OLYMPIA, WA – Despite vows to restrict immigration authorities’ access to Washington state Department of Licensing information, the data sharing continued in a new form, researchers revealed Thursday.

The University of Washington Center for Human Rights reports that federal immigration agents searched Department of Licensing data before stopping drivers at least nine times between August and November.

State officials say they cut off U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to this data in mid-November.

In a joint statement, the licensing department and Washington State Patrol said Gov. Bob Ferguson “stands prepared to take further action” in the face of the Trump administration’s escalating immigration enforcement tactics.

“But he will do so with reason and care,” the agencies said. “Governor Ferguson is committed to complying with applicable laws and finding the right balance in protecting individuals’ data without compromising legitimate law-enforcement investigations of criminal acts that are necessary to preserve public safety.”

The researchers say U.S. Customs and Border Protection still has access to the data, but the state argues that’s necessary for the agency’s work at the Canadian border and airports.

The state’s Keep Washington Working Act, passed in 2019, prevents state data from being shared with federal authorities for civil immigration purposes. Washington is one of 19 states that offer driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status.

Concerns over federal access to this state data date back to at least 2018. But the worries have ramped up in the past year as President Donald Trump has pushed for drastic increases in immigration enforcement and deportations. The Trump administration has focused on accessing various troves of state data to apparently fuel its immigration operations.

Over the summer, KING 5 revealed continued data sharing through the Department of Licensing’s driver and plate database, known as DAPS. The investigation found hundreds of searches of Washington records after Trump retook office, prompting outcries from immigration advocates.

After this, state officials announced they’d stop ICE from accessing Washington’s driver license data through this avenue.

Malou Chávez, executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said it’s “clear that there are cracks in systems here in Washington state that need fixing to truly protect our communities.”

“Washington, as a welcoming state, cannot and should not aid the federal government in its goal of mass detention, mass deportation by providing access to information, allowing our data to be used for civil immigration enforcement when we have laws specifically prohibiting this from happening,” she told reporters.

How it works

The form of data sharing revealed Thursday forces federal agencies to use a different route than the one that drew scrutiny last year.

It’s facilitated by a nonprofit that police agencies use to share driver’s license data across states. This allows them to easily search through a platform known as Nlets for information on drivers from out of state that officers pull over.

A Washington State Patrol platform called ACCESS allows users into the state’s data held by Nlets. The Department of Licensing data shared through this platform includes drivers’ license numbers and photos, home addresses and vehicles’ registered owners, according to the UW researchers.

So, for example, agents could stake out a business, run the license plates of all the cars parked there to get the owners’ names, then look up their immigration statuses and arrest them.

The UW center’s report includes instances where the licensing department information has been used.

In one case in November, ICE agents saw a Washington resident in Oregon leaving a Latino grocer. They ran his license plate through the Washington State Patrol system, then searched his name through their own database and found he wasn’t authorized to be in the country, according to the report.

Federal authorities pulled over his vehicle and arrested him, according to researchers.

“These folks are real Washingtonians who have been affected,” said Angelina Godoy, director of the UW Center for Human Rights. “They are people with lives and families and communities and rights, and they have been harmed by the fact that the DOL allows these agencies to access its data for civil and not criminal immigration enforcement.”

Call for action

In November, Democrats in Congress alerted many states that they were unknowingly sharing information with ICE.

In letters to the states’ governors, they noted Washington, along with Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York, had blocked ICE access to their driver’s license data. They wrote that Washington made the move after “engaging with Congressional Democrats.”

Washington state officials said “thousands of attempted queries from ICE have been denied” since shutting off access to Nlets data on Nov. 19.

But this still leaves the door open for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE subagency, to continue searching Washington’s data, the UW researchers believe.

Customs and Border Protection conducted the data searches in eight of the nine arrests the center documented. Almost all of the arrests were for civil immigration enforcement, not criminal matters. Though when searching the data, the federal agencies don’t need to note if it’s for a criminal or civil investigation.

“The state is granting them that access on the good faith assumption that they’re only going to use it for criminal investigations, and the data that we’ve presented here shows that that is not the case,” Godoy said. “They are using it in ways that are contrary to state law.”

The researchers called on the state to block all federal immigration authorities from accessing Washington’s Nlets data.

“We are reviewing CBP’s use of Nlets, what actions other states have taken, and are looking at all options to protect Washingtonians while also protecting public safety,” reads the statement from the Department of Licensing and state patrol.

In an executive order in September, Ferguson ordered state agencies to “continue to review their data collection, sharing, and retention policies to ensure they are treating the protection of residents’ personal and private information as a matter of public interest and safety.”

The letters to governors, led by Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, said that in the year preceding Oct. 1, federal immigration authorities searched driver’s license databases roughly 900,000 times across the country.

The center expected to receive records Thursday on other arrests tied to the state data. Godoy said the nine cases documented so far “likely represent the tip of the iceberg.”

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