Ruby Castañeda had flashbacks when federal immigration officials raided a Bellingham roofing company earlier this month. Five years ago, during President Donald Trump’s first administration, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundup swept up the Ferndale resident’s husband and 15 other workers at a concrete manufacturing company.
With her husband now in Mexico, she felt compelled to go to the site of the latest raid to offer solace and support to families of the 37 Mt. Baker Roofing workers detained. She’s seeking donations through an organization she co-founded after her husband’s arrest, Raid Relief to Reunite Families.
“I cried because I know what they’re feeling,” said Castañeda, whose children were 5 weeks and 8 years old when her husband was taken away.
Yet to Castañeda, something feels different about the second Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. “It’s really aggressive,” she said, echoing assessments by many local immigration lawyers and advocates.
ICE agents carrying out arrests in Washington have smashed car windows and dragged men out of their vehicles.
At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Customs and Border Protection officers on Feb. 28 extensively questioned University of Washington lab technician Lewelyn Dixon, who has been a lawful permanent resident for 50 years, and transferred her to ICE custody. Her lawyer, Benjamin Osorio, was later told the reason was a 25-year-old conviction for embezzling $6,500 from a bank — something that had not previously prompted action against her by immigration officials.
“We’re in an era of maximum enforcement, when they’re going after anybody and everybody,” Osorio said. Those include international students who have had visas canceled and immigrants with and without criminal records.
Tourists are not off-limits, as shown by the arrest of a British woman accused of having incorrect paperwork and taken to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. Nor are asylum-seekers, even ones previously allowed to live in local communities pending the outcome of their cases.
“It’s like a 180-degree turn,” said Seattle immigration lawyer Ben Cornell, who represents one such client.
Whether all this adds up to the mass deportations promised by Trump is another matter. While the president kicked off his administration with well-publicized raids in other cities, the Mt. Baker Roofing roundup appears to be the first large-scale enforcement effort in Washington. It may or may not herald more to come.
Surprising and murky data
ICE’s regional office did not respond to a request for an interview about its enforcement plans and direction from the new administration. It also left unanswered a request for local arrest figures since Trump took office. Without data, it’s hard to track changes from past administrations. Some, most notably that of President Barack Obama until his final years in office, vigorously enforced immigration law.
Nationally, as well as locally, the picture is murky. The Department of Homeland Security announced nearly 33,000 ICE arrests in Trump’s first 50 days, virtually the same number made in an entire 12-month period ending last September, according to a news release.
But an analysis of ICE data by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows an “erratic,” widely fluctuating arrest record as of March 8 and a daily average that is only 7% higher than it was under former President Joe Biden.
Immigration officials seem to be detaining more of the people they arrest rather than releasing them pending the resolution of their cases, judging by another TRAC analysis. The national immigrant detention population rose by 20% to roughly 48,000 between Jan. 12, before Trump’s inauguration, and March 23. And officials are expecting to detain far more, judging by a request for contractor proposals posted online last week that would mean a massive expansion of the detention system.
Already, the 1,575-bed detention center in Tacoma is nearly full, according to immigration lawyers. It held about 800 or 900 people in January.
Aaron Korthuis, a lawyer with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, sees the ballooning population as an indication of heightened local enforcement. Emails with news of arrests “are churning in a way they never did,” he also noted.
Admittedly, he said, his perception is anecdotal, and it’s hard to gauge the number of local ICE arrests by the detention population alone, since immigrants are flown in from all over the country to be detained in Tacoma.
But the Trump administration’s overall removal numbers so far are “actually quite shocking” in that they are lower than Biden’s, according to TRAC, which calculated a daily average of 661 removals under Trump compared with 742 under his predecessor in the period it examined.
Even so, the Trump administration’s hardball tactics in the cases it has pursued, locally and nationally, are generating fear on a different order than what’s come before. Well-established green card holders wonder if they should carry documents on them at all times. Business owners express hesitancy to publicly voice opinions on immigration policy out of concern that their businesses might be raided.
Immigration lawyers worry about their own vulnerability, not just their clients’. Trump last month threatened allegations of professional misconduct against attorneys bringing immigration lawsuits against the government.
Different rules when returning from abroad
Dixon, the UW lab assistant, was confused when she was arrested at the airport in late February and taken to the ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” the 64-year-old told her niece Melania Madriaga, who along with another niece had traveled to the Philippines with Dixon to visit the country where they were born and to attend to family property. Dixon had long been eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship but hadn’t because of a promise to her father, who wanted to make sure the property stayed in the family.
