On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Ezequiel Morfin pulled up to the East Chestnut Avenue Walmart in Yakima and started scanning the parking lot.
Before long, he found what he was looking for: an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, parked near the fuel center. It was at least the second ICE vehicle to have shown up at the location that day after agents took away a man who had been shopping for groceries earlier in the morning.
Morfin watched for around 45 minutes, livestreaming from his phone in the pouring rain, until a group of other community members showed up to join him. Looking back, he’s still baffled that ICE would stake out at the superstore the day before Christmas.
“I mean, for God’s sake, it’s Christmas Eve,” he said.
Morfin is a board member with Latinos Vote and a former Toppenish City Council member. He said the Christmas Eve sightings are just one example of ICE’s presence in the community. A few days later, two people were injured after a van being chased by ICE agents crashed into three cars on Sixth Street and East Yakima Avenue.
The incidents come amid a recent surge in immigration enforcement, both nationally and locally.
ICE arrested more than 950 people in Washington state between July 29 and Oct. 15 — far outpacing the roughly 1,000 arrests made over the previous seven months, 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. The data is for civil arrests.
Local advocates say they’ve seen a similar story play out in Yakima County, prompting community fears and making family preparedness even more important.
ICE representatives didn’t respond by press deadline to questions for this story sent by email.
Are arrests increasing in Yakima?
Dozens of people gathered in front of Home Depot at 2115 S. First St. in Yakima last weekend to protest ICE activity at the home improvement store, Walmart and other businesses in Yakima and the Yakima Valley.
Among them, Sarah Nahpi rarely stood still. She walked back and forth from the Home Depot sign at Russell Lane south to another entrance at Reed Lane, waving two signs and cheerfully hollering at traffic. Nahpi occasionally jumped in place and kicked up a leg when drivers honked.
“Hey Yakima!” she shouted. “Protest now or bow down later!”l
The protest was organized by a grassroots group that’s been monitoring ICE activity in the community and Central Washington Resistance. Those groups aren’t the only ones keeping a close eye on immigration action unfolding on the ground in Yakima County.
ICE arrests in Washington
David Morales is a volunteer with the Yakima Immigrant Response Network, a nonprofit that provides support to people and families impacted by ICE arrests. The group coordinates with the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network to report and respond to immigration enforcement action in the community, often recording ICE interactions to try to ensure people’s rights are protected.
Morales said quantifying local arrests can be difficult, but “it feels a million percent higher than the Biden administration,” he said.
Eilish Villa Malone, director of immigration legal services with Central Washington Legal Aid, has seen the same thing. She said the situation has gone from one or two occasional ICE arrests to sometimes more than a dozen per day in Yakima alone — an uptick even from the first Trump administration.
From her perspective, ICE activity has definitely increased.
“It feels exponential — like it increased since the inauguration, but in the past three months, it’s increased, and then in the past one month it’s increased, and then even in the past week, it’s increased,” she said.
The data processed by the Deportation Data Project isn’t perfect. For example, some entries aren’t marked by state and therefore don’t show up when filtering for Washington arrests. However, it still provides a picture of how immigration enforcement operations are playing out.
The dataset also includes information on apprehension site landmarks, which refer to either an actual location or an ICE division associated with an arrest. Since the beginning of the year, “Yakima fugitive operations” have been the third-highest category for arrests in the state, following “Seattle fugitive operations” and the Seattle non-detained docket.
From January through the end of July, apprehensions associated with Yakima represented around 17% of arrests statewide. From the end of July through mid-October, they represented around 24% of the total arrests.
Most immigration violations are civil offenses, not criminal ones. Other examples of civil offenses include parking violations, speeding tickets or landlord tenant issues.
For Villa Malone, that’s reason enough to question the way ICE arrests are unfolding.
“In a lot of people’s minds, people think, ‘Well, they’re criminals, they’ve broken the law, that means that they should be arrested and they should be kicked out,’” she said, “when, in reality, I would ask people to think twice about a government’s authority to arrest somebody, put them in a detention center, which is a jail, and then remove them from this country when they’ve done the legal equivalent of something like a speeding ticket.”
Laura Contreras, directing attorney for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project’s Granger office, feels similarly.
Of the roughly 950 people arrested statewide between the end of July and the middle of October, around 31% had a criminal conviction and about 17% had pending criminal charges, compared to about 41% and 18% for the rest of the year. The most recent arrests associated with Yakima were on par with statewide figures for criminal convictions, with an even smaller percentage of people with pending criminal charges.
“When this administration started, the focus was on detaining individuals with criminal histories, and you know, we’ve gotten away from that focus,” Contreras said. “And I think it’s important for every individual to have their day in court, to be able to make their case, whether they have any relief or no relief, to be in the United States.”
