Pacific Northwest saw surge in ICE arrests at end of 2025, data show

The Pacific Northwest saw a dramatic spike in Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests at the end of 2025, particularly in the Portland area and in less populous parts of Washington with agricultural communities, new data from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights show.

From a recent low point of fewer than 250 arrests across the Northwest between October and December 2024, ICE arrests climbed under the Trump administration to a high of nearly 2,250 arrests during the last three months of 2025, researchers said. The data, published Wednesday, offers the first look at the breadth of immigration arrests in Oregon, Washington and Alaska for the entirety of 2025, and a more exact picture of where people were arrested.

“The surge we’re seeing in other parts of the country is happening in the Pacific Northwest,” said Phil Neff, research coordinator at the center. “In Yakima, it’s been a major issue, and the surge in Portland is truly unprecedented for the region.”

In Washington alone, ICE officials made more than 2,340 arrests last year, up 152% from 2024 figures, when 929 arrests were carried out. Among Washington counties, King County saw the highest number of arrests last year, with 1,030 people taken into custody. Nearly half the King County arrests, about 470, were in Seattle.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story of ICE activity under the Trump administration.

ICE arrests disproportionately hit Yakima County, which saw the highest number of ICE arrests relative to its population – 185 arrests per 100,000 people. By comparison, there were 44 arrests per 100,000 people in King County. Other counties with large agricultural communities also saw a spike in arrests in the later half of 2025, including Clark, Mason and Whatcom counties.

In total, ICE made 477 arrests in Yakima County last year, a majority of which occurred in the second half of the year.

“Many people know people who have been arrested” and know families getting split up, said attorney David Morales, a volunteer with the Yakima Immigrant Response Network since 2017 who described recent ICE activity there as extraordinary compared to past years.

Morales said the volume of arrests is not necessarily a surprise. A longtime destination for migrant agricultural workers, Yakima County is home to many undocumented immigrants, an ICE field office and local leaders who are friendly to the Trump administration’s agenda, he said.

“ICE has chosen this place for special attention and now we’re seeing the results,” including stores catering to Latino communities with fewer customers and local schools with reduced enrollment, he said. “It’s very sad.”

‘A huge problem’

As part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, UW researchers obtained U.S. Department of Homeland Security I-213 “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien” forms filled out between January 2022 and December 2025 by ICE agents in the Seattle Field Office, which oversees Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

The forms, which include information like age, gender and country of origin, are created when an ICE agent initially arrests someone they believe may be deportable, a category that has expanded under the Trump administration, including those legally present in the country or with valid work permits.

Written arrest narratives in the forms were not released, but interesting details can still be gleaned from the data: People arrested in Washington last year hailed from more than 80 countries. The youngest was a three year old boy from Brazil taken into custody in Seattle. The oldest was a 71 year old farm worker from Mexico arrested in Yakima who had been living in the U.S. since 2000.

ICE arrests people in different ways. Some last year were arrested at courthouses after their immigration cases were dismissed, or when they went to a scheduled ICE appointment. Some were picked up by immigration officials when released from federal prison. Immigration attorneys, rapid response groups and researchers note many are stopped in public while driving.

Morales has seen ICE experiment with different approaches in Yakima County over the past year, he said. Early in 2025, agents were making a lot of road stops and arrests outside businesses frequented by Latino patrons, he said. Then they seemed to focus more on court system arrests. Late in 2025, agents began setting up in big-box store parking lots and scanning license plates to find people to arrest, Morales said.

Although ICE activity in Yakima County hasn’t received the same attention as mass surges in big cities like Portland and Minneapolis, it’s just as concerning, he said.

“It’s presenting itself in a different way” in Yakima County, and getting overlooked for that reason, he said. “That’s a huge problem.”

‘Historically unprecedented territory’

Neff said some of the data should be reviewed with caveats. The data appears to significantly underrepresent pending criminal charges and convictions among those arrested. And not all immigration-related arrests are reflected in the data, including some by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Sea-Tac International Airport or at the U.S.-Canada border.

The total number of ICE arrests in Washington last year isn’t necessarily unusual. In 2023, under the Biden administration, more than 2,300 people were arrested. But Neff said the dramatic increase in arrests across the Pacific Northwest at the end of last year is troubling, and requires local and state leaders to take action.

“It sets us up in 2026, if this continues … we’ll be in historically unprecedented territory this year,” Neff said.

Many immigrants arrested last year appear to have deep ties to local communities. Just over 400 adults arrested by ICE officers from the Seattle Field Office – or about 10% of all taken into custody – had a child who was a U.S. citizen.

Arrests of adults with U.S. citizen children started dramatically increasing in October, with 105 arrested in November and 111 arrested in December. On average, people arrested last year appear to have been in the country longer compared with those arrested in 2024, Neff said.

In the Pacific Northwest, 38 children were apprehended by ICE last year. Far more children were arrested under the Biden administration, including more than 500 in 2022 and more than 400 in 2023.

Those figures may reflect children who were arrested and processed by ICE along with family members, but ultimately not detained, under Biden-era humanitarian parole programs, Neff said. The Trump administration has since ended temporary protected status programs for hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

‘Red line of detentions’

While arrests in Washington steadily increased last year, the data shows arrests surged in Oregon at the end of last year – from fewer than 100 arrests per month between January and September, to more than 400 arrests in October and November and more than 300 in December.

In Multnomah County, where most of Portland is located, 770 arrests were carried out last year, compared to about 180 arrested in 2024. About 75% of arrests in 2025 occurred in the last three months of the year. Arrests in nearby Washington and Marion counties also surged at the end of 2025.

Alyssa Walker, coordinator with the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, which operates a statewide hotline to report ICE sightings, said those arrests can be attributed to an intense immigration enforcement effort known as “Operation Black Rose” that began in mid-October in Oregon, which immigrant rights groups have criticized as a dragnet surveillance operation resulting in widespread racial profiling.

Federal immigration officials would go to areas with large immigrant communities, run license plates to identify owners and then check names against their own databases to see the person’s immigration status and determine their “deportability.”

Looking at a heat map of arrests called into their hotline, Walker said a majority of detentions reported in the fall were along highways, suggesting many were detained as they were driving to work or a school.

“Like from Beaverton to Forest Grove, there’s a highway that runs between those two, and it’s just like this red line of detentions happening,” Walker said.

The surge in Oregon has since slowed, Walker said. On Feb. 4, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering DHS to stop the practice of making warrantless arrests in Oregon without evidence of a risk of escape.

Meanwhile in Washington, the UW center has documented similar instances of ICE agents using driver’s license data for immigration enforcement, though it has not been challenged in court.