ICE transfers hundreds from Washington detention center out of state

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has transferred hundreds of people from its Tacoma detention center to facilities in other states this week, prompting concerns that they will have less access to lawyers and their families and a slimmer chance of being released on bond while their cases play out.

Between Tuesday and Friday, authorities boarded roughly 360 people on five ICE-chartered planes leaving King County International Airport, known as Boeing Field, according to preliminary numbers from the county's new employee tasked with monitoring such flights and La Resistencia, an activist group that also keeps counts of these passengers.

ICE flights regularly come in and out of the Seattle airport to bring people bound for the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma and to take people from that jail-like detention facility to detention centers and deportation staging areas in other parts of the country.

ICE's high volume of transfers this week is unusual. ICE flew out between 80 and 130 people in each of the three weeks prior, according to the monitor's counts posted on a King County website.

The federal agency also added extra flying days out of Boeing Field — not only Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday as usual, but Wednesday and Friday. Back-to-back ICE flights left Boeing Field on Thursday.

Four of this week's flights had, at most, one or two passengers arriving in Seattle. They were almost exclusively used to fly people out.

Why is the question. ICE did not respond to requests for an explanation.

We're trying to figure out what's happening," said Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

Jamie Ortiz, a volunteer with the Yakima Immigrant Response Network, said she's been in contact with family members of 19 people transferred this week, often with little information conveyed to loved ones.

"Where is my husband?" some are asking Ortiz. Or "What's going to happen now?" Many of those transferred had upcoming hearings scheduled in Tacoma's immigration court, Ortiz said.

Last year, ICE flew dozens of people to Alaska due to overcrowding at the Tacoma detention center. But the facility has not been overfull of late. With a capacity of roughly 1,600, it held about 1,460 people as of mid-August, according to members of Congress who visited then.

It's nevertheless possible ICE anticipates needing more room at the facility. The agency has dramatically stepped up arrests in Washington and nationally in the last few months, according to figures released this week from the Deportation Data Project, which receives government information through Freedom of Information Act requests. Federal agents arrested roughly 700 people in June and July. Most were detained.

At ICE's Tacoma facility, they likely would have a shot at being released on bond, thanks to a July ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling held the Trump administration's policy of refusing bond to almost everyone who arrived in the U.S. without permission ran counter to the law and decades of established practice.

Two appeals circuits have sided with the administration, however, and more than 200 of those flown out of Boeing Field this week went, at least initially, to cities in those circuits — some to El Paso and some to Kansas City.

Adams, whose organization brought the class action lawsuit that led to the 9th Circuit ruling, said he wonders whether the government is trying to do an end run around the judges' decision. If the immigrant rights project concludes that to be the case, he said it would likely return to court.

When someone is transferred, they effectively go missing for a period of time. Guards at the Tacoma detention center won't say where they have gone, according to lawyers, friends and family members who have turned up there trying to find someone. Tacoma immigration attorney Virginia Rivas Aldrete, who had six current and potential clients transferred out of Tacoma this week, said it typically takes 24 to 48 hours for people sent to different detention centers to show up in ICE's online locator.

A King County resident named Maria said she spent a couple days not knowing where her husband was after he was transferred from Tacoma to Texas late last year. "They were horrible," she said of those days.

Maria, who asked to be identified by only her first name for fear of affecting her husband's case, wondered whether her husband had been deported to Mexico or perhaps sent to Alaska.

Once she found him in Texas, she worked on getting him a new lawyer since his old one in Washington could no longer represent him. She said she called 40 lawyers before finding someone who would take the case. She was looking for an attorney to file a habeas corpus, or wrongful imprisonment, petition with the U.S. District Court. While such cases are commonplace in Washington, most immigration attorneys she talked to in Texas weren't familiar with them.

Adam Boyd, a Seattle immigration lawyer, said he was preparing for a client's bond hearing when he heard the man was likely being transferred Wednesday. The client's wife couldn't find him in an app that allows people to contact those in detention, which is usually a sign of an upcoming transfer or deportation.

"Then there was a two-hour scramble to try and stop that and figure out what was going on, Boyd said. He couldn't stop the transfer, but he did win a U.S. District Court order that his client be returned. Boyd's argument: ICE was interfering with his client's right to an attorney.

Leonardo Olachea has been helping a friend who was arrested and detained recently at the Tacoma detention center. First, Olachea found his friend an attorney locally and then, after a transfer this week, one in Texas.

Now, Olachea is dealing with another headache: how to get his friend's belongings. Rent is due on his friend's Shoreline apartment at the beginning of the month. Olachea is hoping he can get the landlord to let him in so he can bring the belongings to his house before his friend loses them all.

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