Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell's Office Won't Respond to Questions About ICE Info Sharing
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell's office won't answer a simple question: How many times has the city fulfilled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) requests for information in 2025?
After over a month of repeated asks, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) won't answer the question either.
This week, Mayor Harrell spoke to immigrant advocates and union members in front of Seattle's city hall. On his official X account, Harrell wrote, "In Seattle, we stand with our immigrant communities and defend the rights of those who advocate on their behalf."
However, the opacity of the Mayor's Office when it comes to ICE information sharing, raises questions about Harrell's commitment to his public statements.
Internal SPD emails from 2020 show that the department has an established protocol for responding to ICE information requests. That process, in 2020, followed a path outlined below:
- SPD will forward to the SPD Legal Unit all ICE requests for disclosure of information along with the proposed records for disclosure
- SPD Legal Unit will forward each request to the Mayor's Office for review and response determination
- Upon receipt of Mayor's Office determination, SPD's Legal Unit will convey determination to records unit
- SPD will then provide a response reflecting the Mayor's Office determination to ICE
Other internal emails show that the SPD aimed for a 24-48 hour turnaround for ICE requests for information. If you've ever made a public records request to the SPD, which can take years to fulfil, that kind of turnaround time is extraordinarily fast.
Through a public records request, I received an old ICE request for information submitted to the SPD in 2020. After it was sent to the Mayor's Office, Julie Kline, Senior Advisor to Mayor Durkan, wrote "This is weird because the request pertained to an attorney listed as a witness in the case." ICE was aiming to obtain information about an attorney who represented the victim of a crime. Its unclear why.
The formatting of this ICE request for information can be seen here:
How frequently has the SPD and Mayor Harrell been disclosing information to ICE since Trump took office in 2025? For over a month, neither the Mayor's Office, nor SPD have responded to my questions, so I've filed a public records request seeking more info.
While Harrell is publicly saying he stands with Seattle's immigrant communities, the President of Seattle's police officers' union, Mike Solan, was privately meeting with President Donald Trump's Border Czar Tom Homan. And just last night, the SPD was out in force quashing protests for immigrant rights.
Why is all this important? Because anonymous masked ICE agents are kidnapping people off the street, disappearing people, trampling constitutional rights, kidnapping people to third countries, to torture centers like CECOT, raiding strawberry farms, all under the color of law.
Mayor Bruce Harrell's determinations to share or not share information with ICE could have extraordinary implications for people wrapped up in Miller, Noem and Homan's violent human trawling operations.
6/20/25 Update: The 2018 Seattle Mayoral Directive for Protocol on Federal Immigration Enforcement and a subsequent 2025 update can be found here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25980314-20250110-seattle-mayoral-directive-re-immigration-protocols/