Washington state leaders say they are protecting the driver information of immigrants from ICE, but immigrant advocates say that data is getting out through other channels, undermining the state’s sanctuary law.
Washington prevented federal immigration agencies from accessing Washington driver information 108,170 times since November of last year, according to Gov. Bob Ferguson. That’s when the state started blocking access to the feds.
“Washington is a national leader on protecting the private information of our residents,” Ferguson said. “My administration has taken multiple actions to adapt to a Trump administration that is intent on misusing law enforcement agencies to further the president’s cruel immigration agenda.”
ICE officials say they use information-based leads to identify and arrest people in what they call targeted enforcement. According to court testimony by ICE agents, during a spike in arrests in the Pacific Northwest — they would scan license plates at random to identify potential targets. They also testified that they had warrants signed for an arrest after they had already had people handcuffed, according to a report from the Oregonian in December.
The governor's office said the state has canceled ICE and Homeland Security Investigations' access to Washington’s driver and plate search records. Customs and Border Patrol have also had their access suspended when their searches “have not met our state’s requirements for authorized access to this data,” the governor's office said.
The state has also blocked all searches from ICE and its sub agencies — Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations — from accessing state records via an international law enforcement data exchange resource. The program is called the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, or Nlets for short.
Since mid-November, ICE has had 28,539 requests denied, according to the governor’s office, with Homeland Security accounting for another 30,290 denied requests. But a majority of the denials were initiated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Requests from that agency have been rejected 49,291 times since mid-November.
Ferguson said his office has removed Customs and Border Protection’s ability to see photos of Washingtonians through Nlets.
“There are only a handful of states that have taken this step, and Washington is one of them,” the governor's office wrote in a statement.
Human rights researchers have found state and vehicle data continues to be used to make immigration arrests in non-criminal-related vehicle stops.
They do this by tracking federal identification codes associated with ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and Homeland Security Investigations called “Originating Agency Identifiers” when they attempt to search for driver info managed by Washington State Patrol and the Department of Licensing. Those Original Agency Identifiers leave a digital trail when the feds make requests for license plate info. Researchers then take license plate numbers of cars left behind after an arrest and compare them to the Original Agency Identifier searches.
“The records we’re getting show that the rejection doesn’t stop them from getting the data,” said Angelina Godoy, director of the UW Center for Human Rights. “They get rejected using one [Originating Agency Identifier] and then just submit their request under another one. There are thousands of still-open [Originating Agency Identifiers] they can use.”
Godoy said this flies in the face of a law passed in 2019 called the Keep Washington Working Act – commonly referred to as the state’s sanctuary law.
“ More action needs to be taken to bring this practice into compliance with state law, which specifically prohibits Washington sharing Washingtonians' private information for purpose of civil immigration enforcement.”
Jazmyn Clark, the smart justice policy program director at the ACLU of Washington, said the state’s sanctuary law doesn’t include adequate measures to ensure it is fully enforced.
“To be quite frank, a law is only as effective as its enforcement piece,” Clark said. “Keep Washington Working doesn’t contain a broad standalone enforcement mechanism that automatically penalizes every violation. So in practice, enforcement has largely occurred through state oversight and litigation.”
The governor's office said there is no immediate way to address this issue soon. They want to avoid fully shutting off all access to the federal government in order to keep information flowing for public safety concerns — like guns being moved through ports of entry and human trafficking.
“Looking ahead to the next three years, this will be an ongoing process for us to adapt to what the federal government does next to work around what we do to protect our data,” Ferguson said.