Immigration, housing, health-care and wildfire policy dominate Medford forum

By Steve Mitchell, Ashland.news

Four Democratic women vying for their party’s nomination in Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District shared a stage Sunday, Feb. 1, at Oakdale Middle School in Medford, making their case to more than 300 voters in a district long dominated by Republicans.

Congressional candidates Rebecca Mueller, Mary Doyle, Patty Snow and Dawn Rasmussen answered questions at the Jackson County Democratic Party forum, moderated by Kevin Stine, a Medford city councilor, on topics ranging from recent federal immigration crackdowns to the rising costs of living, health insurance and housing.

The May 19 primary will determine who faces incumbent Republican Rep. Cliff Bentz in November. The sprawling 2nd district is the state’s largest, covering most of the area east of the Willamette Valley and including Jackson County.

The 2nd District is a GOP stronghold that saw Bentz win reelection in 2024 with 64% of the vote.

The district has not sent a Democrat to Congress in more than 40 years, nor has it ever elected a woman.

The four candidates have vowed to support the primary winner and donate any leftover campaign funds to that candidate.

Candidate introductions

Referring to herself as a “purple Democrat,” instead of a “blue Democrat,” Snow, a businesswoman from Phoenix, said she is running to represent everybody, regardless of political party.

“With me, people always will come first,” she said. “They will come before party politics, certainly before the president’s wishes, and also before any desires of wealthy donors. The people come first.”

Watch it:
Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District Democratic Candidate Forum

Snow said her core areas are health care, the environment, the economy, and “our rights.”

Mueller, who described herself as a rural pediatrician, advocate, and mother who moved to the Rogue Valley about a decade ago, said all the candidates on stage agree that President Donald Trump is behaving in an authoritarian manner.

She added that Trump is leveraging a complacent Congress to erode rights, suppress a free press, undermine the balance of powers, and create opportunities for special interests, which she believes is leading toward a police state.

Nonetheless, she said, the polls show that most people in the 2nd District disagree with the candidates. While this is a Democratic primary, the race is for Congress, where, in the district, typically a third of non-affiliated voters go with the Democratic candidate in the general election. In this November election, the Democrats need over half of those voters.

“Are we going to offer them a candidate that has the same blue talking points and just expect that this time they’re going to agree? Are we going to focus on their issues? My goal is to focus on their issues and also to remind us and all of them that we have far more values that we agree on together than we have differences,” she said.

Rasmussen, a resume writer from the Dalles, said she is running for office as “an act of resistance.”

“Instead of being sad, angry, scrolling, doom scrolling, being upset, I had to channel my energy, and I realized no one is coming to save us but us,” she said.

She said that both the candidates and “everybody in this room” need to come together and take action.

People across the 2nd District are struggling, Rasmussen said.

“We are being crushed by rising costs everywhere,” she said. “You can see the struggle.”

Despite that, she said she is “hopeful, not hopeless.”

She said they can change how politics work.

“I’m an Oregonian running as an Oregonian, not as a partisan warrior,” she said.

Rasmussen promises to fight for economic justice — that is, making the wealthy and the corporations pay their share, she said. She also said working to lower inflation and ensuring the U.S. is not paying for tariffs she called “unregulated, unnecessary and illegal” would be another campaign promise. She added that the U.S. must have universal health care.  

Doyle, a teacher with the Bend-LaPine School District, introduced herself as a mother, a sister, and a new grandmother.

In the 2016 run-up to Trump’s first election, she found herself getting into online arguments with people she should have “building coalitions with.”

She said the upcoming midterm election will be the most important midterm in the country’s democracy.

Everything she said she would be talking about and answering her questions about would hinge on two concepts: fair taxation and corruption in politics.

On fair taxation, she said billionaires and oligarchs need to be held accountable for the “pillaging and extraction of wealth off of our bodies, off of our environment, and off of what it means to be a functioning democracy.”

Doyle said that when it comes to corruption in politics, there is a push for a 28th Amendment to ban corporate Political Action Committee money and a 29th Amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress and Supreme Court justices.

“Individuals are the only ones who should be contributing to politics, not corporations,” Doyle said

The corporate money has distorted representation and policy, Doyle said.

“Corporations are not free speech,” she said.

