Although it may not seem like it, the presence of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is not a new addition to the Seattle area. Since the branch’s inception in 2003, ICE has had an office in Tukwila, just a five-minute drive south of the Museum of Flight. Seattle has long been a sanctuary city, a place where undocumented immigrants could safely go knowing they would not be prosecuted by anti-immigration laws. However, this has changed over the past year, as ICE’s presence in Seattle has steadily increased.
ICE has received more local press lately due to unconfirmed reports that agents in South Seattle have led to four schools enacting shelter-in-place protocols, but ICE has been making arrests more or less under the radar in Seattle since the beginning of the second Trump presidency. It is well-documented that ICE uses King County International Airport (or Boeing Field) as its airport of choice for deportation flights, the frequency of which has skyrocketed since Trump took office.
A big push came over the Labor Day weekend, when more ICE agents were sent to five U.S. cities that “refuse to work with ICE,” those being Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. The decision was met with pushback from then Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson. All of this is to say that ICE is not a new appearance in Washington. As of December 2025, around 2,000 people were arrested by ICE since Trump took office, and another month of activity has increased that number.
The precautionary shelter-in-place of the South Seattle public schools highlights the impact of ICE’s operations on local communities. As enforcement activities increasingly include tactics such as using children in certain operations and entering homes without warrants, residents and authorities are paying close attention to their effects on Seattle neighborhoods.
