As President Donald Trump ramps up detention of unauthorized immigrants, an activist group said volunteers at Seattle’s Boeing Field on Sunday witnessed 110 handcuffed and shackled people come off a plane operated by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractor.
The GlobalX Air plane’s arrival Sunday coincides with a recent uptick in people held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma and may be a sign that the jail-like facility, which has been operating significantly under capacity since the pandemic, will soon fill up.
One of the biggest questions surrounding Trump’s plan to round up millions of undocumented immigrants is where the government would put them all before deporting them. The Northwest detention center is one obvious location.
The privately-run facility holds not only people arrested by ICE locally due to their allegedly unauthorized status, but also immigrants flown in by the agency from the southern border and elsewhere in the country.
The website Flightradar24 confirms a GlobalX Air flight from Phoenix landed at 10:12 a.m. Sunday. Neither ICE nor GlobalX Air have confirmed the people on board were in the agency’s custody or were headed for the Tacoma detention center.
Maru Mora Villalpando, with the antidetention group La Resistencia, said she was among three witnesses Sunday at King County International Airport, as county-owned Boeing Field is formally known. They had seen on another flight-tracking website that a GlobalX Air flight was due to arrive. The charter airline company came under scrutiny late last month when mechanical problems caused a plane of people being deported to Brazil to sit in sweltering conditions.
Mora Villalpando and the other volunteers went to a room King County has provided for La Resistencia and other groups to monitor ICE flights through a closed-circuit video feed from cameras on the tarmac. The county offered the observation room two years ago after courts forced it to back down from a ban on ICE using the airport, whether to bring people into the area or fly them back to their birth countries.
The activists counted people as they came off the plane, as they regularly do when monitoring ICE flights, Mora Villalpando said. The number of people arriving on flights to Boeing Field has been trending upward since the end of former President Joe Biden’s administration. Still, Sunday’s count was roughly twice as high as any single flight they saw under Biden.
“We have never counted so many people arriving,” said Mora Villalpando. As they got off the plane, some without jackets despite cold weather and snow flurries, they were frisked and put on buses waiting on the tarmac, she said. Mora Villalpando said the activists also saw a person in a full-body restraint being carried onto the plane before it left the airport an hour or so later.
Before the pandemic, the Northwest ICE Processing Center ran close to its 1,575 bed capacity. But its numbers fell dramatically as COVID-19 slowed immigration enforcement and a lawsuit over conditions further limited its intake.
As recently as late January, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which runs a federally funded legal orientation program at the center, estimated between 800 and 900 people were in detention there. The number had grown to more than 1,000 by Monday, according to Lesly Avila, a supervising attorney with the nonprofit legal rights group.
At the same time, the Trump’s administration’s flurry of orders called into question what legal help those detained would receive. The Department of Justice issued a “stop work” order last month to the New York nonprofit subcontracting with the Seattle-based rights project and organizations doing similar legal work around the country. The directive followed a Trump executive order calling for a review of contracts that provide services for unauthorized immigrations.
The Northwest rights project joined other legal nonprofits in suing the federal government Friday. Indicative of the head-spinning legal and administrative maneuvering underway since Trump took office, the Justice Department rescinded the stop work order Sunday. The backtracking appears related to a temporary restraining order in a separate lawsuit over Trump’s broader funding freeze of federal grants, loans and financial assistance programs, said Vanessa Gutierrez, a Northwest Immigrant Rights Project deputy director.
“We are glad we can continue the program but we’re not in the clear yet,” Gutierrez said. The administration could change its mind again. For that reason, her organization and fellow nonprofits are continuing their lawsuit.
