his wife had confronted ICE officers at courthouse
Light filtered into Vanessa Jimenez’s living room in Wapato on Wednesday as she adjusted her seat on the couch, looking through a stack of photographs of her husband, Joseluis Ramirez.
Wapato, WA. – In one photo, Ramirez posed with three of his children in a swimming pool, his youngest propped up in a bright yellow floatie. In another, he stood near the 50-yard line at Zaepfel Stadium with his stepson for Davis High School football’s senior night. In a third, he gathered with his children outside his mother-in-law’s house — the whole family wearing Seahawks jerseys.
The photos capture highlights of Ramirez’s family life over the last decade: birthday parties, graduations, visits with Santa. But for Jimenez, they’re now also a reminder of his absence.
More than two weeks ago, he was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Jimenez and her children are all U.S. citizens who have spent their lives in the Yakima Valley. Ramirez moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a teenager and has lived in the country for roughly two decades, working at the same fruit company in the Valley for 15 years. Last winter, Jimenez contacted an attorney in Seattle to try to start the process toward legal status.
On paper, Ramirez doesn’t necessarily seem like a priority target for ICE. He has no criminal record and, save living in the U.S. without documents — a civil offense — he hasn’t violated any immigration laws like trying to leave and re-enter the country. And yet, like hundreds of other people, he’s in detention at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, ICE arrests in Washington state have surged, climbing consistently since January 2025. Between March 11 and Aug. 5 of this year, ICE arrested more than 2,500 people in Washington state, according to government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request, processed by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Yakima Herald-Republic. That’s roughly 600 more arrests than from the previous five-month period, and an even bigger jump from years past.
Less than a quarter of those arrests involved someone with a criminal conviction.
Of all the cities where arrests occurred, Yakima topped the list, surpassing even Seattle and Spokane for number of arrests. But for Jimenez, the surge in local arrests can’t be expressed with numbers alone. Ramirez is the sole provider for Jimenez and her five children, and also pays child support for Jimenez’s stepson.
“It just feels like they just rip you apart,” Jimenez said. “Like they took somebody, and you never know if he’s ever gonna come back.”
‘I want to know why’
The morning of Aug. 31, Ramirez left home for work just before 6 a.m. As he passed through Wapato, one vehicle pulled onto the road and started following him. As he continued over the train tracks and past a nearby gas station, several more joined. Then, he got to a stop sign, and the vehicles blocked him in.
That was when he called Jimenez to tell her he’d been stopped by ICE.
As soon she got the call, Jimenez said she jumped into her car and started a Facebook Live video, frantically recording the blur of open roads and fields as her son drove.
“Tengan cuidado,” she pleaded to her followers through tears. “Be careful.”
By the time they reached the spot where Ramirez was apprehended, the vehicles that had stopped him were leaving. It wasn’t until Ramirez had arrived at the Department of Homeland Security office on River Road in Yakima that he got the chance to call Jimenez again and tell her what had happened. He told her the agents tried to encourage him to sign self-deportation papers, but he declined.
That morning, there were dozens of questions rushing through Jimenez’s head. But one in particular sticks with her.
“I want to know why,” she said. “How did they get info (on) him?”
Without an investigation, it’s hard to fully answer that question — but Jimenez has her suspicions.
Jimenez said she regularly records Facebook Live videos when she sees ICE agents in an area, sometimes coordinating with the Yakima Immigrant Response Network to help alert people of their presence. Four days before her husband was arrested, a Facebook video shows Jimenez outside of the Yakima County jail, yelling expletives at ICE vehicles in the parking lot. Jimenez said the agents eventually left, but not without first taking a photo of her vehicle.
Later that day, Jimenez walked over to the Yakima Municipal Court building after seeing the same vehicles nearby. As a man approached the building, she asked if he was documented, and urged him to go inside the building for his court appointment where she thought he’d be safe. Within minutes, federal agents entered to arrest the man.
“I was yelling to them, and I was letting them know, like, ‘Hey, this is not right what you guys are doing. This is a shame of you, shame of your family,’” Jimenez said. “You’re not guilty until you’re proven guilty.”
Jimenez said one of the agents took a photo of her. Given the timeline of events, she fears the agents identified her and used the information to find her husband. Danielle Surkatty, a volunteer with the Yakima Immigrant Response Network, said Jimenez isn’t the first person with that fear.
From YIRN’s view, the responsibility of the group’s rapid response team is to observe and document arrests and to try to get the name of the person being arrested so they can contact their families. The group doesn’t advocate that volunteers scream or curse at federal agents — in part because of those considerations.
“With volunteers, we ask them, ‘Do you have an undocumented family member?’” Surkatty said. “You know, and it could be their parents, it could be their grandma, it could be their cousin or whatever. And then we caution them: ‘Please consider what you want to do publicly because we don’t want you to endanger your vulnerable family member.’”
