WA state law doesn’t allow jails to help ICE. Tri-Cities leader wants to call the bluff
A Benton County leader says they’re prepared to challenge Washington state over its law limiting cooperation with federal agencies deporting undocumented people accused of committing crimes.
Legal advocates worry that doing so could open the door for harassment, discrimination and even deportation of people contributing to the community.
One of the biggest challenges the Trump administration would face in a potential mass deportation is where they’d house the people being processed.
Before Donald Trump’s second inauguration Monday, Benton County commission Chairman Jerome Delvin discussed the potential impact of the president’s campaign promise to kick off a massive deportation of undocumented criminals.
Delvin first brought up the issue at the board’s Jan. 7 regular meeting and discussed it more in an interview with the Tri-City Herald.
Delvin has suggested that while the state’s Keep Washington Working law, passed in 2019, prohibited the jail from sending a list of inmates to agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it doesn’t prevent agents from coming to the jail every other day.
Delvin also said he’d like the county to explore whether they could sign a detention contract with ICE to house detainees. The county already has contracts with other municipalities and the U.S. Marshals service, but the state law expressly prohibits a similar arrangements with ICE.
The statute bars state and local law enforcement from giving immigration authorities any information that is not already publicly available, and also introduced a provision barring jails from housing or detaining inmates at the request of the agencies.
Delvin, a former Richland police officer and longtime state legislator for the Tri-Cities, believes the state overstepped when it passed the law.
“I think I’d be willing to push that subject to see what the state can do, to push that into a courtroom to ask for a ruling on that,” Delvin told the Herald.
Community safety
Delvin said he’s seen the way law enforcement agencies have become less empowered and communities have become less safe over the years. He thinks counties should have the authority to decide whether they want to participate in a potential deportation program.
“It’s evolved over the years that less and less is being done and we’ve seen the effects of that over the last four years with the open border,” he said. “I think people are tired of that.”
Delvin pointed to programs like the Tri-Cities Metro Drug Task Force which works with the U.S. Marshals, Drug Enforcement Agency and other federal law enforcement to combat the fentanyl crisis in the region.
A majority of Washingtonians appear to agree with Delvin, with more than half of respondents saying the state should cooperate with the Trump administration on deportation, according to a recent poll conducted by Cascade PBS.
Delvin believes further cooperation with agencies like ICE will make the community safer, and offer the county a way to potentially bring in revenue at a time when local governments across the state are facing major budget crunches.
“If we can generate revenue to offset jail costs, I think that’s a good thing for our area,” he said. “If we can cooperate with ICE, I think that’s more safety for our community.”
Law enforcement and jails are the biggest costs for local governments in Washington state. In Franklin County the sheriff oversees day to day jail operations, but in Benton that authority falls to the county commissioners to delegate.
Potential legal battle
Aaron Korthuis, a staff attorney with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, told the Herald that not only would this be a direct violation of state law, but it could also sow fear and confusion among immigrant communities that are vital to the agricultural community in the region.
“That is explicitly forbidden by Keep Washington Working, so this idea that Benton County could do that is expressly contradicts state law,” he said.
“If Benton County wants to do that, they’re exposing themselves to significant legal liability, and stepping back, Keep Washington Working was passed to help keep immigrant families together in Washington, to ensure the people and communities contributing to huge sections of the Washington economy, like agriculture, that noncitizens who have recently arrived to this country often work in.”
Korthuis said proposing to help ICE enforce the law against these immigrants disrespects why the law was written in the first place and shows a lack of appreciation for community members.
He also believes this kind of cooperation could swiftly lead to any immigrant being swept up and deported, rather than just the violent offenders to whom Trump has referred.
Delvin said he isn’t particularly worried about whether nonviolent offenders would also be deported.
“I’m not concerned, my attitude is that if they’re here illegally and they get stopped for something, my understanding of who they’re going after is they’re not just going to do sweeps through streets, but they violated the law to get here,” Delvin said.
“I don’t have sympathy for those people. I have friends who immigrated from Peru, they did things the right way and it took them over 10 years.”
More than half of the state’s H2A farm workers are employed in a four-county region of central Washington, which includes Benton and Franklin counties, according to federal data on the program.
Washington uses 10% of the entire H2A pool to fill nearly one-third of all farm jobs in the state as more and more domestic workers choose to move on from the industry, according to data from the Washington Employment Security Department.
Adams County lawsuit
Korthuis is currently working on a case involving an Adams County man who was arrested on a nonviolent charge, which was dropped while he was being held in the Franklin County Jail.
Despite the charge being dropped and the man being released on a separate personal recognizance bond on a municipal charge, an Adams County Sheriff’s Deputy transported Serafin Rangel Sembrano 70 miles back to Ritzville into the custody of U.S. Border Patrol in March 2023.
Rangel has filed a civil rights lawsuit after the ordeal.
Korthuis said Adams County was also breaking the law by sending Border Patrol a daily list of new in-custody inmates that specified which would need a Spanish language interpreter. By law, agencies are only allowed to give ICE and border patrol publicly available information upon request, such as what can be found in online jail rosters.
He said there was no legitimate reason for Adams County to be providing that information.
“This is an attempt to make it easier for them, (to identify for Border Patrol) as to who’s coming into their facilities,” he said. “This is the kind of nonpublic information that shouldn’t be shared, pursuant to the law.”
These federal agencies also have the ability to intervene during the court process, but they cannot order Washington jails to hold an inmate until they arrive, Korthuis said.
He said that if someone is a legitimate public safety concern, the law makes exceptions for the Department of Corrections to transfer inmates into the custody of other federal agencies.
Corrections would take custody of a prisoner once they’re convicted, where a county jail would typically be holding someone while they are awaiting trial or who have been convicted of certain misdemeanor charges.
Impact of rhetoric
Korthuis is also concerned that a near daily ICE presence at a county jail could constitute coercion, by confusing or intimidating inmates into believing they have to speak to federal immigration agents.
“If a noncitizen can’t trust a police officer when they arrive at their house because they’ve been a victim of a crime to hand them over to Customs and Border Protection or ICE,” he said, “people aren’t going to call the police in the first instance. They’re not going to be protected in the way police and sheriff’s office are supposed to.”
Korthuis said his client is an example of how this distrust could play out. He said Rangel is a member of the community with family in the area, who has lived and worked here for some time. Despite not being a suspect in a violent crime, Adams County went out of its way to try and have him deported.
Contrary to political rhetoric, the Biden administration had a policy of prioritizing violent offenders, Korthuis said.
Delvin doesn’t believe cooperation with agencies like ICE and Border Patrol will negatively impact people who are legally living and working in the United States. He said that while lawmakers could make the process easier, the huge immigrant workforce in the area is evidence that approaching the process legally works.
“That argument, it’s like the argument thrown out there by the left that says if you require voter ID that’s going to discriminate. That’s a moot point, it’s so easy to get identification now,” he said.
He said the Tri-Cities is a diverse community, pointing to the city of Pasco’s majority Hispanic population, and doesn’t expect to see new deportation policies result in backlash or discrimination.
“I don’t think there’s going to be anger toward anyone because of what they look like or anything like that, that’s not the Tri-Cities,” Delvin said.