Local governments: If ICE calls, don’t make the mistake Tacoma did | Opinion
It seems that ICE is looking around the corners of the country for places to hold immigrant detainees. My advice to regional governments: saying yes to holding people for US immigration enforcement agencies is very hard to go back on.
US Immigration Customs and Enforcement reached out to the Nisqually Indian Tribe about the possibility of contracting with them to house detainees in their 288-bed correctional facility. The tribe’s government has said it won’t contract with ICE.
Good.
It’s a tribe’s prerogative whether to work with ICE to house detainees, and I believe that’s how it should be. But it’s my hope that all local tribes, along with other regional governments, will continue saying no.
The News Tribune reported that’s what will likely happen in the Pierce County Region. The Puyallup Tribe couldn’t be reached by this newspaper’s reporter, but the tribal corrections facility that opened in 2014 only had 28 beds, so they don’t appear to have much capacity.
The cities of Tacoma and Fife, as well as the county’s government, confirmed to the reporter that they would not contract with ICE to hold immigrant detainees.
That’s not a surprise. Tacoma and Fife don’t operate their own jails. Also, state law seems to forbid an agreement by barring state and local governments from assisting immigration enforcement efforts.
And as for Tacoma, well, the city already had its chance to say no to ICE over twenty years ago. It missed that opportunity. Since 2004, we’ve had the biggest ICE detention center in the region right here at our tide flats.
That facility is filled to capacity, which is likely why ICE is looking for more spots to put detainees. Over the years, numerous complaints about the conditions detainees face there have led to hunger strikes, protests and efforts to change state law to allow health inspectors to make surprise visits to the facility.
Those conditions weren’t new when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Still, the open cruelty of his proposed immigration policies inspired Tacomans to consider evicting ICE contractor GEO Group, which runs the detention center, from the city. But it was way too late.
Instead of kicking the detention center out, Tacoma’s city council passed a land use ordinance that would prevent it from expanding its operations. This plunged the city into a years long legal struggle that culminated in the state enacting a law that would make it possible for local governments to restrict the growth of private detention facilities like the one in Tacoma.
That’s another reason why the agency is likely looking for other places to keep the immigrants they detain. A later state law that would have shut down privately run prisons in Washington was rendered unenforceable when it comes to the Northwest ICE Processing Center.
There’s an argument to be made that taking in immigrant detainees in a community where people care about their wellbeing could help protect them. It might be better than letting them be sent somewhere else, where they’re farther from their families, and there could be less local interest in oversight of the facilities where detainees stay.
The main point I’d make against that is that communities might find it very hard to back out of these arrangements.
Or, as immigration attorney Jay Gairson put it to me, “it’s very hard to put the genie back in the bottle.”
That was Tacoma’s experience. And people might want to back out, as more stories emerge of US immigration agencies targeting people with no or insignificant criminal records, who were in the country legally and trying to do everything right.
At least the people who are currently going to regional jails and prisons for criminal proceedings have a modicum of due process. That isn’t the experience immigrant detainees and their attorneys have reported.
Communities should think long and hard about whether they want to participate in that system.
This story was originally published November 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