On term limits, she said the U.S. should not have “career politicians,” nor should the Supreme Court be appointed for life.

Federal immigration crackdown

On immigration and the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that led to the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Mueller said the federal government’s tactics have been “atrocious.”

With ICE, Mueller said that she believes Trump is using every excuse that he can to put “thugs” in the streets to run over the rights not only of citizens who are in the country with legal status and refugees, but also to deny the human dignity of those who are in the country illegally.

A centerpiece of her campaign is that the U.S. should not be doing anything that denies human dignity.

ICE has no foundation in the country’s constitutional government, Mueller said. The Republicans claim the founding fathers of the U.S. as their own, according to Mueller. However, the founders believed they were designing a democracy that was for the people and by the people.

The founders believed that people, when educated and given economic opportunity, deserved the right and had the fortitude to rule themselves.

What is happening in Minneapolis is not just ICE, Mueller said — it’s an excuse to take power.

The constitution sought to prevent a single leader from becoming an authoritarian and to protect the rights of the people, she continued.

Rasmussen said nobody wants criminals in their communities. However, she said it’s been proven that most immigrants are not criminals.

“They actually have contributed to our society. They have helped this country innovate, move forward, be productive. They are the ones that have helped us become us,” she said.

Rasmussen said she embraces diversity and immigrants.  

ICE, she said, has been used as a political tool by the Trump administration not only to disenfranchise and disengage, but to deport those who don’t look like the white nationalistic image.

“I have a problem with that,” she said.

Doyle said weaponizing ICE was listed in the agenda laid out in Project 2025, the roadmap for the second Trump administration that was penned by the Heritage Foundation.

The administration, she said, is stripping away people’s dignity and dehumanizing people.

She pointed to a pattern of dehumanization in U.S. immigration policy with a longer history that includes the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment.

“And now ICE is buying warehouses across our country to put people in who may never come out,” Doyle said.

Snow said she was “mad as hell” about ICE’s actions.

Pretti, she said, was peacefully protesting when a woman next to him was knocked to the ground. He threw his body on her to protect her from ICE agents, then was teargassed before he was shot in the back 10 times.

“For any of you who didn’t think we were an authoritarian government, think again,” Snow said.

ICE, she said, has been militarized to invade streets, to separate children from their parents.

Her first priority in Congress, she said, would be to demand that ICE get off the streets of American cities and go back to the border where they belong.

Snow said she believes in a strong border and that the country needs law enforcement to ensure it is safe. However, she said, that is not what ICE is doing.

“They’re trying to make this a homogeneous society, and we are not,” she said.

Affordability and the economy

Rasmussen said her work as a professional resume writer is threatened by artificial intelligence, which, she said, symbolizes a  wider insecurity in the labor market.

She said corporations that control every aspect of people’s lives are to blame for skyrocketing costs in housing, healthcare, education, fuel, and groceries.

“They are charging us more and more,” she said.

She said she is ready to fight the corporations and what she described as predatory and inflationary tactics that they inflict on people, who don’t get the benefits of the higher costs they are paying.

Not even farmers are getting anything back from the higher food costs, she said.

Rasmussen said the U.S. should revive its antitrust legislation.

“Back in the day, when we had robber barons, there was antitrust legislation,” she said. “Where the hell is that now? It’s not present.”

Doyle said that when it comes to affordability, the U.S. needs a progressive tax policy.

She added that the Trump administration cut funding for the IRS that had been used to go after those who cheat the system.

“Working families are paying more for the basics,” she said. The U.S. needs to address the issue through taxation and enforcement policy.

Snow said Trump’s tariffs, which he has put on those countries he wants to fear the U.S., are to blame for the country’s affordability problem.

“The United States is not an island,” she said. “We have to have fair trade policies with our trade partners.”

The tariffs have also affected exporters such as soybean and wheat farmers in Oregon, Snow said. The tariffs have also driven up the price of farm equipment, she said.

She said Congress must take back the power to impose tariffs.

For her part, Mueller said she backs progressive tax reform and corporate accountability, but she cautioned against treating tax policy as a replacement paycheck for working people.

Instead, she said companies like Amazon should pay employees enough “so that they have the pride and the dignity” of buying groceries without government assistance to prop up low wages.

“What we are doing to our people is making them feel like they are dependent on the government when they are working,” she said.

