that Newport’s position at the confluence of highways 101 and 20 would give DHS easy transportation access up and down the Oregon coast, as well as to the Willamette Valley and Portland.
The state of Oregon does not currently have a long-term detention facility. The embattled ICE field office in Portland (the site of months of continuous protest) is only allowed to detain people for up to 12 hours, though recent investigations by the city show ICE has consistently violated that condition. The construction of a large-scale detention center in Newport would transform immigration enforcement on the West Coast, according to Gomberg.
“What we’re looking at here is the potential to bring people in from up and down the coastline, and from all over the state, detain them in Newport and then put them on a plane and take them God knows where,” Gomberg said.
Black Box
Both the removal of the Coast Guard helicopter and the construction of a detention center would have serious repercussions for the community of Newport. But there has been no official communication about either issue from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both ICE and the Coast Guard.
The community faced a similar situation in 2014, when the Coast Guard sought to close its air rescue station in Newport. But that time, the decision was publicly announced 30 days prior, according to Dixon. This gave the Newport Fishermen’s Wives and their allies a chance to file a lawsuit, which resulted in the helicopter and rescue station staying put.
The lawsuit claimed that the attempts to decommission the air station were illegal because by moving the helicopter farther from Newport, the Coast Guard would “degrade its search and rescue capability in violation of its obligations under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and the National Environmental Policy Act.”
The new standards regarding the closing of Coast Guard air stations were updated in 2018, and require the DHS to conduct a risk assessment as well as a public comment period.
But in this case, neither process has happened, Dixon said. Instead, the helicopter was removed without any announcement on October 30th. The community only became aware of the move when someone noticed it was missing from its hangar at the airport. Furthermore, Dixon learned that the Newport Coast Guard Station has not been fully manned since at least April, information that was not made public at the time.
“We were shocked. We couldn’t understand how this could happen when those steps had been implemented at the end of our last fight,” she said.
The news was especially unexpected given the Newport Fishermen’s Wives’ close working relationship with the Coast Guard. The group supports fishing families and bereaved spouses whenever an incident occurs, Dixon said.
Dixon emphasized that the USCG Newport station was not responsible for the decision to move the helicopter and is not involved in DHS’s potential plans to build a detention facility in the area. Instead, these decisions have been made by DHS officials. But some Newport residents have turned their frustration on local Coast Guard service members, who have historically been welcomed and celebrated in the small community.
“There are people over in Washington, D.C. that are making decisions without the knowledge of how it’s going to affect our community,” she said. “People have no idea that our ocean is different than any ocean in the United States.”
The sudden loss of the helicopter, just weeks out from the beginning of crabbing season, is destabilizing for the whole community, Dixon said.
“I am the person who gets the call that a boat went down. I’m generally one of the first people that talks to the families of lost fishermen and women. And I don’t think anyone can understand the grief that I deal with, the shock that I deal with,” she said. “I walk through grief with these families.”
The helicopter has also played a role in rescuing surfers, tourists, and even loggers who have been trapped on cliffs.
But Dixon said repeated demands for answers about the helicopter’s removal – from the local Coast Guard station to official inquiries at DHS – have gone nowhere.
On Thursday, November 13, Dixon met with Jason McCommons, Captain of the local USCG station in Newport. According to Dixon, McCommons had no further information on why the helicopter was moved.
USCG air station that used to house Coast Guard’s search and rescue helicopter, located at Newport’s municipal airport. This is the location DHS is considering for a potential detention facility. (Photo by Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder)
Dixon also reached out to the Captain of the North Bend USCG air station, Jason Bustamente, as well as officials in Seattle, Washington, but as of this writing, she has received only generic responses directing her to the public information email address of the Coast Guard.
Information about the potential ICE facility is similarly lacking, according to Gomberg.
“The federal government won’t tell us anything,” he said. “Reasonable people can disagree about immigration policy, but I hope we all agree that the government ought to be more transparent, more forthcoming.”
In this atmosphere of confusion, city officials have spent the week researching their legal rights and responsibilities, according to John Fuller, communications director for the City of Newport.
“They’ve Underestimated Us”
Mayor Jan Kaplan and the City Council called a special public meeting on the evening of November 12th to address the issues at hand. The meeting room was packed, with overflow seating in the hallway and recreational center, and more than 130 online attendees.
For two hours, residents gave impassioned speeches pleading for city officials to reject the detention center and bring back the helicopter.
One teenage resident moved the crowd to tears as she spoke about her father, who had been detained by ICE several weeks ago. “No one deserves to go through what my family is going through,” she said.
Other speakers invoked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the post-Holocaust poetry of Pastor Martin Niemöller, and New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani. They highlighted the important role that immigrants play in the cultural, social, and economic fabric of Newport.
The mayor and city council expressed their unanimous opposition to the building of the detention center, and promised to do everything in their power to bring back the rescue helicopter. It isn’t yet clear how much say they will ultimately have in either issue, but they were heartened by the outpouring of community support in the face of uncertainty, Mayor Kaplan said.
A welcome sign by Newport’s municipal airport. (Photo by Jan Pytalski)
City Councilor Steven Hickman said he’d spent a lot of time puzzling over the question of why DHS had apparently selected Newport as ground-zero for their Oregon ICE operations.
“Maybe somebody thought, ‘it’s a small place, it’s rural, we can probably overpower them,’” he said. “We’ve been underestimated, absolutely underestimated, and we are not going to stop until we succeed in one form or another.”
He continued. “What I know from history is that in every terrible, dark time of this world, empathy and compassion and kindness have ultimately prevailed, and it will prevail here too.”
Pilot Jeff Shapiro isn’t so sure. “The Department of Homeland Security is continually bending and breaking the Constitution and ignoring the rule of law,” he said. “I have very little faith that our voices are going to matter in this instance, and they’re not going to do exactly what they want to do anyway, which is really a shame and divisive, and I think is going to be a real stain on this town.”
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