Seattle PD Assisted ICE As They Worked to Deport College Student
In the spring of 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received a notification from the State Department that a college student’s visa had been revoked based on her criminal record.
But the student, who HardPressed has given the pseudonym Kaitlyn for safety reasons, had no criminal record. She’d never been charged with a crime, prosecuted for a crime, or convicted of any crime in the United States. However, she had been arrested for a petty matter in Seattle, but was immediately released hours later and no criminal charges were ever filed against her.
As a college student in the United States, Kaitlyn’s work has focused on helping children with social challenges. In the spring of 2025, Kaitlyn received an email from her university, advising her that she no longer had a valid visa and to plan to leave the country immediately. Kaitlyn then requested that the State Department reinstate her visa.
ICE said that Kaitlyn’s information was run against criminal datasets and matched a previous Seattle Police Department (SPD) arrest record. At the time, ICE wrote to Kaitlyn’s attorney that she had not yet been taken into ICE custody and she was not yet in administrative removal proceedings.
That same day ICE said she was not yet in removal proceedings, another ICE agent submitted a public records request to SPD asking for police reports involving Kaitlyn. This ICE request stated that the SPD reports would be used for removal proceedings.
SPD closed this initial ICE request which was submitted through the standard public-facing portal that HardPressed uses. Despite an explicit nexus with federal immigration enforcement, SPD did not notify then-Mayor Bruce Harrell's office of this ICE request, as required by a Mayoral Directive issued in 2018, which states that “all requests from ICE or other federal authorities related to immigration enforcement” be referred to the Mayor’s office for review.
No records were initially provided to ICE as part of this first request. It appears that SPD administratively aimed to channel ICE's request into SPD's law enforcement interagency request portal.
The same ICE agent then submitted an almost-identical request for information a few days later through SPD’s law enforcement interagency request portal. ICE’s second request omitted the language that the SPD reports would be used for removal proceedings and was forwarded to then-Mayor Harrell’s office for review. The SPD then released records to ICE four days later.
HardPressed obtained a redacted version of Kaitlyn’s 2024 arrest report which shows that her then-boyfriend called police while she was in town visiting, later alleging that she threw a shoe and hit him with a charger cable. According to the report, when SPD arrived, there was no disturbance. After talking with Kaitlyn and her then-boyfriend, SPD arrested Kaitlyn, but she was immediately released, never charged with any crime, never prosecuted, and never convicted of any crime. SPD redacted portions of what Kaitlyn told officers in the police report but the statements from her then-boyfriend remained unredacted.
The circumstances of Kaitlyn’s arrest, however minor and not charged or prosecuted, then showed up within a State Department database. SPD did not comment on how and why their arrest records data is shared with the State Department.
Seattle municipal law requires city employees “to cooperate with, and not hinder, enforcement of federal immigration laws.”
HardPressed contacted SPD and Mayor Katie Wilson’s office repeatedly with requests for comment. Neither responded. Former Mayor Harrell was also contacted again and did not respond to a request for comment.
Ultimately Kaitlyn had her visa reinstated four days after SPD provided ICE with her arrest records and she remains in the country. But throughout the process of fighting for her existence, she was met with a torrent of harassment, and disruption to her life.
In the summer of 2025, HardPressed began investigating the city of Seattle’s coordination with ICE. Then-Mayor Harrell’s office refused to answer basic questions about the city’s information sharing, so HardPressed dug further, publishing a second report which found that SPD was fast-tracking ICE records requests while delaying requests from journalists and community members.
This third report provides more details of how a petty arrest, never charged or prosecuted, can end up ensnaring someone within ICE’s dragnet and how SPD seamlessly cooperates to provide ICE information on demand, regardless of the extraordinary stakes for the person caught in jeopardy of deportation.
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