A man in handcuffs locked to a belt chain trudged up metal stairs, eyes fixed on the door of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter plane bound for El Paso.
He turned and brightened when gusts carried the shrill tone of a whistle blown by one of a dozen activists 50 yards away. “No estas solo!” — You are not alone! — the activists yelled across the tarmac from behind chain-link and barbed-wire fencing.
The man with a goatee and glasses — one of 51 unidentified detainees dispatched on a recent Tuesday by ICE — twisted his right wrist to wave.
Much of the focus on President Trump’s immigration crackdown has been at the U.S.-Mexico border, which has seen a surge of Central American asylum seekers hoping to cross into the United States. But more than 1,000 miles to the north, ICE finds itself bedeviled by activists, attorneys and politicians in the Pacific Northwest who are determined to gum up the machinery of immigration enforcement.
Their efforts have “significantly impacted” the agency’s ability to carry out its mission this year, said Tanya Roman, ICE spokeswoman for Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. “State and local efforts thwarting ICE operations serve only to create additional security concerns and add significant delays and costs to U.S. taxpayers,” she said in an emailed statement.
Washington plays a lead role resisting federal immigration practices because its politics are “so diametrically opposed to the national policy of enforcement,” said Leidy Perez-Davis, policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington, D.C. Opposition is also strong in Oregon, where state Supreme Court Chief Justice Martha Walters issued a rule forbidding ICE agents without warrants from arresting immigrants in or near courthouses.
In February, Washington immigrant-rights attorneys won a settlement prohibiting Yakima County’s jail from holding inmates for ICE beyond their incarceration for local offenses. In May, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed a measure called the Keep Washington Working Act, which curbs state and local law enforcement agencies’ collaboration with federal immigration agents and stops ICE from renting jail cells for detainees within two years.
None of these steps appeared to perturb ICE officials as much as a decision in April by Western Washington’s King County to ban agency flights from Seattle’s Boeing Field. County Executive Dow Constantine said in his order that deportations raised troubling human rights concerns, “including separations of families … deportations of people into unsafe situations … and constitutional concerns of due process.”
ICE officials, turned down by other airports, were forced to switch the flights to Yakima, more than 100 miles to the southeast. Incoming and outgoing detainees are bused for hours across a snowy mountain pass between the farming hub and an ICE detention center in Tacoma.
The flights from Boeing Field had transported more than 34,000 detainees since 2010, according to public records obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. Planes most often flew to either Mesa, Ariz., or El Paso. From there, deportees were delivered to domestic detention centers, bused across the Mexican border or put on connecting flights to other countries.
In a statement reacting to the Oregon courthouse arrest ban, ICE said it had turned to arresting immigrants at courthouses because of policies preventing county jails and state prisons from transferring inmates to the agency. “A courthouse may afford the most likely opportunity to locate a target and take him or her into custody,” Roman said.
Walters said her rule allowed state courts to hold accountable people accused of crimes. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson made similar arguments when he sued the Trump administration Dec. 17 to end courthouse immigration arrests.
