EVERETT — Federal immigration enforcement agents are continuing to access data about Washingtonians through the state Department of Licensing and are using the records to assist in hundreds of arrests, according to a recently released University of Washington report.

Researchers have said the practice continues to occur in Snohomish County, as well as across the state, and local community organizers said that the recent rise in immigration enforcement activities has had a chilling effect on immigrant communities.

“People are living in fear,” said Arun Sharma, the head of Utsav, a Bothell-based nonprofit that provides services to the south Asian community. “I’ve been in this county since 1992. I’ve never seen a situation like this.”

Immigration enforcement officers are able to access the data through a system called Nlets, a network that allows law enforcement officers to query databases, including criminal records or state department of motor vehicles records, and get information about a vehicle and its owner in real time. According to the report, released by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights on Oct. 13, immigration officers have submitted queries in Nlets for information about drivers in Washington, then will often cross-reference with their own internal databases to determine a vehicle owner’s immigration status and make arrests.

In an interview Monday, Angelina Godoy, the director of the UW Center for Human Rights and the principal author of the report, said that the center’s research had found 389 instances of a direct connection between an Nlets search and a confirmed arrest in Washington. The database is sorted by cities of arrest, not counties, but Godoy said that Snohomish County cities like Everett and Lynnwood are “amply represented among our data set” in terms of immigration arrests tied to Nlets searches.

Godoy said in an Oct. 13 press conference that Washington state has been a leader in immigration-related policy, through both allowing non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses since the 1990s and through the passage of the Keep Washington Working Act in 2019, which prohibits state and local agencies from assisting in civil immigration enforcement. But Godoy said that “repeated scandals” of immigration agents accessing driver’s license data — uncovered in 2018 by the Seattle Times, in 2025 by KING 5 and earlier in 2026 by the Center for Human Rights — mean that the state can no longer be considered a leader in that regard, she said.

“If that information that the state holds is now being weaponized against those very communities, the state needs to be accountable to its own promises,” Godoy said in an interview Monday.

One woman, who has lived in south Everett for three years under asylum status and spoke with The Daily Herald on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retribution, said her husband had been arrested after immigration agents searched his vehicle registration data through Nlets. Records obtained by The Herald show that Customs and Border Patrol agents in Washington used Nlets to search the registration information of an owner of a car — a pickup matching the description of her husband’s vehicle — shortly before his arrest in July.

The woman said her husband, who was living in the United States without legal status, was later deported to Mexico. The woman and her two children are still living in Everett, and she is weighing a difficult decision whether to reunite their family in Mexico or stay in the United States and build a better future for her children, she said.

Another woman, Gabriella, who only gave her first name in a phone interview, had been living and working with her husband in Washington for about 17 years when immigration agents arrested her husband in June, she said. Neither had permits to be in the country, and her husband had previously been deported, she said. After his arrest, Gabriella sought legal help but was scammed out of $8,000 of savings by somebody impersonating an attorney, she said. Her husband was then deported to Mexico; she went with him.

Previous research by the Center for Human Rights found that immigration arrests in Snohomish County had increased significantly between 2024 and 2025, and were at the highest levels since 2011. Joomi Kim, who leads a nonprofit in south Snohomish County that serves immigrant communities, said she’s been able to see the impact as fewer people seek services and more are living in fear.

“Their daily routine of their lives are really affected, and many of them are becoming increasingly fearful of going to public places or attending religious services or even seeking resources and information,” she said.

Sharma, whose organization also serves south Snohomish County, said that communities of color are more afraid to ask for help, go to community centers or go to religious places, and it’s like “they are living underground,” he said.

“Every day, they are going to our community centers, religious places, and they are tracking those things,” Sharma said.

Kim said that the ability for immigration enforcement officers to have access to Washingtonians’ drivers licence data represents “an erosion of trust in public institutions.”

“The possibility that information is being used for immigration enforcement undermines confidence in government assurances of privacy,” Kim said. “And we want the Governor to really close that loophole.”

In a statement, Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson wrote that the state is a “national leader on protecting the private information of our residents,” and that the state has taken actions to try and curtail immigration enforcement officers’ access to drivers’ data. He wrote that the state shut off ICE’s access to driver license and vehicle data and limited access for Customs and Border Patrol officers, but added that it maintained some access “necessary to protect public safety, such as human trafficking investigations that require real-time access to data.”

“Shutting off the federal government’s access to our state’s DOL data across the board is not an option because there are many legitimate public safety reasons why we need to share data with some federal law enforcement agencies — such as preventing violent crime, child abductions, and human trafficking,” Ferguson wrote. “No states have fully shut off federal access to Nlets.”

Ferguson wrote that between November 2025 and mid-October 2026, Washington State Patrol has blocked over 174,000 attempts from federal agencies to use Nlets for civil immigration enforcement.

But the UW Center for Human Rights report said that the action that Gov. Ferguson has taken to this point has been “insufficient.” The state has blocked certain access to certain Originating Agency Identifiers, or ORIs — essentially usernames used by law enforcement to access the Nlets system — associated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security, and Customs and Border Patrol. Evidence obtained by the Center for Human Rights suggested that after certain ORIs were blocked, federal agents have switched to using different ORIs and are still able to perform searches on vehicles.

The report states that between January 2025 and May 2026, agencies affiliated with the Department of Homeland Security searched the driver’s license database for driver and vehicle information nearly 3.7 million times.

“This game of whack-a-mole is not providing meaningful protection for Washingtonians’ data,” the report read.

Godoy said she understands that Customs and Border Patrol has legitimate law enforcement functions, but agencies should be required to pursue and obtain a warrant before they are able to access this information, she said.

“If ICE, or the police, for that matter, want to enter my home, they have to show a judicial warrant. If they want to search my property, they have to show a judicial warrant. So why would Washington not require the same if they want to access my data, which is stored in a state repository?” Godoy said during an Oct. 13 press conference.

In Ferguson’s statement, he wrote that, as far as he knows, no state requires judicial warrants for all federal inquiries involving driver data, but his team is “reviewing what other states have done, and what is lawful, to require judicial warrants for civil immigration-related requests,” he wrote.

“My team has worked to limit Customs and Border Protection access for immigration enforcement, while maintaining access necessary to protect public safety, such as human trafficking investigations that require real-time access to data to protect vulnerable Washingtonians,” Ferguson wrote. “Looking ahead to the next two years, this will be an ongoing process for us to adapt to what federal government does next to work around what we do to protect our data.

The report also explores other ways immigration agents could access data from the Department of Licensing, including through third-party data brokers, although the Center for Human Rights had no specific information linking data brokers to individual immigration arrests in Washington. But in the short term, Godoy said the existence of multiple ways for immigration agents to access state driver data shouldn’t inhibit the Governor from taking more immediate action to address the primary pathway the state is aware of, Nlets.

“We’re really talking about core principles of the Constitution, which is that you should not be subjected to unlawful search and seizure, you should not be subjected to violence upon your arrest — much less for a civil infraction — you should not be subjected to racial profiling and be pulled over on the side of the road because you’re driving while broad, and that’s exactly what we see happening in our communities,” Godoy said. “And worse yet, that our own state is abetting it, is outrageous.”

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.