The Newport Municipal Airport hosts a U.S. Coast Guard facility, which has been at the center of a controversy gaining national attention over the Trump administration's immigration and coastal rescue policies. (Photo by Shaanth Nanguneri/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
A rescue helicopter that’s long been kept at Newport’s Municipal Airport and Coast Guard facility on the Oregon Coast will remain there, an official for the federal agency assured Oregon’s U.S. Senators in writing.
It follows major local fallout over the Coast Guard’s decision to relocate the helicopter further south on the Coast to North Bend in late October with no explanation and ahead of the dangerous dungeness crab fishing season.
Ongoing legal battles over the helicopter’s removal continue to play out in federal court, and a judge recently ordered it at least temporarily returned until late December. Oregon lawmakers and local residents have speculated that the federal government moved the helicopter so they can begin to repurpose the airport site for a potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility.
Oregon’s U.S. Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden alongside U.S. Rep Val Hoyle, who represents the state’s 4th Congressional District that includes Newport, had pushed for the helicopter’s return. The Democratic lawmakers on Friday announced that they received confirmation from Admiral Kevin E. Lunday, the U.S. Coast Guard’s acting commandant, promising the helicopter would return.
Lunday told Merkley and Wyden that it was always his intent to return the helicopter to Newport in December, and that he will visit the Newport area within a year.
“The Coast Guard will do better to communicate and be transparent with you and the Newport community in these situations,” Lunday wrote in a Friday letter. “In addition to Newport, we will continue to conduct search and rescue response along the entire Oregon coast with helicopters and crews from AIRFAC Newport and Coast Guard Air Stations in Astoria and North Bend.”
Merkley in a social media post Friday wrote that he had “temporarily held up” Lunday’s confirmation as a U.S. Coast Guard commandant in the Senate “while we waited on this news.”
“In addition, should they ever reconsider the permanent location of the helicopter in Newport, they will start with the public meetings and congressional notification that are required in the law I wrote and passed in 2014,” Merkley said.
The announcement corroborates previous verbal assurances Wyden and Merkley reported on Dec. 4, though it still leaves the door open for more long-term changes to the Newport Municipal Airport’s Coast Guard facility.
In an ongoing lawsuit filed by the state of Oregon, alongside a local nonprofit and Lincoln County, against the Department of Homeland Security, federal lawyers have assured that the helicopter will remain in the Newport area until at least spring 2026, according to court filings.
It was not immediately clear how plans for a potential immigration detention facility in the city could be complicated by the announcement. In his letter, Lunday wrote that should the Coast Guard consider “any future change to the long-term status” of the Newport site, it would comply with federal law requiring notice and public comment. Aiken on Friday also allowed the Coast Guard to relocate Newport’s rescue helicopter to respond to flooding in the state of Washington.
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