Madriaga, learning about the embezzlement conviction through the lawyer the family hired, explained to Dixon it was the reason for her detainment. Dixon’s nieces knew nothing about the crime. A 2000 plea agreement in federal court states she was a Washington Mutual vault teller who withdrew cash from the vault eight times. She served no jail or prison time, but was instead ordered to pay back the stolen $6,400 and spend 30 days at a residential reentry facility.
For 25 years, there was no suggestion of Dixon losing her green card because of the offense, which qualifies as a “crime of moral turpitude” in immigration law. It takes two such crimes to endanger lawful permanent residency status — when someone is on U.S. soil.
Unbeknownst to many, the rules are different when returning from abroad. You’re “applying for admission to the U.S.” even if you’ve lived here legally for decades, said Osorio, Dixon’s lawyer. When entering the country, it only takes one crime of moral turpitude to be rendered “inadmissible.”
“They were well within their bounds to do this,” Osorio said of the immigration officials who detained Dixon. Whether they should have is a different question, he said, given her age, nonviolent record and eligibility for a form of relief open to longtime green card holders.
Canadian border agents agents might have made that calculus last year when Dixon returned home from trips to the Philippines and Turkey. The only questions she got then were about a ham sandwich from the plane she had tucked into her purse.
Dixon, still being held at the detention center and scheduled for a court hearing in July, normally lives in a spacious Pierce County town home she shares with niece Madonna Cristobal. Dixon’s upper-floor room remains how she left it: pictures of family and her travels on the walls, books by novelist Nicholas Sparks and former President Barack Obama on a nightstand, her calico cat Mozzie wandering about.
Draped over a staircase railing outside her room one day this month was one of Cristobal’s hoodies, made for a rally outside the detention center. “Stand with Immigrants,” it read.
Before her aunt’s arrest, Cristobal didn’t know what the detention center was. Now, she said she is fighting for the release not only of her aunt — whom she said has always looked out for her and her children — but everyone held at the ICE facility.
Arrest of migrants connected with Riverton church
ICE agents have also detained five immigrants receiving housing or other support from the Riverton Park United Methodist Church, according to Sean Gourgues, a lawyer with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. The Tukwila church has served as a refuge for more than 2,000 asylum-seekers in the Seattle area over the last couple of years.
People who file asylum applications are legally protected from deportation while their cases are ongoing, but they can be detained. Gourgues said some of the people connected with Riverton fell under the purview of the Laken Riley Act passed by Congress in January, which requires the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused or convicted of certain crimes.
One man, for example, is accused of an assault in which he allegedly hit an ex-girlfriend in the head, causing her to lose consciousness, according to court records.
Other Riverton-affiliated immigrants seem to have been targeted because they weren’t officially in immigration court proceedings yet and could be eligible for a fast-track deportation process that bypasses court hearings, according to Gourgues. Usually, border officials give migrants notices to appear in court, but that practice has been inconsistent, he said.
Migrants without those notices would start the court process when they file asylum applications. Three hadn’t filed an application by the time they were detained.
Migrants have one year after entering the U.S. to apply for asylum, Gourgues said, adding that his nonprofit “would like everyone to file as quickly as possible for their own protection.” But he said that’s not always possible given the challenges of adjusting to a new country.
Some of the migrants connected with Riverton were arrested at required ICE check-ins, which has made others reluctant to go to theirs, according to the church’s Rev. Jan Bolerjack. “It makes them want to go underground,” she said.
Some immigrants at risk of arrest have also stayed away from work when rumors of ICE sightings hit. But the necessity of earning money makes that impractical long term, leaving workplace raids potentially fruitful for immigration officials.
April’s Bellingham raid happened shortly before Castañeda was due to fly to Mexico to visit her husband, Daniel, who is in the process of applying for a green card. She and two of their children, all American citizens, lived with him for nearly four years there before returning for medical reasons.
They’ve been apart for a year and a half. “I don’t know how much more we can take, honestly, as a family,” she said.
Families affected by the Mt. Baker Roofing raid facing a similar separation need a lot of help, she said. Many spouses and children are living off the last paycheck of the person detained, who might also need support if they’re deported to a country where they haven’t lived for years.
Castañeda said she and other locals should have been prepared to provide immediate assistance after raids as the second Trump administration got underway but weren’t. She plans to get prepared now.