ICE Still Outsmarting Washington's Driver Data Protections

Washington state officials have made it harder for immigration agents to access driving records during deportation raids, but keep getting played by Trump’s deportation goons.

That’s according to a new report from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR). The report released Tuesday claims that current Department of Licensing practices still likely violate state laws protecting Washington state drivers from the disclosure of names, addresses, and license plate information for civil immigration enforcement.

Cruising around neighborhoods, malls, and other public spaces in Washington, ICE is able to look up driver information from state databases, despite laws prohibiting them from doing so.

“Most of these cases happen when people were driving, or close to their vehicles, or inside their vehicles,” said Guillermo Rivera, with Eastside For All, at a presentation of the report in a corner of a UW library. “We need accountability, and we need leadership now, not months from now.”

It’s not supposed to be like that in so-called “sanctuary states” like Washington.

The 2019 Keep Washington Working Act bars “nonpublicly available personal information” from local governments to federal immigration authorities “in a noncriminal matter, except as required by state or federal law.” But the enforcement of the law is patchy, and the state hasn’t caught up with changing tactics by immigration agencies, the report found.

Titled “Stopping the DMV-to-DHS Data Pipeline,” the report compares vehicle and driver data sharing between state and federal immigration across Washington, Maryland, Minnesota, and New York. The report identifies four pathways which driver data reaches immigration agents: directly through state databases, an interstate messaging system called Nlets, local law enforcement, and private data brokers.

The report looked at states with so-called “sanctuary” laws that profess to protect drivers’ privacy from federal immigration agents. (California, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, and Oregon didn’t share their data.)

Despite significant actions inconveniencing ICE, Washington still lets Customs and Border Protection (Border Patrol agents and Customs officers) access to car owner names and addresses through the interstate messaging system called Nlets.

In one example cited by the report, the interstate messaging platform Nlets was accessed by CBP to lead to an ICE arrest with no CBP agents present, suggesting ICE logged in with a CBP username, or asked for a lookup.

Immigration agencies blocked by Washington are logging in “just like you might share your Netflix password with a family member,” said UWCHR Director Angelina Godoy.

The news comes amid conflicting reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Washington state, but a clear uptick in ICE enforcement nationwide ahead of the midterm elections. ICEwatch tracker IceOut.org published evidence Monday based on local arrest reports that some of the ICE enforcement in Washington has been shifted to California.

Gov. Bob Ferguson has attempted to disrupt the DOL to DHS data pipeline, according to the report. To understand what he’s been up to, here’s a refresher on immigration agency jargon:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goes after immigrants internally using Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) agents to arrest. Those agents used to operate separately from ICE’s detective wing, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Those real cops used to focus squarely on human trafficking and other transnational crime. Customs and Border Protection, which is supposed to guard the border, has also been reassigned under Trump, sending agents to back up ERO.

Here’s what Ferguson has done:

Terminated direct access to the state’s Driver and Plate Search for two ICE subagencies (ERO and HSI), and suspended CBP’s account, but it could regain access.
Blocked Nlets, the more basic interstate driver lookup tool, to queries from ICE-linked usernames, first to ERO last November, and then to HSI, finally, in January of this year.
Blocked some individual CBP-linked usernames for the Nlets interstate database. The report says this began in April 2026 and that five CBP usernames were blocked as of September 18, 2026.

Sound complicated? Well, if the state simply required a warrant from immigration agencies to use its data, it wouldn’t be. According to the report, that’s what New York State did, and it’s closed a lot of loopholes.

Washington’s approach is piecemeal. Under Ferguson, the state is trying to balance the role of federal agencies going after criminals and the White House hijacking criminal investigators to carry out mass deportations. It’s a game of whack-a-mole that Washington has accepted for the remainder of Trump’s term.

For example, according to Ferguson, CBP still needs access to Nlets to combat human trafficking and firearm access.

“My team has worked to limit Customs and Border Protection access for immigration enforcement, while maintaining access necessary to protect public safety, such as human trafficking investigations that require real-time access to data to protect vulnerable Washingtonians,” Ferguson’s statement read. “Looking ahead to the next two years, this will be an ongoing process for us to adapt to what federal government does next to work around what we do to protect our data.”

Ferguson’s office told The Stranger how many queries it has blocked from immigration agents (174,349 from November 2025 to October 2026), but not how many were granted. The report says 3,696,147 data searches for driver and vehicle information have happened—though the numbers are not completely comparable because they are over a broader time frame (January 2025 to May 2026).

The UW report questions why that game should be played. It points out that victims of various immigration authority data theft have apparently never been notified of their data being given away illegally. A spokesperson for the governor declined to name an example of a notification, and did not contract the report’s finding.

The deportation machine, long focused on targeting immigrants who posed safety threats, is ramping up to unprecedented levels of not just xenophobia but illegality. Racial profiling, rubber stamped by the Supreme Court, is now the norm. Apprehending legal immigrants, and lying to courts to cover up illegal arrests, are shockingly common. And HSI, which used to quietly work with local police to solve international crimes, has been demoted from detective to beat cop.

Responses to these problems have been stronger in other states. Not only is New York state demanding warrants, it’s also historically funded immigrant legal defense at higher levels.

Many immigrants across Washington were already afraid to get in their cars, take their kids to the park, or even go grocery shopping in this so-called sanctuary state. As I’ve reported before, even immigrants who have beaten ICE in court travel nervously, packing an absurd number of documents with them as a kind of safety blanket against anticipated arrests and harassment.

Immigrants in Washington state keep getting arrested, with the assistance of data produced by their own tax dollars, in a regressive tax state where they contribute disproportionately to their income. Their data is casually released by politicians who are supposed to represent their interests (yes, non-voters are constituents), and answer to the family members and neighbors who voted them in. The report is a reminder that the laws voters supported to protect immigrants’ civil rights aren’t fully being enforced.