An ICE spokesperson said in a statement that ICE uses “reasonable suspicion” to investigate immigration status and probable cause to make arrests consistent with Title 8 of the United States Code and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“ICE is committed to protecting the public’s constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and peaceful assembly, while carrying out its law enforcement mission,” the spokesperson said. “We do not retaliate against people who are documenting and protesting ICE activity by arresting family members.”
More questions
Jimenez also has other questions, like whether ICE accessed license plate data to arrest her husband.
The state’s Department of Licensing database includes a range of driver information associated with a plate number — everything from a person’s name to their birth date and address. The state’s Keep Washington Working Act prevents state officials from collaborating with federal agents on civil immigration enforcement action. However, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights said in a July release that it had verified through public records requests more than 60 instances of immigration arrests that occurred after federal agents searched a plate number in the database.
In a statement to Gov. Bob Ferguson said his administration has taken numerous steps to try to address the situation, including shutting off ICE’s access to driver license and vehicle data, and limiting Customs and Border Protection access to the system for immigration enforcement. Governor’s Office Communications Director Brionna Aho added that the administration continuously reviews users from Customs and Border Protection other federal agencies suspected of being associated with civil immigration enforcement.
However, shutting off the federal government’s access to Department of Licensing data across the board isn’t an option because data sharing with federal law enforcement agencies is sometimes necessary for addressing legitimate public safety issues, like violent crime, child abductions and human trafficking.
YIRN is working with the Center for Human Rights to try to verify whether arrests in Yakima County have been made using license plate data. The group also continues to voice concerns about whether ICE is following the Courts Open to All Act, which took effect in 2020 and restricts civil immigration arrests in or around courthouses and prohibits court staff from sharing information like citizenship status with immigration authorities. Making arrests outside — or, as recently documented, inside — the courthouse is a clear violation of the law in YIRN’s eyes, Surkatty said.
“It fits their narrative of how every undocumented person is a criminal, right? That’s their story. That’s what they keep telling the public,” she said. “We know from our statistics that that’s not true at all.”
ICE did not directly answer a question about whether it had accessed Department of Licensing data to make arrests in Yakima County. However, the agency did reiterate that it stands by its practice of making arrests at courthouses.
“The ability of law enforcement to make arrests of criminal illegal aliens in courthouses is common sense. It conserves valuable law enforcement resources because they already know where a target will be,” the spokesperson said. They said making arrests outside courthouses is safer for officers and the community because people have gone through security and been screened to not have any weapons.
‘It breaks me down’
At a hearing on Tuesday, Ramirez’s request for bond was denied.
Jimenez said her attorney has put in a petition for habeas corpus, a legal procedure that allows people to challenge their detention, and has another court date set for Sept. 21. She hopes for the best, but fears it will just result in a continuance, and then a final hearing. The family has started a GoFundMe to try to cover the legal fees and household expenses.
Jimenez said the last few weeks have been filled with anxiety and stress — mental, physical and financial. In 2024, she sustained an injury that left her unable to work. Since then, Ramirez has been the sole provider for the family. Without that security and support, Jimenez said every day has been a struggle.
“Every morning, he was giving my medicine before he left to work because he knew that if I didn’t have my medicine, I couldn’t get up from bed,” she said.
Watching the toll of her husband’s absence on her children has been equally painful. Jimenez said her 14-year-old has lost his appetite and hasn’t been eating. Her two oldest children have shed tears. Her youngest, a 7-year-old, has missed school and needed counseling.
“It breaks me down, you know, seeing my kids — they’re crying,” Jimenez said. “When I’m on the phone, they ask my husband to come home, that ‘What is he doing?’ that ‘Why is he taking a long time?’ And my husband tells them, ‘I’m at work. I’m at work.’ But they know.”
Jimenez’s oldest son, Evan Frias, remembers when Ramirez came into his life 10 years ago. Frias said he wasn’t sure what to expect — but over the years, they became close. Ramirez taught him about cars, hard work and how to build credit, and attended all of his promotions and graduations, including his high school graduation in June. Technically, Ramirez is Frias’ stepdad, but Frias just calls him dad.
“He would always talk to us after work, even if he was tired,” Frias said. He would ask the children about their day and advised them “to never go down the wrong path.”
Frias is interested in attending college and exploring a future with the U.S. Marine Corps — but for now, he said, those things are on pause so he can step in and help support his family. Meanwhile, his younger siblings are also navigating new territory.
Jimenez said they’re constantly asking her questions.
“I have two kids that have mental delay, and they’re always asking me, like, ‘Mom, why (did they take) my dad?’” she said. “‘Was there a reason why they took my dad? My dad’s not a not a bad person. My dad’s a good person. If they only knew my dad, they wouldn’t have taken him.’ And those questions, I hear them every single day.”
