Immigrants in Washington make up about one in five workers and are essential to our state’s cultural vibrancy. They also contribute significantly to our economy and communities, paying around $6.5 billion in state and local taxes each year. The increased and violent actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration have made life harder for immigrants and U.S.-born citizens alike, by spreading fear and uncertainty and tearing families apart. In Washington, a surge of ICE activity has led to a record number of detentions in the summer of 2026. In June and July of 2026, ICE arrested 1,405 people in WA, more than double the arrests during the same period in 2025 and almost eight times the arrests in the same period in 2024.1
State law blocks ICE access to state data, but uneven enforcement means it has continued
Our state sanctuary law, Keep Washington Working, recognizes immigrants as valuable community members and part of our workforce. The law prohibits local law enforcement and state agencies from sharing information with federal officials for the purposes of civil immigration enforcement. Keep Washington Working is designed to keep our communities safe, strengthen our economy, and increase trust in state government, so that people can access essential services and go to school and work without fear. However, in 2025, a King 5 investigation found that the Department of Licensing (DOL) was directly sharing access to vehicle data with ICE.
Upon learning of this direct data access, Governor Ferguson ordered this data pathway blocked. Later that year, in November 2025, Governor Ferguson also blocked ICE’s access to DOL data through a separate access pathway, a national data switchboard called Nlets. His office has since blocked a handful of individual Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) accounts. However, UW researchers have found that once blocked, ICE agents simply switch to performing the same queries using another account belonging to another subagency under the Department of Homeland Services (DHS). In practice this is similar to using a colleague’s password. Blocking accounts one at a time leaves Washingtonians, and their data, vulnerable to federal abuse. The continued use of DOL data through other data pathways undermines Keep Washington Working by making state-held data easily accessible for federal immigration enforcement purposes.
The impact of sharing driver’s license and vehicular data with ICE
Federal immigration officials use state vehicle and driver data to detain people through traffic stops, which are often violent. These stops are not routine or benign: federal agents increasingly use a tactic called “jump outs,” in which agents in multiple unmarked cars surround a person’s vehicle at high speed, then confront the driver with overwhelming force. As the University of Washington report demonstrates, ICE and CBP often target people based on name or appearance, a racially discriminatory practice. Such violent traffic stops can lead to collisions, unsafe car chases, fear, injury, and even death. It is unacceptable that DOL data enables federal immigration agents’ continued harassment of immigrants and people of color on our roads. Surveillance often takes this pathway:
- Federal immigration agents surveil communities, by traveling to locations where they expect to find immigrants, including Latino Grocery stores or Home Depots.
- Federal immigration agents query state DOL data via the Nlets data switchboard, by querying license plates of vehicles in the vicinity to obtain personal identifying information on the car’s owner, and cross-referencing that information with other databases to determine whether to make an arrest.
- Federal immigration agents then typically make an arrest within minutes, or travel to the listed address of the car’s registered owner later that day or the next day. Research shows that if one means of obtaining vehicular data is curtailed, federal immigration agents often simply look for another open channel.
Surveillance by federal immigration agents via traffic stops sows fear in immigrant communities, but it also affects citizens and their civil rights. For example, University of Washington researchers documented queries by federal immigration agencies on U.S. citizens’ license plates while those U.S. citizens were monitoring and observing ICE activities in their community.
State leaders must take action to strengthen state law, and protect our communities from violent traffic stops
A broad group of community and advocacy organizations have repeatedly called on Governor Ferguson to take action to comprehensively block federal agents from using state data for the purpose of civil immigration enforcement. State lawmakers must close loopholes that allow ICE and CBP to access state data, whether directly through state agency databases, or through other channels such as the Nlets data switchboard or third-party data brokers that contract with the state. Governor Ferguson can take immediate action to direct DOL to comprehensively end the continued disclosure of personal information contained in state databases and law enforcement systems to federal authorities that conduct civil immigration enforcement. It is critical that elected leaders and advocates work together to ensure our state doesn’t facilitate the abuse of residents by federal agents. Together, we can protect our communities from interrelated surveillance technologies and the harm they cause.
