By Nia Wong
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
As federal agencies continue to besiege immigrant communities across the country, community organizers gathered in front of the Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) office in Tukwila on Thursday to protest the agency repeatedly breaking state law by allowing federal immigration agencies to access driver data. Protestors called on Gov. Bob Ferguson to end the practice.
The state has taken measures to prevent immigration agents from accessing driver information, including passing the Keep Washington Working Act in 2019, which explicitly prohibits state agencies from sharing driver and vehicle data for federal civil immigration enforcement. However, a University of Washington (UW) Center for Human Rights report published in January shows that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents had run license plate numbers through the DOL database and a national data-sharing platform before arresting immigrants.
“Department of Licensing data released last week shows a tenfold increase in total arrests by immigration officers of Washington state residents since January of 2025,” Professor Angélica Cházaro of the UW School of Law said. “Our highways and roads have become a hunting ground for ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and CBP.”
Ferguson said in a statement to the Northwest Asian Weekly that he respects these groups’ right to protest and “encourages” them to protest President Donald Trump and federal government agencies violating the rights of Washingtonians. He also highlighted the state’s efforts to protect immigrations and its residents’ private information, and said that his administration “shut off ICE’s access to many systems, including our driver license and vehicle data.”
“My team is working on options to limit [CBP] 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 said. “Looking ahead to the next three years, this will be an ongoing process for us to adapt to what the federal government does next to work around what we do to protect our data.”
B.J. Last with Stop Surveillance City started a petition to get Ferguson to block the sharing of Washingtonians’ licensing information with federal immigration agents.
“We have to stop the surveillance, because it is literally leading to our neighbors getting kidnapped—and similarly, we also have to cut down on how much data we are actually storing,” Last said. “Why is so much data getting collected? … [W]e know once data gets collected, it is impossible to keep ICE from accessing it.”
Immigrant activist groups at Thursday’s protest said there’s no time to waste. They want Ferguson to block all data sharing with federal agents, invest in services for immigrant communities, instead of surveillance, and provide restitution for impacted families. A migrant worker with Comunidades Sin Fronteras, who shared her story at the protest with the help of a translator, is a member of one such family. She did not share her name for safety reasons.
“I know that it is due to the data sharing that my husband was detained, because the same ICE agents confirmed it to him,” she said. “They told him that they knew where he lived, that they knew his license plate information and that they had been watching where he was going before being detained.”
Center for Human Rights researchers noted in their report that many arrests they identified appear to have been warrantless. They also said that some were violent and some involved U.S. citizens. The DOL did not respond to the Northwest Asian Weekly’s request for comment.
“Every day that CBP retains access to endless data,” Cházaro said, “is a day that another Washington family is ripped apart, another child comes home from school to find their parent missing, another resident of our state is assaulted on our highway by Trump’s cops and sent to the deadly Northwest Detention Center.”
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