1 week Ago By Alex Baumhardt
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield (right) and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (left) hosted a town hall in Portland April 10, 2025. Nearly 200 people came to discuss concerns about President Trump's executive orders and cuts to federal agencies. The two states attorneys general are among 23 Democratic attorneys general nationwide who have sued the federal government more than a dozen times in the first three months of Trump's second term.
(Alex Baumhardt/Oregon Capital Chronicle)Nearly every day, Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield joins 22 other Democratic state attorneys general from around the country over Zoom to discuss the latest harms to civil liberties, jobs and basic services their states’ residents face from the Trump administration.Then, the attorneys general plan how they’ll sue.They’ve been meeting like this since January, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told a crowd at a “Safeguarding Oregon” forum she and Rayfield hosted at Portland State University on Thursday night.
About 200 people attended the event to share concerns over federal threats to Social Security, Medicaid, rural health clinics, unions and food banks.“We’ve only been working together for three months, and it feels like 40 years at this point, given the number of lawsuits that we have had to file on behalf of Americans,” Mayes said. “We have 23 Democratic attorneys general in America today who are fighting like hell to make sure that we protect and preserve this beautiful, precious, irreplaceable democracy of ours.
”The Democratic attorneys general have sued President Donald Trump and his administration more than a dozen times in the last three months. And they’ve mostly been successful, Mayes said.Federal judges in nearly every case have issued temporary restraining orders blocking Trump efforts such as ending birthright citizenship and attempts to cut research funding to the National Institutes of Health.
Rayfield filed Oregon’s 13th suit against the Trump administration on Thursday, to block officials’ withholding of COVID-relief funds already promised to schools. It was also Rayfield’s 100th day in office.“I didn’t expect this.
I didn’t expect when I ran for this position that on the 100th day that I’m in office, that I’d be telling you ‘I filed our 13th lawsuit against the Trump Administration.’ I just did not think that was a reality,” he said. “This was not a reality — I’m 46 years old — this was not a reality for 45 years of my life.
This was not the way the country operated. It’s a very different normal.”Event moderator Melissa Unger, executive director of the largest public services and care provider union in Oregon, Service Employees International Union Local 503, described the states’ attorneys general as the “last line of defense when it comes to protecting our rights and our freedoms as Oregonians.
” Cutting food and health care Rayfield, Mayes and the other attorneys general have been hosting town halls since early March. The first, in Phoenix, drew a crowd of about 500, according to Mayes. A March 20 town hall in North St.
Paul, Minnesota was attended by more than 1,100 people. On Wednesday night, about 250 people came out to meet with Rayfield and state Rep. Juley Fahey, a Eugene Democrat and Speaker of the Oregon House, in Eugene, according to Jenny Hansson, a Rayfield spokesperson.
The Portland forum Thursday night opened with a panel from Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette, the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, Oregon Food Bank, the Oregon AFL-CIO federation of unions and the Oregon League of Conservation Voters. Leaders from those groups discussed some of their key concerns under the current presidential administration.Of great concern to nearly all of them was the likelihood that Republicans will ultimately cut about $880 billion in Medicaid and Medicare funding over the next decade in their budget plan, which passed the U.
S. Senate April 5 and the U.S.
House on Thursday.Sara Kennedy, a doctor and CEO of Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette, said a majority of Planned Parenthood’s Oregon patients rely on Medicaid.More than one-third of all Oregonians rely on Medicaid for insurance, and 45% of all pregnancies and 57% of all children in the state are covered by Medicaid, according to data from the Oregon Health Authority and analysis from Oregon Health &Science University.
“90% of what we do at Planned Parenthood is preventing cancer, and providing birth control, and providing education, and preventing congenital syphilis, and most of those patients are on Medicaid. So if Medicaid goes away, all of those things get worse,” Kennedy said.Matt Newell-Ching, public policy manager for the Oregon Food Bank, said hunger in the state is already high and likely to get worse under federal cuts.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture in January cut millions in funding for food assistance programs nationwide that have resulted in the cancellation of about 90 truckloads of food so far that were supposed to go to Oregon Food Bank locations around the state.
Demand at Oregon Food Bank sites was already rising over the last year, by nearly one-third, due to the high cost of food, housing and the expiration of pandemic assistance such as the child tax credit and emergency SNAP benefits, Newell-Ching said. He expects it will continue to rise as the Trump administration threatens cuts or enforces more documentation requirements to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, school lunch subsidies and food aid via the USDA’s Women Infants and Children program serving new parents and their babies.Oregon’s Senate Democrats, who wrote Friday to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins urging her to reverse the decisions to cut millions in food assistance to Oregonians and to farmers who grow food for USDA food aid programs, share his concerns.
“We implore you in the strongest possible terms to immediately resume food deliveries infull to the Oregon Food Bank, and to provide a helping hand to people who are trying to find ways to survive, rather than to extraordinarily affluent Americans by means of yet another tax reduction,” they wrote. Threat to unions and retirementGraham Trainor, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, a statewide federation of labor unions representing over 300,000 working Oregonians, spoke out against Trump’s firing of tens of thousands of federal workers and an executive order to strip collective bargaining and organizing rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers and more than 30 federal agencies under the guise of national security.Trainor asked the attorneys general to protect those workers, as well as union activists, from being taken by U.
S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE recently detained Washington farm union organizer Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, and students from college campuses in Oregon who have unlawfully had their visas revoked.
Other attendees who shared stories with the crowd and the attorneys general included Liana Coffey, a 37-year-old trans Air Force veteran who spoke out against Trump’s executive order barring trans military personnel from serving, and Ben Fain, an 86-year-old Marine Corps Veteran and career Tri-Met bus driver who brought his father’s Social Security card with him. Fain held it up to make the point that his generation and generations before him benefitted from the program and that it should not be reduced, privatized or ended.“I don’t think I’m a burden,” he said.
“I think I contributed to it. I think that everybody who works should have that available to them.” “Worst might be yet to come”The attorneys general told the crowd they would continue to sue the Trump administration for unconstitutional and illegal harm.
Mayes has created a form on her office’s website where Arizonans can report any disruptions to their Social Security. She said her staff has already received about six dozen complaints.“We know they fired 7,000 employees,” she said of the Trump administration cuts to the Social Security Administration.
“My personal suspicion is that this is sabotage from within, and the first step for us as AGs, to be able to do something about it, is to gather that evidence. So please do report it.”Rayfield in December created an oversight and accountability cabinet made up of about a dozen leaders from the health care, law and labor sectors to advise his office and its defences against Trump threats to Oregon policies.
The cabinet includes Trainor, Kennedy and Baessler.Rayfield said he might also create something similar to what Mayes has in Arizona for submitting Social Security payment disruptions and other complaints.“It’s people like that who are willing to tell their stories, like you, that are willing to come here and tell your stories, that help us do our job and that help us protect our democracy,” Rayfield said.
Mayes said things are likely to get worse before they get better.“There is likely more to come. The worst might be yet to come,” she said.
She assured the crowd that she, Rayfield and the other Democratic attorneys general would keep suing.“We have something called the separation of powers, and that is really what is at the bottom of all of these cases, and what President Trump and unelected billionaire Elon Musk and DOGE are violating week after week after week,” Mayes told the crowd. “We do not have a king in this country.
We do not have a king.” GET THE MORNING HEADLINES. SUBSCRIBE.
