According to the immigration agency, from May through July of this year, Portland turned back 58 of 34,694 foreigners arriving here, meaning it admitted 99.83 percent of them. Seattle admitted all but 80 of 122,633 (99.94 percent), and Los Angeles admitted all but 752 of 1,236,679 (also 99.94 percent).

Moreover, officials said, there may be additional reasons that Portland has a higher rate of deportations. Because it has much smaller numbers of foreign travelers, they said, agents here may actually be able to do a better job of screening out counterfeit documents, and a higher percentage of people arriving here are workers, who are more likely than tourists to have problems proving they have the proper authorization to remain in the country.

None of that, however, seems to have quelled the public outrage here or the perception abroad that Portland is a bad place to enter the country. And the strip-search treatment of the Chinese businesswoman, which was first reported by The Oregonian, a daily newspaper here, was described as the ''last straw'' by Mike Thorne, the executive director of the Port of Portland.

The woman, Guo Liming, of Guangzhou, China, arrived here on an Aug. 19 flight. An agent, who has not been publicly identified by the immigration service, decided that her passport was suspicious because the laminate over the photograph was loose, indicating that the photograph could have been replaced.

The director of the office here, David Beebe, later told a reporter that the woman also ''fit the profile'' of an illegal immigrant because she was traveling with another person -- a man who turned out to be her fiance.

Ms. Guo was shortly removed to a room where she was ordered to strip down to her underwear, and was inspected by two female agents. She was then handcuffed and taken to Northern Oregon Regional Corrections Facility in The Dalles, Ore., 80 miles away, while the agency investigated whether her passport was bogus. Inspectors declined to tell her fiance, Hsieh Tsuhui, where she was, and he hired a Portland immigration lawyer to track her down.

After spending two nights in jail, Ms. Guo was told by the immigration service that her passport was indeed authentic, and they brought her back to the airport for a flight to New York. Mr. Beebe initially defended the agency's treatment of her, but after the Oregonian article about her ordeal set off a storm of outrage, he reviewed the incident, announced that agents had erred in their handling of her, and offered Ms. Guo an apology. Ms. Guo is traveling and could not be reached for an interview, said her Portland lawyer, Bao Lin Chen.

The incident was not an isolated one: the immigration service here has come under fire for jailings of other foreigners, including six Chinese teenagers seeking asylum. But Mr. Beebe has resisted calls from elected officials for his resignation, and the agency has not announced any disciplinary action against the agents who dealt with Ms. Guo. Mr. Beebe referred calls to the immigration service's regional office in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Mr. Williams, the director there, said it was too early to call for anyone's dismissal here. ''You would not jump to that kind of a decision without benefit of a full look at all the issues at hand,'' he said.