Immigration agents pulled roughly 360 people out of the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma over four days last week, loading them onto five charter flights that left Seattle's Boeing Field between Tuesday, Aug. 25, and Friday, Aug. 28 — nearly triple the agency's usual weekly pace. The surge has immigration lawyers wondering whether the destinations, not just the numbers, are the real story: more than half of those flown out landed, at least initially, in El Paso or Kansas City, two cities that sit inside the only federal appeals circuits still letting the government hold immigrants without a bond hearing.
Nearly Triple the Usual Traffic
Flight counts kept independently by a newly hired King County monitor and by the advocacy group La Resistencia show ICE running planes out of Boeing Field on five separate days last week instead of its normal three, adding Wednesday and Friday departures and even sending back-to-back flights out on Thursday. For each of the three prior weeks, the agency had flown 80 to 130 people out; last week's total roughly tripled that. Several flights that touched down in Seattle carried barely a passenger or two before turning around full — evidence the planes existed mainly to empty out Tacoma rather than fill it. ICE has offered no explanation. Northwest Immigrant Rights Project legal director Matt Adams put it plainly: "We're trying to figure out what's happening."
A Legal Fight That Isn't Actually Split Down the Middle
The timing tracks a court battle over a policy, adopted under President Trump, that tried to shut nearly everyone who'd entered the U.S. without inspection out of a bond hearing, however long they'd lived here. A Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled July 30 that the policy oversteps federal law, restoring a shot at bond for people held anywhere in Washington and the eight other Western states the circuit covers. That ruling didn't break new ground so much as extend it. By the time the Ninth Circuit acted, four other appeals courts had already rejected the same policy, and an eighth joined them — the Third Circuit, just three days before ICE's Tacoma transfers wound down. Only two circuits still back the government: the Fifth, covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, in a split February ruling, and the Eighth, covering Missouri and six neighboring Midwestern and Plains states, the following March. More than 200 of the roughly 360 people who left Tacoma on this week's flights landed, at least initially, in El Paso or Kansas City — squarely inside those two exceptions. Adams' organization brought the lawsuit behind the Ninth Circuit win, and he's now asking whether ICE chose those destinations on purpose. If his group concludes it did, he said, it will head back to court.
Families Left in the Dark
For relatives, a transfer can mean days of not knowing where someone went. Guards at the Tacoma facility routinely won't say, and it typically takes a full day or two before someone reappears in ICE's own locator tool, said Virginia Rivas Aldrete, a Tacoma immigration attorney; six of her current or would-be clients ended up on out-of-state flights this week. Yakima Immigrant Response Network volunteer Jamie Ortiz says she heard this week from relatives of 19 different detainees, many of whom already had hearings on Tacoma's immigration court calendar. Seattle attorney Adam Boyd learned mid-week that a client with a bond hearing coming up had likely been flagged for transfer, after the man's wife lost contact with him through the detention system's messaging app. Boyd couldn't stop the move, but he won a federal court order sending the client back, arguing the transfer had cut the man off from his lawyer. It's a familiar scramble: a King County woman named Maria described something similar last year, after her husband was moved from Tacoma to Texas without warning. She phoned 40 attorneys before one agreed to take the case — a habeas corpus filing that's become routine in Washington's federal courts but was unfamiliar to most lawyers she reached in Texas.
The Pattern Extends Well Beyond Tacoma
Washington isn't an outlier. Domestic "shuffle" flights that move detainees between facilities nationwide climbed 147% in March 2026 versus the same month a year earlier, according to Human Rights First's independent ICE Flight Monitor tracking. Tacoma's own numbers suggest overcrowding isn't driving this round of transfers: a congressional delegation that walked through the facility in mid-August put its population near 1,460, well under its roughly 1,600-person capacity and nowhere close to the crowding that pushed ICE to ship detainees to Alaska last year. Arrests, meanwhile, have jumped. Federal agents picked up roughly 700 people across Washington in June and July alone, and most were held rather than released, according to figures the Deportation Data Project obtained through public-records requests.
Headed for the Supreme Court
With eight circuits now against the no-bond policy and only two still enforcing it, the fight is all but destined for the Supreme Court, which the administration has already asked to take up. The Department of Homeland Security said afterward it "strongly disagrees with the Ninth Circuit panel" and expects to ultimately prevail. Until the justices weigh in, where a detainee lands — Tacoma or El Paso, Seattle or Kansas City — may decide whether they ever get the chance to ask a judge for release.
