Attorney General Dan Rayfield speaks to the Salem City Club at the Willamette Heritage Center in Salem on Sept. 12, 2025. (Photo by Laura Tesler/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
If someone had told then-Oregon House Speaker Dan Rayfield two years ago that any attorney general had filed 37 lawsuits against the federal government, he would have assumed that attorney general was “bonkers.”
But Rayfield, now eight months into his term as attorney general, has filed 37 lawsuits against the Trump administration, and nearly all of those cases have resulted in some level of relief for the state and its partners — judges granting injunctions and issuing other rulings that at least temporarily paused efforts to block federal funding, strip automatic citizenship from people born in the U.S. and fire federal workers.
“Oregon has been taking the lead in these cases, and this is something we’re incredibly proud of,” Rayfield said during a Friday speech to the Salem City Club.
He said he’s not yet thinking of the U.S. as experiencing a constitutional crisis, but that President Donald Trump’s threats against Congress and the courts as coequal branches of government keep him up at night.
“I think we’re at a point where we are stretching the bounds of our democracy,” Rayfield said. “Currently, I don’t believe that we have broken at all, and I do believe that there is hope as we move forward.”
Rayfield also took questions from members of the nonprofit civic engagement group that hosts regular events at the Willamette Heritage Center, a former textile factory near the state Capitol.
He criticized the government of Marion County, which contains most of Salem, for suing the state and saying it needed a federal judge to rule on possible conflicts between federal law and Oregon’s nearly 40-year-old sanctuary law that prohibits the state and local governments from helping to enforce federal immigration law without a court order.
“Our sanctuary status law was passed in 1987,” Rayfield said. “That’s a long time that they could have come to the Department of Justice and asked us for clarification if they had been confused. Maybe they’ve been busy.”
Marion County’s case is about administrative subpoenas the county received in August from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that demanded information about people on parole. Administrative subpoenas generally aren’t signed by judges, and Rayfield said the simple answer for the federal government was to get a judge to sign off on a lawful warrant before Marion County could hand over information.
Rayfield also criticized ongoing efforts in Republican states, and the response in some Democratic states, to redraw congressional maps to benefit one party. Oregon, where Democrats hold five of six congressional seats after Democratic Rep. Janelle Bynum defeated a Republican congresswoman last year, has not been part of the current redistricting debate.
“I think we’re in an incredibly dark period in our history where politicians feel comfortable talking to all of us about how we need to manipulate our maps to gain an unfair political advantage for anybody,” he said.
As he often does, Rayfield recounted his experience growing up with a Republican father who was a colonel in the Air Force Reserves and a mother who was a Green Party member. His father would tell him about how the U.S. needed nuclear weapons to keep the world safe, while his mother took the elementary-aged Rayfield to anti-nuclear protests and counted how many times she could be arrested for civil disobedience without it escalating to a felony.
Growing up with parents with diametrically opposed worldviews meant Rayfield has spent his political career, including his three-year tenure as speaker of the Oregon House, focused on establishing a culture of mutual respect.
“Oftentimes — right now more so than ever — we have politicians, and I’ve done it too, where we’ve said things or done things that divide folks in our community,” he said. “We have to say, ‘What is our collective responsibility?’ and ‘How do we act as leaders?’ just like a parent. Because I know if I act like a jerk, my son’s going to act like a jerk, right?”
The 37 lawsuits the Justice Department has filed against the Trump administration dominate headlines, but Rayfield said he’s also focused on expanding the department’s consumer protection work. It was his main focus in 18 years in private practice, at times picking up cases that he said a 10-person team at the Justice Department couldn’t handle.
Since Rayfield took office at the end of December, the Justice Department has doubled its consumer protection team to 20 attorneys. He’s focused also on prevention, with the idea that by the time attorneys file civil lawsuits or pursue criminal charges, scammers have already taken advantage of Oregonians.
“What we need to do is have a robust education program on the front end, outreach, partnering with a lot of different organizations,” he said, “and I think that this is a partnership that can act on the national level with Republican attorneys general and Democratic attorneys general being more proactive.”
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX