We all, regardless of immigration status, deserve the freedom to keep our families safe and the ability to control the security of our personal information. U.S. courts have long acknowledged a person’s right to privacy within constitutional protections. Additionally, data privacy fortifies an individual’s ability to safely access important public benefits. But Trump and his administration are threatening to rip families apart by exploiting individuals’ personal information. The Trump administration is unethically amassing confidential data from various agencies, including Washington state’s Health Care Authority and the Department of Licensing, to support its mass deportation agenda. This is immoral. What’s more, immigrant workers are also vital to our state economy, and mass deportation will hurt us all. Ultimately, this violation of data privacy endangers all Washington residents’ safety and undermines our collective democracy. All of us must work together to strengthen our state’s Keep Washington Working (KWW) law, intended to protect immigrant workers and our economy, in the face of federal attacks, to make sure Washington state remains a safe place where everyone’s privacy is protected.
Lawmakers rightly passed Keep Washington Working in 2019 to protect immigrants. The legislation:
- Prohibits local law enforcement from sharing information and using state dollars, equipment, and staff time for federal immigration enforcement. For example, local law enforcement cannot hold individuals in jail for the purpose of federal immigration enforcement.
- Also applies to county sheriffs, Washington state patrol, Department of Corrections, and school resource officers (SROs) in public schools.
- Ensures personnel in hospitals, court houses, and shelters also cannot assist ICE in accosting individuals.
Since KWW was passed in 2019, the subsequent presidential administrations have continued to put an undue emphasis on detaining immigrants. Now Trump and his administration have exponentially ramped up efforts and are using new methods to locate and detain immigrants for their mass deportation agenda. Washington state lawmakers need to step up and pass additional legislation that protects the rights and safety of all residents.
A timeline of increased surveillance and federal information sharing
The Trump administration has used a multitude of tactics to gather data about immigrants for their mass deportation agenda, creating detrimental consequences to individuals’ personal information safety. Since coming into office, Trump has instituted several policies that pressure numerous agencies and individuals to share their data with his administration. These actions include:
- March 20, 2025: Executive order to open data sharing across agencies.
- March 24, 2025: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sign a Memorandum of Understanding that establishes a partnership to share data with each other.
- April 7, 2025: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and DHS finalize a Memorandum of Understanding that allows DHS to request the IRS to provide the most recent address of individuals who have a pending deportation proceeding. This agreement could reveal as many as 7 million people’s information, against longstanding legal precedent which safeguards taxpayer privacy.
- April 11, 2025: A registration requirement orders non-citizen individuals to disclose their personal information with the federal government (putting them at risk of detention and deportation), or otherwise risk receiving a $5,000 fine, and criminal and immigration charges.
- April 21, 2025: The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) receives access to data about immigrants who have interacted with the immigration system from the U.S. Department of Justice .
- June 13, 2025: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) send out letters to various states (Washington, California, New York, Oregon, Illinois, Minnesota, and Colorado) requesting data about their state-funded programs that provide health care to individuals who are not eligible for Medicaid due to their immigration status. Washington state Health Care Authority provides data about Apple Health Expansion (AHE) clients with CMS, putting AHE enrollees at greater risk for getting swept up in Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
- June 2025: The New York Times reports that the Trump administration has amassed data in an app for ICE to help locate and detain people.
- July 11, 2025: King 5 breaks news that the Department of Licensing has been sharing data with ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, and the Department of Homeland Security since 2018.
Data privacy protects our safety and our civil rights
Trump’s data sharing policies harms the families, the cost of living, and the safety for not only our immigrant communities, but also everyone in Washington state. The federal administration’s violation of individuals’ data privacy impacts immigrants’ ability to be in public, receive services, see friends and family, and live their lives with autonomy. Since Trump came into office for his second term in 2025, many immigrants have been too afraid to go to work out of fear that they’ll be detained in their workplace, resulting in lower incomes for families and unfilled labor. Many people are too scared to send their children to school, drive, or attend church or events – anticipating federal immigration enforcement presence. Immigrant community members are also avoiding critical medical care and other social services out of fear of ICE or the impact that receiving public benefits will have on their immigration status. The impact, however, is intergenerational and community wide. The families and loved ones of community members directly impacted by the U.S. immigration system, their employers, and neighbors are also harmed by this culture of fear.
The Trump administration’s violation of data privacy to aid their destructive deportation agenda and community members’ consequent withdrawal from public life has dangerous ripple effects on our national and state level economies and on our local communities. Vital jobs like child care and construction work will go unfilled, life will become more expensive, and U.S.-born workers, who are interdependent on their immigrant coworkers, will lose jobs as the result of mass deportation. The federal government, which has relied on immigrants to fund vital social safety net programs that many immigrants cannot benefit from, such as Social Security and Medicaid, is projected to lose $25 billion in 2026 alone. An additional $313 billion could be lost over the next ten years, as immigrants may be less likely to file their taxes out of fear. This violation of data privacy will hurt all Washington residents’ pocketbooks and impact their daily lives.
In addition to the moral and economic consequences of mass deportation, the Trump administration’s efforts to extract data about individuals from various departments into one database endangers everyone’s civil liberties — our safety, freedom of speech, and our democracy is at stake. The federal administration is compiling one massive database of individuals’ information, regardless of whether these individuals are non-citizens, U.S.-born citizens, refugees, or legal permanent residents. This makes everyone’s data more vulnerable to getting hacked and into the hands of bad actors. Many of the databases are not intended to be used for immigration enforcement, which puts U.S. citizens at risk of also getting mistakenly swept up in the deportation net. Data breaches may also lead to identity theft and financial theft for individuals. Every individual’s information and actions also will be surveilled by the state, threatening every resident’s right to freedom of speech and their right to be free of unlawful seizures. Everyone deserves the right to understand who has their data, access what that data is, and manage their information from getting shared and sold.
State efforts to protect immigrants’ data privacy
The good news is states across the country have enacted policies that protect immigrants’ personal information, keep immigrant families together, and make all communities safer.
Since Trump’s first term in office, many states and their localities, including California, Illinois, New York, and Washington state, have passed immigrant “welcoming” policies that follow the “Anti-Commandeering” Principle of the 10th amendment, preventing the federal government from compelling state and local government use of resources for federal purposes, including civil immigration enforcement. These policies, consequently, prevent local law enforcement from collaborating with ICE outside of criminal investigations and increase protections for individuals’ personal information. States and localities with welcoming laws keep immigrant families together and correlate with less poverty, lower unemployment rates, and decreased crime. The facts show that these welcoming policies benefit us all.
In our increasingly digital world, it is critical for Washington residents to also have more comprehensive data privacy laws. Many states that have welcoming policies have also worked to pass legislation that safeguards peoples’ data privacy by including citizenship and immigration as protected sensitive data. Sensitive data is information about an individual, such as their race, immigration status, health issues, biometrics, and any other information that can identify that person. Sensitive information can also be considered as any data that can be used to violate an individual’s civil liberties, including their rights to freedom of speech, security, and equality. California and Connecticut’s data privacy legislation protects individuals’ civil liberties by ensuring that people can access what companies have their data, what kind of data companies hold, the ability to revise or delete that data, and the authority to prohibit companies from selling their data to another company or group. This ensures that information about an individual is owned and controlled by that individual, rather than a company that wishes to profit from selling it to others at the expense and safety of that individual.
Third-party data brokers and new technology are also playing a greater role in gathering data to surveil and unlawfully seize and deport innocent individuals. New Mexico recently passed legislation addressing the delinquent role of third-party data brokers. New Mexico found that their state motor vehicle division was selling data to a company called New Mexico Interactive, that then sold it to another private data company, LexisNexis, that promptly sold the data to ICE. In the 2025 legislative session, advocates in New Mexico passed a new law that prohibits motor vehicle divisions from sharing individuals’ information to anyone outside of their department who wants to use the data for federal immigration enforcement. Further, they require that any third party that gains access to the information must sign an agreement that they will not use the data for federal immigration enforcement or else that group will lose access to the data and face legal consequences. While these policies are steps forward to protecting immigrants from exploitation, there needs to be more oversight and accountability imposed on bad actors who violate data privacy to harm people and profit from using individual’s sensitive information.
Opportunities for Washington lawmakers to protect individuals’ freedoms
In recent years, Washington state lawmakers have grown our state’s data-privacy policies, including the 2023 My Health My Data legislation that protects individuals’ information about their health. However, because of opposition from Washington’s huge technology industry, our state lags behind other states in our data-privacy policies and has work to do to strengthen statewide policies to keep immigrant families together and safe.
Washington lawmakers can protect individuals’ safety by:
- Passing comprehensive data privacy legislation that gives people agency and authority over their sensitive information, including immigration status, biometric data, and other personally identifying information, similar to legislation in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Virginia. In the 2025 legislative session, advocates in Washington introduced the People’s Privacy Act that would have put these data privacy principles into state law.
- Strengthening oversight and accountability of agencies and localities that violate the Keep Washington Working Act. For example, Oregon’s Sanctuary Promise Act is a good model. It puts their state Department of Justice in charge of responding to sanctuary policy violations. Currently, several localities in Washington refuse to comply with the Keep Washington Working Act, and adding oversight and enforcement would ensure real compliance with the intended spirit of the law.
- Protecting individuals’ data by preventing state agencies from sharing any data outside of their department, particularly making guardrails around any agreement with third-party data brokers.
- Allowing companies and groups to only collect data necessary to provide their service and limiting the amount of time they can hold a person’s data.
Washington state lawmakers can join other states in standing up against the Trump administration’s massive campaign to detain immigrants and instead stay true to our values. They must protect all Washington residents’ safety and privacy by passing comprehensive data privacy legislation.
Thank you to OneAmerica and Northwest Immigrant Rights Project for contributing to this analysis.