She said she sees single mothers coming into her clinic daily who are ashamed to be receiving government assistance. Some, she said, work two jobs.

Health care

Doyle said the American health care system is “inherently broken” and called for a single-payer system.

The current model allows corporations to “verticalize” healthcare, meaning they own clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers, and insurance, she said.

“Every step of the way,” she said. “They are extracting off of our bodies and weaponizing our health against us.”

Snow said the 2025 Budget Reconciliation Act, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” brought cuts to the provider tax, which has sharply reduced Medicaid funding, and cut funding to rural hospitals and available care.

Building on Doyle’s critique of how health care has become verticalized, Snow said the U.S. needs to disband corporate conglomerates much like the way it did with banks decades ago.

Mueller said that as a pediatrician, health care was “near and dear to her heart.”

She said with the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. made headway on the issue, but, at the last minute, the public option was ditched.

One thing the country can do, she said, is decouple health care from employment, making coverage portable. This, she said, allows people more options and greater movement between jobs.

The U.S. could incentivize states to build public health options, which could later inform a national plan, according to Mueller.

The focus on who pays for health care does not get to the heart of the issue: the shortage of health care providers.

“There are so many other parts that are broken, and we can’t even get to them because we’re still arguing years later about how we pay for it,” she said.

Rasmussen said there are four billionaires in the health care industry. That, she said, “says it all.”

She added that medical facilities in Oregon are being shuttered. Rasmussen said the neonatal and birthing center in Baker City closed, as will the birthing center at the Ashland hospital.

She said people will often avoid going to the doctor because of the cost, only to end up in the emergency room later.

Like the other candidates, Rasmussen said the U.S. needs a single-payer health care system.

Wildfire, climate and forest management

Snow said swaths of Phoenix burned to the ground in the 2020 Almeda Fire, which, along with other wildfires, can be tied to climate change.

She criticized the rollback of environmental regulations and said that gutting the Environmental Protection Agency could have long-term health consequences.

Mueller said “hyper-partisanship” has led to public lands not being adequately managed. Everybody wins when the national forests are managed, she said.

Rasmussen, an administrator for the Columbia Gorge Wildland Fires Information Page, said wildland firefighting resources are stretched thin.

This, she said, is a direct consequence of earlier practices by the US Forest Service: an overcrowded forest and a backlog of natural fires that would have burned through the undergrowth have created a tinderbox on public lands. If elected, she said she would ensure the U.S. has responsible forest practices. She said she was also concerned about the environment.

Like the other candidates, Doyle said climate change is behind wildfires.

She said the U.S. needs to dig into the issues that allow for sustainable logging on forest lands while also protecting the environment.

Housing and homelessness

Snow said there needs to be a substantial investment in mental health facilities and reintegration services, and said many people on the streets are there due to untreated mental illness, and not by choice.

Homelessness, she said, is a “horrible issue,” and it’s one that will cost money to solve.

“I know we don’t want to hear that,” she said. “We’re already being taxed, but we need to improve our mental health centers,” she said.

Mueller said there is a national shortfall of 7.3 million homes in the U.S. Along with paying people higher wages to afford homes, the U.S. needs to cut red tape that hinders the construction of those homes.

“We have to cut red tape,” she said. “You know, Democrats are super-known for regulation. Guess what? One thing is that we need to be smart and streamlined about how we regulate.”

For her part, Rasmussen linked growing homelessness to the erosion of the middle class, offshoring, corporate layoffs, and the weakening social safety nets.

“All of us are a lot closer to being houseless and homeless than we are to being millionaires,” she said.

Doyle said the U.S. needs to raise the minimum wage nationwide, reform U.S. tax policy, and bar hedge funds and corporations from buying up subdivisions. Often, they push out renters, she said.

Fifth candidate

Stine noted that Peter Quince of Ashland had recently entered the race. Due to timing, Quince could not be included in this event, but will be in future forums. Quince, according to his Jan. 28 filing, is a writer and previously served as a precinct captain for President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Email Ashland.news associate editor Steve Mitchell at stevem@ashland.news.

Related story

Four Democratic women vie to challenge Rep. Cliff Bentz in Oregon’s 2nd district (Jan. 29, 2026)

Feb. 3: Updated to note the correct spelling of Kevin Stine’s last name.